# taz.de -- Violence in the Kurdish regions of Turkey: „Silopi could turn in another Kobani“
> The conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK is intensifying. The
> bloodiest clash so far happened in the Basak neighbourhood of Silopi.
IMG Bild: Traces of the confrontations between the PKK and Turkish security forces in a street of Silopi.
SILOPI taz | The mother’s face reveals several emotions: grief for the loss
of her 17-year-old son, shot while sitting on the front-door step at 9
o’clock in the morning; gratitude for the condolences of the people who
fill her courtyard five days after the fatal riot; and wariness of the
foreign journalist who is visiting for the first time.
Zeynep Tamboga lives in a modest, two-story house in Silopi’s Basak
district, which earned notoriety on 7 August when its young residents held
off the police for four hours. The provincial governor’s office accused the
youths of belonging to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), saying
they attacked the police with „rifles and rocket-propelled grenades“ from
barricades and ditches dug to obstruct armoured cars.
The governor said three people were killed and seven wounded, including two
policemen.
Turkey has suffered turmoil since an alleged Islamic State-suicide bomber
killed 33 people in Suruc on July 20. But nowhere else has there been such
a pitched-battle as that in Basak, a low-income suburb whose walls are
stencilled with the face of the imprisoned PKK leader, Apo Ocallan.
People in western Turkey have been alarmed by the battle of Basak, as well
as a two-hour gunbattle between police and PKK in Istanbul’s Sultanbeyli
district on 10 August. Such confrontations recall the anarchy that infested
Turkey in the late 1970s, an era that ended in the coup of 1980.
Basak hit the news again when, also on 10 August, alleged PKK fighters
detonated a bomb that blew up a paramilitary vehicle, killing four
policemen and wounding a fifth.
The police who arrived on the scene, out of rage or panic, began firing
randomly, according to witnesses.
## The family samovar has been wrecked
Basak resident Seyhan, who did not want her surname published, invited TAZ
into her house to see how heavy machine-gun fire – from the turret of a
police armoured car, presumably – had peppered the walls of her house,
wrecking the family samovar (chrome-plated urn for boiling tea) and
penetrating her father’s black suit. The street wall of her house bears 27
bullet holes. Similar holes are to be seen on seven houses nearby.
Minutes after the shooting spree began, police came to her house and,
finding the door locked, knocked a hole in the wall with pick axes to gain
entry.
Seyhan showed the freshly-cemented wall where the hole was repaired. She
said the police were looking for men, but there were only women and a child
in the house at 9:30 am.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said the PKK must surrender its weapons,
and the campaign against Kurdish militants will continue „until not one
terrorist remains”.
„We don’t believe Erdogan,” Seyhan commented. „He has lied many times. If
the PKK put down their guns, then the police could kill us again.”
Much of what happens in Sirnak province, of which Silopi is a part, is not
reported in Turkey’s mainstream media, possibly because the incidents often
do not cause fatalities.
Fighters, masking their faces with PKK flags, stopped two TIR lorries
driving between Silopi and the Habur border gate with Iraq on 11 August.
They forced the drivers to get out, doused the cabins with petrol, and set
them on fire.
The lorries were carrying aluminium tubes for construction. They were
blackened by the fire, but intact. The cabin-engine section of the trucks
were gutted utterly.
The driver who spoke to TAZ said the fighters did not harm him, but he was
shocked that Turkish citizens could so calmly destroy each other’s
property.
A young man who eavesdropped on the interview rebuked the driver for
„blaming the PKK”. The driver moderated his answers, declining to say why
he thought the fighters had burned his truck.
„They did it to show the state has no authority,” said a Turkish customs
official at Habur Gate, who had seen the trucks. He spoke on condition of
anonymity.
## „It was done to frighten people”
In another incident that escaped the big media, a bomb placed in an
underground drain in the Sirnak high street exploded on Monday evening,
shattering the windows of five shops. Nobody was injured as most shops were
closed at 7:30 pm and the pavement was deserted.
