pending trial, but she had left the country despite her travelling ban. On 11 August 2018, one of the deputies of the party, Mahmud Togrul, was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for making terror propaganda. Two months later, the former lawmaker Sırrı Süreyya Önder was sentenced to 3 years and 6 months in jail for spreading terror propaganda. In September 2020, the Turkish Government ordered the detention of the current Mayor of Kars Ayhan Bilgen, together with other prominent HDP figures like the former MPs Ayla Akat Ata or Sırri Süreyya Önder due to their support of the Kobani protests in 2014 which were held in support of the Kurdish population besieged in Kobani by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). By October 2020, Duvar reported that only six out of the sixty-five elected mayors of the HDP were still acting as mayors. The other mayors were replaced by state imposed trustees of the Turkish Ministry of the Interior. In June 2020, Leyla Güven and Musa Farisogullari were stripped of their parliamentarian immunity and arrested. Two of their MPs had to defend themselves from having attended a Democracy March in protest of the dismissal of Farisoğullari and Güven in the midst of the spark of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since February 2021, several parliamentarians are faced with investigations into the lifting of their parliamentarian immunity due to the parties involvement in the protests during the Siege of Kobani in October 2014. Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu was stripped of his parliamentary membership on 17 March 2021 due a conviction for spreading "terror propaganda" in a tweet of 2016 supporting eventual peace negotiations with the PKK. On the same day the state prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals Bekir Şahin filed a lawsuit demanding the closure of the HDP at the Constitutional Court of Turkey due to the parties alleged organizational links with the PKK. He also called for a five-year ban from politics for 687 HDP politicians. Amongst the politicians who are to be banned from politics figure all former party leaders including Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ and dozens of former and current members of parliament. Kurdish peace process The Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP) government began a peace process with the PKK in 2013, consisting of a withdrawal of militants from Turkish soil and negotiations towards the normalisation following nearly 30 years of armed conflict