Kurdish crisis:Turkey is winning the battle, but can it win the war? Nicholas Birchwrites from Diyarbakir and Yuksekova, southeast Turkey
Slenderly built, his face wrinkled from years of sun and a diet of locally-grown tobacco, Irfan Gur doesn't look like the sort of person who would give the Turkish state a headache.
The photos on his wall tell a different story. There's his father, long dead, the top of his portrait covered in lace, as is the tradition here. But lace also covers the features of a much younger man, Gur's son, a Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militant who died fighting the Turkish army in 1994.
Gur points to another photograph, this one open. "My youngest son," he says. "He went to join the group in July. I haven't heard from him since."
Seventy-five PKK members have died since militants attacked a Turkish platoon on October 21st, killing 12 soldiers and taking eight hostage. It is the latest sign of the asymmetrical nature of the war the PKK has waged against Turkey since 1984: 5,000 soldiers killed, more than 20,000 Kurdish militants.
Yet, as Turkey's number two general admitted last month, while the country's military campaign has been a success, Turkey has been "unsuccessful" in dissuading a new generation of Kurds from joining the PKK.
Last year, Turkish military intelligence reported that 40 per cent of the estimated 3,000 militants in northern Iraq had joined up since the PKK declared a five-year ceasefire in 1999. In Diyarbakir, locals talk of at least 150 teenagers who have enlisted this year. In Yuksekova, a town of 100,000, six have joined in the last month.
Many Kurds find the PKK's continued magnetism baffling.
Formed at a time of massive state oppression, the group fought until 1999 for an independent Kurdistan. Since then, it has dropped separatism. Few - sympathisers or otherwise - appear to understand its current call for "democratic confederalism".
"Did you hear what Leyla Zana said yesterday," fumes one left-leaning former Diyarbakir deputy mayor - no PKK supporter - referring to Turkey's most famous Kurdish nationalist politician. "Free [ imprisoned PKK leader] Abdullah Ocalan and I will fight separatists personally. Does she mean to say these kids are dying so one man can be set free? Not even the Prophet [ Muhammad] demanded such sacrifice."
Part of the answer to the PKK's attraction can be found outside Irfan Gur's front door. A decade ago, his neighbourhood was fields sloping down to the river. Now it's a slum, streets full of grubby children, some barefooted, leaping across open sewers and piles of rubbish.
Places like this exist throughout the southeast, filled with villagers forced from their homes by Turkish security forces during the 1990s. A decade ago, Diyarbakir's population was 350,000; now it's nearly 1.5 million. Ninety per cent of families in some districts live below the poverty line.
"What future do these children have?" one local journalist asks. "Crime, the PKK, radical Islam."
Locals say it was poverty and a sense of neglect, rather than organised PKK activity, that drove a riot in Diyarbakir last summer in which 11 people, mainly children, were shot dead by security forces.
Poverty, though, is not an exclusively southeastern problem. What makes it explosive here is the frustration that has grown since Ocalan was captured in 1999.
There have been improvements since then. The southeast is now free of military law, Kurdish names are legal, Kurdish broadcasting is permitted for one hour a day, and for the first time in a decade Kurdish nationalists are represented in parliament.
But Kurds remain unconvinced there has been a serious change of mentality on the part of the state. They point to the flood of criminal investigations opened against Kurdish politicians since elections this July. The latest came yesterday, in response to calls for a revision of Turkey's unitary structure.
When four policemen shot a 12-year-old boy 10 times in the back from close range in 2005, on the other hand, a court described it as "self- defence" and freed them.
Nothing, though, irks Kurds more than what they see as the partiality of the Turkish media. "He makes it sound like a bloody football match," says Yuksekova student Semdin Dumankaya, referring to a news reporter enthusiastically describing how 30 PKK fighters were killed by the military on Tuesday.
When 17 villagers were injured when their minibus hit a mine on a road outside Yuksekova on October 21st, the media followed Turkey's military in blaming it on the PKK. Almost nobody in Yuksekova, a town with long experience of state terror, believes them.
"We keep being told we should stand up to the PKK," says one Yuksekova shopkeeper. "I haven't heard many people questioning the army recently."
There are two sides to the Kurdish story, but only one of them gets told in Turkey, says Esat Canan, a Yuksekova lawyer and former MP.
"The Kurdish problem is the Kurds' problem. But as somebody living here, nobody asks me 'what do you think we should do?' Instead, they call you a traitor. Violence only breeds violence. Without full democracy, full freedom of speech, this problem will never end."