SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2019 | THEGLOBEANDMAIL O NEWS | A
Amid sporadic clashes even
during the recent ceasefire, Tur-
key has vowed to resume its of-
fensive – which it has labelled
“Operation Peace Spring” – if the
YPG is found anywhere in the
border area.
While the Kurds of Syria feel
abandoned by their allies, anger
at the West is even sharper in Tur-
key, where the foreign media is
seen as having vilified the coun-
try by focusing on Kurdish suffer-
ing rather than Turkey’s security
concerns.
“All the news stories presented
by the Western media end up be-
coming propaganda material
that has lost all neutrality,” read
one editorial carried last month
by Turkey’s state-run Anadolu
news agency.
We arrive in Akcakale hoping
to collect our media cards – which
we’d applied for by e-mail a week
earlier – and report the Turkish
perspective. Without accredita-
tion, we’re told, we can’t report
from the border areas, or even the
hospital beside the military
media centre, where those
wounded in an Oct. 11 YPG mortar
attack on Akcakale were being
treated.
Each day we’re in Turkey, I
message the centre, asking if the
media cards are ready. The ac-
creditations never come.
SANLIURFA, TURKEY
It’s a 30-kilometre zone on the
Syrian side of the border that’s
the focus of Mr. Erdogan’s con-
cern – but the tension stretches
deep into Turkey, as well.
In Sanliurfa, a historic city
where Turks, Arabs and Kurds
have long lived cheek by jowl,
animosity is rising. Among Turks,
there’s near-unanimous support
for Mr. Erdogan’s military move
against the Kurds of Syria. A long
and bloody struggle for Kurdish
autonomy inside Turkey waged
by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party,
or PKK, has eroded any trust that
once existed between the two
populations. More than 40,
people have been killed on both
sides over four decades of off-
and-on fighting between PKK
militants and the Turkish state.
Despite the YPG’s participation
in the anti-IS coalition, Ankara
sees no distinction between the
PKK and the YPG, which has for-
mer PKK fighters among its top
commanders.
While the Kurds, who make up
nearly 20 per cent of Turkey’s
population, sympathize with
their ethnic kin across the border,
opinion polls suggest that 75 per
cent of the country supports the
incursion into Syria. Behind that
support are polls showing that al-
most 80 per cent of Turks think
it’s time to start sending back the
3.7 million Syrian refugees who
have been living in Turkey since
early in Syria’s eight-year-old civil
war. The second phase of the
agreement between Mr. Erdogan
and Mr. Putin provides for exactly
that.
As Syria’s Kurds flee their
homes, plans are being made to
move many of the Syrian refugees
currently in Turkey – the large
majority of whom are ethnic
Arabs – into a “safe zone” the
Kurds are leaving. “We think that
two million refugees may return
to territories liberated from ter-
rorists,” Turkish Foreign Minister
Mevlut Cavusoglu said Wednes-
day.
Amnesty International has ac-
cused Turkey of “forcibly deport-
ing refugees.” Turkey says those
returning are doing so voluntari-
ly.
The planned resettlement is
loathed by many Kurds – who de-
scribe it as de facto ethnic cleans-
ing – and baffling even to some of
the Syrian Arabs that Turkey
wants to move into the border ar-
ea. “Tel Abyad is not our home,
Qamishli is not our home. There’s
nothing for us there,” said Fayza
Barkat, a 35-year-old war widowand mother of five from Damas-
cus, naming some of the towns
the YPG has withdrawn from. “We
are from Damascus, Aleppo, Raq-
qa,” she adds, pointing to neigh-
bours who have gathered to join
the conversation.
Mohammed al-Hamed, a 31-
year-old refugee from the eastern
Syrian city of Raqqa, looks un-
comfortable as Ms. Barkat speaks.
