IndyMedia - Vrij Media Centrum Nederland

In the autumn of 2015 youth organisations had started arming themselves, putting up barricades and digging trenches in poor quarters of towns. It was in response to this that the Turkish army sieged on these residential areas with tanks and fighter jets. 350,000 people ended up being made homeless and hundreds of civilians were killed (no one knows exactly how many, estimates start at 250). The destruction of the cities was not everything, the Turkish army was also attacking rural areas.

The road took us up and down through a wide, mountainous landscape. The villages were generally on high places, overlooking their surroundings. The villagers readily told me what had happened only days earlier: “There were hundreds of soldiers in our village. Only on this one hill next to us there were 200 of them, sleeping in blankets on the rocks, keeping guard night and day. On the radio they said there were 20,000 soldiers in the whole region. We could see them everywhere over those mountains with their tanks and helicopters.” - “I still had thorns in my fingers from working in the garden, when they burnt it all down”, one woman expressed herself almost poetically, pointing first at her hands and then at the blackened slope where her vegetable beds had been.
In another village the inhabitants told me that the military ordered them to leave their homes shortly before the operation. They had to wait for two entire weeks in the city before they got permission to come back. On returning they found their orchards burnt, and the tractors and other farm machinery sabotaged.

Those who stayed put witnessed the depredations the army committed. “We smelled the smoke of the forest fires, and heard the screams of the animals dying in the flames. For days after, the stench of the burnt animal cadavers came wafting over to us.”

The people here felt isolated, they were glad someone came to listen to them. An elderly lady approached me and poured her heart out at length, she wanted me to know all that had happened. She spoke only Kurdish, but a young man from the area helped by translating it into Turkish, “this is already the second year that the military burns our gardens, orchards and vineyards. We think they added chemicals to the fire on the one hill. Every other area they burnt last year started to become green again after a few weeks. But this one never did, it is still black a year later.”

I wrote down everything people said to me verbatim. It felt like a duty to document it all. The more they talked, the more I scribbled in my note book. Pure, unfiltered, everything the locals revealed to me went straight onto the page. ”Why do they do this?”, I asked. “They want to drive us from our homes, they want to empty out the area”, came the answer. I also learnt that in several places people were shot and killed by the military when trying to put out the fires.