It started going wrong at Kobanî, the small Syrian town that, for a month in the autumn of 2014, filled the world’s television screens.
In September, Isis launched a huge offensive. At the time, the Islamic death cult was at the zenith of its power. In the space of three months it had stormed into Iraq, declared itself a caliphate, and massacred the Yazidis, an ancient polytheistic Kurdish sect living in the mountains near Mosul. Now it had set its sights on Kobanî, a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria. Isis had the town surrounded from every side except the north, where it abutted Turkey, and in the space of a couple of days, almost 200,000 terrified people streamed across the frontier. The fields were parched from the last fierce blasts of the summer sun, and it made an apocalyptic scene. Old women with tribal face tattoos stumbled across the scrub clutching jars of home-pickled olives they refused to leave behind for the hated enemy. Farmers tried to bring their livestock with them, and tough men cried as they realised they would not be allowed to take their animals across the border.
A small band of Kurdish fighters armed only with rockets and assault rifles stayed behind in the town to stave off the attack. They belonged to the Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (People’s Defence Forces, or YPG) – a militia that, up to now, had played at the fringes of Syria’s war. In this increasingly black conflict, where hope was fading fast and good guys were in short supply, the YPG looked like they could be the much-needed heroes. Their ideology was secular, leftists and ecologists and women fought alongside men in their ranks. They had already won the world’s admiration a month earlier in Sinjar, where they saved tens of thousands of Yazidis by beating a path through Isis territory and opening a route to safety.
The YPG was a newish incarnation of a group that boasted a long relationship with Syria and the Assad family – the PKK. After the Newroz ceasefire announcement in March 2013, most of the PKK’s veteran fighters had left Turkey. Some of them went to northern Iraq, where the group has a long-established stronghold in the remote Qandil mountains. Others hopped into Syria, across a border so artificial that in places it dissects towns, and so porous that people-smugglers could cut you a deal for a return journey for just $100. In Syria the PKK fighters joined the fledgling project started when Salih Muslim, a Kurdish politician from Qamishli who had been living in exile in northern Iraq, returned to Syria at the start of the uprising at the invitation of Bashar al-Assad.
Soon after Muslim and Assad met in Damascus in April 2011, Syrian government forces began withdrawing from the country’s Kurdish-majority region, a large sweep of strategic territory, rich in oil and at the waypoint between Aleppo and Mosul. That allowed Assad to focus his military manpower on the fight against the rebels in other areas, safe in the knowledge that the country’s two million Kurds were being kept in line by a friendly militia. There was also a second purpose to Assad’s renewed warmth for the PKK – in the tried and tested way, it provided the perfect tool to needle Turkey, which had quickly thrown support to Syria’s armed opposition.
I first encountered the YPG in November 2013, eight months after Turkey’s Newroz ceasefire, when I travelled to the Kurdish-populated north-eastern region of Syria. At that time the Kurds were battling against Isis but mostly against the mainstream Syrian rebels, and their leaders ardently denied their back-room deal with Assad even though it was clear to see. In Qamishli, Syria’s main Kurdish town, regime soldiers manned checkpoints at the central roundabout and the nearby closed border crossing with Turkey, happily coexisting with the YPG troops manning checkpoints half a mile down the road. While the YPG’s political wing controlled the state institutions in Kurdish areas, all the salaries of the workers were still paid by the Syrian government.
The YPG quickly built an image as the protector of Kurds amid Syria’s Darwinian anarchy – much as the PKK had done for thirty years in Turkey. In many respects it was true. But, like the PKK, the YPG could be ruthless with rivals. One Syrian Kurdish doctor who had fled to Istanbul told me in intricate detail about the day in 2012 when YPG fighters dumped the corpses of a father and son who had opposed them outside the entrance to her hospital.
The YPG fighters I met on the front line near the town of Ras al-Ain, close to the Turkish border, were almost all veterans of the war in the mountains of Turkey. They spoke a brand of leftist Kurdish that even my translator, a native of Qamishli, had trouble deciphering. Sometimes they spoke Turkish among themselves and one, having spent time in Europe, was also fluent in French. All were well practised in reciting the ideas of Öcalan.
‘There is no difference between our fight before and our fight now in terms of ideology,’ said Berwalat, a 29-year-old with sun-leathered skin and a strip of white lace woven through her long, plaited hair. It was her only nod to femininity; otherwise, she was dressed in an outfit that could as easily have been worn by a man. The rollneck of her red jumper sat up high against her chin, and her black leather jacket and khaki trousers were loose and shapeless. She told me she had joined the PKK when she was just twelve years old, and had dedicated her whole life to the cause. She recommended that women join the militia young, as she had, because it was better for them to carry a gun than to live as a slave in domesticity. She had not seen her own mother since 2005, she said. When I asked her if she would ever marry and have children, she creased double with laughter: the PKK bans sexual relations between its members. Men and women are not even allowed to give gifts to each other, lest it spark romantic feelings.