“We will move there if Erdogan
says we should move there,” he
quietly replies.DIYARBAKIR, TURKEYBefore the battle for Rojava, be-
fore the battle for Kirkuk, came a
2016 fight for Sur, a neighbour-
hood of the ancient city of Diyar-
bakir, one of the world’s biggest
centres of Kurdish culture. Aswith the other fights, the Kurdish
side – this time represented by
the PKK – tried to establish local
self-government. Once again, the
Kurds were hopelessly out-
matched once the shooting start-
ed.
In the summer of 2015, while
the eyes of the world were fixated
on the rise of IS, Kurdish activists
declared self-rule in Sur. Five
months later, the Turkish mili-
tary cracked down, using helicop-
ters and heavy artillery to crush
the uprising – levelling 80 per
cent of the neighbourhood in the
process.
The part of Sur where the PKK
made its stand was literally flat-
tened and is only now being re-
built – although in a concrete-
and-glass style that would fit in
well in Istanbul, but which clash-
es with the red-brick architecturearound it in Diyarbakir. Many
Kurds fear that another histori-
cally Kurdish area is about to van-
ish, and that it will be Turks who
move in after the reconstruction
is finished.
The siege of Sur marked a sea
change in Mr. Erdogan’s relation-
ship with Turkey’s Kurds, many of
whom initially supported his Isla-
mist AK Party when he first came
to power in the early 2000s.
Where once Mr. Erdogan had
courted the Kurdish vote – begin-
ning a peace process with the
PKK and allowing Kurdish-lan-
guage classes in schools – in Sur,
he switched course.
No longer would Mr. Erdogan
try to assuage the Kurds. His new
allies would be Turkey’s national-
ists and its military. The PKK were
again the mortal enemies of the
Turkish state.
Three years later, Diyarbakir is
still a city on edge. While police
cars in Istanbul and Ankara are a
mélange of Japanese and Europe-
an makes, in Diyarbakir, police
have for years prowled about in
armoured personnel carriers.
The streets have been largely
quiet since the beginning of Tur-
key’s assault on Rojava, but jour-
nalists and analysts in Diyarbakir
say that shows only the level of
repression in the city. Turkey is a
NATO ally, and technically still an
applicant to join the European
Union, but these days, the politi-
cal atmosphere more closely re-
sembles that of Mr. Putin’s Russia.
Hatice Kamer, a local journal-
ist, said her camera was smashed
by police when she tried to cover
a small demonstration – she esti-
mates that there were a few doz-
en people there – on Oct. 9, the
first day of the Turkish military
operation in Syria. Twenty-four
people were arrested.
“It’s simple: If you are a normal
citizen and you protest, the police
will smash your head. If you are a
journalist, the police will smash
your camera,” she said when we
meet in a dimly lit tea house.
“People say there will be a [pop-
ular] explosion some day, be-
cause we can’t say anything.”
Of all the people we meet on
our journey through invisible
Kurdistan, Sedat Yurtdas is per-
haps the most nervous speaking
to a foreign journalist. Mr. Yurtdas
was once a prominent politician,
a founder of the Democratic So-
ciety Party, one of a host of Kur-
dish political movements that
were briefly tolerated before be-
ing disbanded by the Turkish
courts. He says he’s still facing
criminal charges related to his po-
litical activities.
Mr. Yurtdas now expresses
himself through Turkish-lan-
guage novels about the conflict.
He hopes his fiction communicat-
es that only politics, rather than
violence, can resolve the Kurdish
issue.
“We are trying to use careful
words. Openly, we can’t really
share our views,” he said, sitting
in a law office across the street
from the sprawling Turkish mili-
tary base in the centre of Diyarba-
kir.
“This can’t go on forever. It has
to change.”People walk the streets of a historical site in downtown Sanliurfa, Turkey, which is the recent focus of concern for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
A police vehicle is parked outside a heavily guarded government building in Diyarbakir, a major hub of Kurdish
culture. Diyarbakir police have for years used armoured personnel carriers.Sanliurfa, seen above, is home to many refugees from Syria. Turks, Arabs and Kurds have long lived together
here, but recent conflicts have inflamed relations between the groups.obstaclestowardIraqiKurdistanindependence