Kurds struggle to make ends meet in the ruins of Cizre

[Anthea]

DW

Kurds struggle to make ends meet in the ruins of Cizre

Residents of Cizre, in Turkey's volatile southeast, have slowly been returning to the city which has been laid waste by a protracted military campaign targeting Kurdish militants.
Tom Stevenson and Murat Bayram report.

The smell of burned flesh permeated the basement, but inside there was little that could be identified as human at all. The walls were blackened by flames and only some small bone fragments remained; the smell was still thick, clinging to clothes and body alike.

This was one of three of the basements in Cizre's Cudi neighborhood where Turkish security forces had stormed residential buildings in which it claimed militants were hiding, resulting in more than 100 deaths. The local Kurdish political party, DBP, released a statement on Tuesday saying that 300 people had been killed during the curfew. A full body count has yet to be performed, and exactly what happened is still disputed by the state and local officials, but the seriousness of the assault was written on the building's walls.

Cizre was subjected to a round-the-clock lock-down for 79 straight days until the curfews were relaxed on March 1, a measure the government claimed was intended to "ensure the safety and security of civilians."

Now, the curfews have been partially lifted and residents may leave their homes during the daylight hours. DW was able to enter the city twice during this time, alongside residents in search of their belongings who had fled before the lock-down was declared.

Brutal campaign

The Turkish government has been locked in a brutal campaign against militants linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern provinces of the country for more than seven months, imposing round the clock military lockdowns in several cities including central Diyarbakir, Cizre, Sirnak, Nusaybin, and Yuksekova.

The open fighting in the streets of predominantly Kurdish cities is almost reminiscent of the Turkish state's 1980s and 90s military campaign in the southeast that claimed as many as 44,000 lives.

Abdullah Akan was one of the few who had been hiding in Cizre's basements who survived. In all there were 20 people hiding in his home, which was fortunate not to have been one of those stormed by security forces. "Down there, all we could hear was the sound of bombs," he told DW.

"At one point our son went out into the courtyard and snipers shot him dead. His name was Ibrahim Akan and he was 16-years old - it was 26 days before we were allowed to collect his body," Akan said. "We lost our boy and our home, we have nothing here now."

The city has experienced a kind of destruction without parallel in Western Europe since World War II: street after street has been reduced to rubble, houses with holes in their sides the size of articulated lorries, multi-story apartment buildings burned out leaving only hollow shells, the rooms within them now a trichrome scheme of black, grey, and white ash.

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