„It was done to frighten people,” said Yilmaz Tatar, who estimated it will
cost him 15,000 Turkish Lira (euros 4,840 or US dollars 5,380) to repair
his window and replace the cell phones that were on display.
What is fuelling the rising lawlessness is the collapse of the peace
process with the Kurds, who comprise about 20 percent of Turkey’s 75
million people.
Two days after the Suruc bombing, PKK hitmen sneaked into the apartment of
two policemen in Ceylanpinar, another town on the Syrian border. They shot
the policemen dead in their beds. The PKK said they had done it to avenge
the police’s „collaboration with Islamic State”.
This was a turning point. It gave the government the cue to launch a
disproportionately large campaign of F-16 airstrikes and detentions against
the PKK. Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc gave parliament figures that
showed six times as many PKK suspects had been detained as IS suspects.
The PKK announced that the ceasefire declared in March 2013 was finished.
In the past three weeks, the group has killed more than 25 police and
soldiers.
The conflict has re-opened old divisions in Turkey, forcing Kurds to choose
between obligation to their state and feelings for their people.
In the shaded courtyard of the Tamboga family in Basak, daughter Kezban,
25, expressed her predicament.
„One of my brothers is serving in the Turkish army,” she told TAZ. „And one
of my brothers was killed in the street wearing slippers, and has been
labelled a ‚terrorist’.”
Asked how the fighting could be ended, Kezban said: „It’s the government
that began this cycle of violence and it’s the government that can end it.”
She insisted the people in the streets when her brother was killed were not
armed. Her brother had been watching the spectacle when he was hit by a
police bullet fired from about 200 metres.
But some of Basak’s youths must have been armed: two policemen were wounded
and the rioters torched a bulldozer brought in to fill the ditches and
remove the barricades.
The lawmaker for Silopi, Faisal Sariyildiz of the pro-Kurdish People’s
Democratic Party (HDP), acknowledged the Basak fighters were armed. And he
recognised that just as the barricades and ditches are still there, so too
are the weapons.
What did he feel about having an arsenal of rifles and RPGs in the backyard
of his constituency? „I’ve lived in such an environment since my
childhood,” he replied to TAZ, adding „the police have many more weapons
than the young people.”
He was asked if he were afraid of Silopi becoming like Kobani, the north
Syrian town that suffered a four-month battle between IS and the Syrian
Kurds.
„If the government doesn’t give up its passion for control, Silopi could
turn into another Kobani,” Sariyildiz said.
## Unusually even-handed
One ray of light in this morass of blood, accusation and counter-accusation
is the Kurdish businessman Shahismail Bedirhanoglu.
The owner of a prominent hotel in Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of
Turkish Kurdistan, he is the chairman of the Southeastern Industrialists
and Businessmen’s Association, which has met the prime minister to lobby
for change.
Bedirhanoglu is unusually even-handed in apportioning blame. He condemns
the PKK’s killing of the Ceylanpinar policemen as an atrocity that
„undermined what the Kurds have gained”.
He faults the government for failing to support the peace process with the
legislative reforms that the Kurds expected in return for their ceasefire.
„The government has been fooling the Kurds,” he told TAZ in an interview.
The way out of the impasse, Bedirhanoglu said, is for the government and
the Kurds to „resume negotiations from where they broke off”. To that end,
„NGOs and CEOs must put pressure on both sides.”
18 Aug 2015
## AUTOREN
DIR Jasper Mortimer
## TAGS
DIR Kurden
DIR Schwerpunkt Türkei
DIR englisch
DIR PKK
DIR HDP
DIR Schwerpunkt Türkei
## ARTIKEL ZUM THEMA
DIR Gewalt in türkischen Kurdengebieten: Panzerfäuste im Hinterhof
Der Konflikt zwischen der PKK und dem türkischen Staat eskaliert weiter.
Zur bisher blutigsten Konfrontation kam es im Basak-Viertel der Stadt
Silopi.