Locals: Turkey’s Crackdown on Kurdish Towns Increasingly Violent

Troops Shelling Indiscriminately Into Curfew Torns

While Turkey continues to hype its military operations against towns in the southeast as part of the war against the PKK, with an eye toward “cleansing” the country of PKK separatists, locals complain the operations are increasingly bloody.

To make matters worse, the attacks are largely indiscriminate, with Turkish military forces imposing a full curfew on those towns, and firing against anything that moves. Wounded civilians are basically stuck in their homes, with no way to get to hospitals, and no way for doctors to reach them.

Turkey insists the operations are very precise, and hit militants who are active in affected neighborhoods, but locals point to a growing number of women, children, and the elderly killed in the operations to dispute those claims.

Turkey has been at war with the PKK for over 30 years, but had a ceasefire in place until this fall, when the Erdogan government abandoned the ceasefire and launched a new offensive against PKK targets inside Iraq. This has since escalated, and they’ve ruled out any return to a truce.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.