Smashed homes and shelling disturb life in Turkey’s Kurdish capital

Diyarbakir is a city on the brink of outright war. On October 25th, its joint mayors, both Kurds, were detained and their homes raided by police. The government initially said their arrest was for allegedly diverting funds to the separatist PKK, but that changed to charges of membership of a terrorist organisation.

Five days later, Figen Yuksekdag, a co-leader of the Kurdish-focused Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, was banned from leaving Turkey by a regional court, a move labelled "arbitrary and unacceptable" by her party. Violent protests and an internet blackout affecting about six million people in the predominantly Kurdish southeast have followed.

A nervous tension hangs over Diyarbakir’s streets, which is today experiencing one of the most violent periods since the war for Kurdish autonomy first broke out more than 30 years ago.

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Turkish anti-riot police officers push back protesters with their shields on October 26th at a demonstration against the detention of Diyarbakir’s co-mayors. Photograph: Ilyas Akengin/AFP/Getty

The registration plates of cars parked outside a military complex are covered, presumably for fear of being identified and targeted by Kurdish rebels or their supporters. The city’s municipal offices and court house, several hundred metres from some of the city’s worst fighting earlier this year, were closed and surrounded by reams of fencing, military vehicles and security personnel.

Backstreet fighting

In Diyarbakir’s old city of Sur, Turkish special forces backed by tanks and helicopters fought separatist Kurds down alleyways last winter and spring, destroying hundreds of homes in the process.

Bullet pockmarks decorate the outside walls of family homes and, at a temporary checkpoint, two young security officers hastily put on bullet-proof vests before their superior arrives. Nearby, two women shake dust from a carpet with such force it makes a booming sound. “It’s not a bomb!” one says in the direction of the soldiers with a nervous smile.

The guards say they have no information or idea about where the families displaced by the fighting are living now; nor does their superior, who hurriedly appears from down an alley some minutes later in civilian clothes. He then orders this reporter out of the area for “security reasons”.

If opinion on the streets is anything to go by, Diyarbakir is a divided city. A shopkeeper in Sur says everything has been good for three months. His sentiments are echoed by Mehmet Sah Akdag at the nearby Akdag hotel, who, while quickly scribbling down the nightly rates on the back of a business card, says “the security situation is better now; it’s fixed”.

Forced from home

Down the phone, a friend of Akdag’s who has property in the Sur neighbourhood worst-affected by the clashes sounds less upbeat, saying there has been no decision on when reconstruction will begin.

Yet the fact that few are willing to attach their names to any comments suggests there is something to be fearful of. Of the more than 6,300 homes destroyed across the southeast, almost all have been due to military shelling and tank fire. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been forced from their homes.

Kurdish MPs claim the government is attempting to change the demographics in the region. In Sirnak, a predominantly Kurdish town close to the Syrian-Turkish-Iraqi tri-border, the HDP claims that gendarmerie forces – special police forces – have been raiding camps inhabited by civilians who fled the city as part of a recent “systemic destruction and depopulation” effort.

Unesco site

Turkey denied such allegations, and blames PKK terrorists for the damage. The minister for the environment and urbanisation said in June that anyone who did not wish to return to Sur would be housed elsewhere. Last month, authorities announced they would invest €3.1 billion across the region to reconstruct 67,000 homes damaged by fighting including in Sur, parts of which are a Unesco world heritage site.

In Sur, the government expects a damaged Ottoman-era mosque and Armenian church to be reopened by 2018. “Instead of houses destroyed by the PKK, we are building beautiful houses,” prime minister Binali Yildirim said when visiting the city in September.

Some locals, however have said the intense level of shelling earlier this year puts much of the district beyond repair.

Supporters of the PKK, locked in a decades-long struggle for Kurdish independence with Ankara, are unlikely to stand down or give up. The group is said to have killed at least 785 Turkish security personnel, many by targeted assassination, over the past 15 months on an almost daily basis. Its use of roadside bombs in rural areas has caused major casualties and is difficult to prevent.

Nationalist zeal

For Ankara, a failed military coup in July has offered leverage on the back of an explosion of nationalism to double down on Kurdish separatists, a move that now and in past decades has proved popular among mainstream Turks.

For the country’s estimated 15-20 million Kurds, the internet blackout has made them feel they have been cast adrift from Turkish society. If the number of checkpoints, blockaded streets and lengthy vehicle searches in Diyarbakir is anything to go by, this civil war is unlikely to relent anytime soon.