Now, in this new war and new phase in the PKK’s history, Berwalat had a new enemy – the Syrian rebels, whom she referred to in blanket terms as Al-Qaeda. But neither had her old enemy gone away. ‘The ideology of Al-Qaeda is stronger, and Turkey has the better technology,’ she said in her soft, almost melodic voice, at odds with the battered old Kalashnikov laid out on the rug in front of her. ‘But ultimately we can defeat them both.’
That still sounded ridiculous by the time Kobanî erupted less than a year later. The YPG’s ranks were filled with hardened guerrillas, but they had no heavy weaponry. I found it difficult to take them seriously; they parroted the kind of leftist political theories that had gone out of fashion decades before most of them were born, and many had joined up when they were still children with malleable minds. But this bunch of slightly outlandish idealists was about to score a huge PR success, which would bring them US military backing and position them, for a time, as the war’s biggest winners.
I was in Silopi, the last town in Turkey before the Iraqi border, as the battle for Kobanî geared up. It is a Wild West frontier of Kurdish smuggling and PKK fanaticism, each feeding off the other; a remote, deadbeat place, deep in territory that has long been neglected by the Turkish state. Silopi’s potholed main street is lined with kebab houses and cheap motels catering to truckers on their way to the Habur border crossing, six miles down the road. The local men who hang out in the tea houses look as though they have little else to do.
I had witnessed the PKK’s publicity machine in action here before; when Isis attacked the Yazidis in Iraq in August 2014, some of the first to flee managed to make their way over the border into Turkey and to a tiny hamlet next to Silopi called Nerwon. I scrambled down from Istanbul to cover the story and reached the camp as the first refugees were flooding in. The camp, on a sun-beaten patch of land and framed by a sweeping vista of the mountains over in northern Iraq, was disorganised and under-equipped – a huddle of half-finished dwellings and agricultural outhouses where the new arrivals squatted without water or electricity. It was August, and in the 45-degree heat even sitting in the shade was unbearable.
Everyone in Silopi knew where the Yazidis were staying, and they rallied to help their Kurdish brothers, bringing piles of blankets and huge vats of food in the backs of pick-up trucks, along with crates of bottled water taken straight from the deep freezer. Within a day, a bright banner hung at Nerwon’s entrance: the flag of the PKK, emblazoned with the face of Abdullah Öcalan.
In the immediate absence of Turkish officials and international aid organisations in this far-flung corner of the country, the Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi (Peace and Democracy Party, or BDP – then the PKK’s political wing and the local ruling party in Silopi) took charge. Officials picked the Yazidis up from Habur and brought them to the camp, arranged for the sick to be taken to doctors and roused the local people to donate carloads of food and clothing.
A BDP volunteer met me at the gate on the second day I went to the camp. ‘Please write the truth about what is happening here,’ he said before letting me in to speak to the Yazidis. ‘Write that it is us, not the Turkish government, who is helping these people.’
Inside I met Dawd and Sivan, Yazidi friends in their early twenties who had graduated from Mosul University. One thing separated them: Dawd had a passport and had crossed into Turkey legally. Sivan didn’t. He and his family had paid a human trafficker thousands of dollars to guide them over the heavily landmined illegal crossing route.
‘We cannot stay in Iraq any more,’ explained Sivan as we walked to the building where his family was staying. ‘We can’t live amongst Muslims after this.’
His aunt, Fatima, was a warm and kind-eyed woman who could not stop thinking about her pet birds. She had left them behind in her village as it was overrun by Isis fighters. ‘I dreamt about them last night,’ she said, smiling broadly. ‘I could hear the noises they made.’ Then she started sobbing, and one of Sivan’s brothers fumbled to find her a tissue.
Over the following days Nerwon swelled. As more fleeing Yazidis crossed the border, rumours started circulating around the camp. ‘We’ve heard the Turkish government are going to move us,’ Dawd said one morning. ‘They’re going to take us to one of their official camps, and we don’t want to go.’
The new camp being prepared by the Turkish government was in Midyat, a Christian town several hours’ drive north-west of Silopi. Dawd had heard they would have to stay there twenty-four hours a day, and that their mobile phones – their only link with their friends and relatives still stuck inside Iraq – would be taken from them. These rumours blossomed every time the Turkish government opened camps for Kurdish refugees – and always they were unfounded.
Dawd and Sivan started planning, considering what their options could be. ‘Maybe we should leave and go to Ankara,’ Dawd said. ‘We speak English, we’re educated, we can find a job.’ The initial appeal of their plan wore off when they remembered the reality of their situation: they had no work permits, no official leave to remain in Turkey and, in Sivan’s case, no passport.
It wasn’t hard to see why the Yazidis didn’t want to leave Nerwon: the camp had quickly become a community. For over a week they had slept alongside each other, and eaten, cried and laughed together. The children had forged new friendships. In a tent that had been turned into a play area, I watched volunteers lead them in traditional Kurdish folk songs, praying for rain on the parched land. At the end of playtime the children ran to the doorway to find their shoes. As they did, they broke into a chant: ‘Apo! Apo! Apo!’
Sivan smiled and shook his head. ‘Yazidis had nothing to do with the PKK before this,’ he said. ‘Now so many of us love them.’
Now the streets of Silopi were alight: Kurds were again under attack in Kobanî, and this time they believed that Erdoğan was to blame. The riots were spectacular; it seemed as if the whole town, including women and small children, were coming out each night to build and burn barricades and lob Molotov cocktails at the cops. This was the night I realised why all the armoured police cars in the south-east are pitted with scars: it is where rocks and flaming bottles have bounced off them.
That kind of violence is exciting to cover, until it isn’t. Invariably, it reaches a tipping point at which the rioters become completely invested in causing as much destruction as possible and the police get sick of people throwing burning stuff at them and decide to finish it by any means, as quickly as possible. Then, it becomes a zero-sum game in which you do not want to get trapped if you’re not armed with something, because sure as hell the people who are armed will be aiming something at you. Each night, I tried to sense when we might be approaching the tipping point, and retreated back to my hotel.
Unfortunately, although the ambitiously named Grand was at the other end of town, Silopi was so small that the tear gas floated down to it eventually and seeped into my room. I had been waiting to cross the border into Iraq to follow a story there. But, as it became clear that Kobanî was going to become a huge news event, my editor dispatched me to go and cover it instead.
The next morning I hopped on one of the old intercity buses that criss-cross the length and breadth of Turkey, rickety carriages reeking of sweat, the drivers’ stale cigarette smoke and the cheap sachet coffee the tea boy serves up every couple of hours. I have taken these buses so many times in Turkey’s borderlands, starting when I first came as a hard-pressed freelancer with little money, and continuing even when my finances revived because I’d developed a grudging kind of affection for them. They are uncomfortable and the attendants have a bad habit of moving you from seat to seat like a tiddlywink at every stop when you’re a lone female traveller, because it is unthinkable to have you sitting next to a man. Also, they can be held up for half an hour or more at police roadblocks, as all the passengers’ documents and bags are checked. But I had never felt unsafe on the border buses until this trip. Now, with Kobanî exploding, something felt different as I travelled across south-eastern Turkey; there was itchy static in the air.
Diyarbakır, where I stopped for the night to meet up with a translator before travelling on to Kobanî, was no longer the friendly, laid-back place where I had sat for long dinners with friends and listened to Öcalan’s words about peace. Nightly funerals were being held for locals who had skipped across the border into Kobanî to join the YPG in the fight against Isis. Each day, bigger crowds were coming onto the streets to protest against what was happening to their Syrian Kurdish brethren, to be met with the inevitable water cannon and tear gas from the Turkish police.
‘It was the way Isis cuts off heads; when he saw this he felt he had to go and help the YPG,’ said Mehmet Çelik of his son, Sertip, who was being lowered into the ground of Diyarbakır cemetery swaddled in white sheets. Mehmet’s sorrow at his son’s untimely death, at the age of just twenty-seven, was drowned out by his indignation over the injustice of it all. ‘In Sertip’s last phone call he said he was in the centre of Kobanî and that all the villages around the town had been taken by Isis. The biggest gun they had was a Dushka [a vehicle-mounted machine gun], and they were being attacked with tanks.’
Kobanî, eighty miles south of Diyarbakır, was brimming with stark desperation. The world’s press had gathered on the Turkish side of the frontier to await the town’s inevitable fall to Isis. Even then, it felt uncomfortable to pay so much attention to one battle when Syria had been soaking in blood for three years. Some Syrians believe Kobanî got so much coverage because it is a Kurdish town, and that Kurds make more sympathetic victims than Arabs for Western audiences. That was certainly part of it but, above that, Kobanî was a battle made for television. From our viewpoint safe in Turkey the town was laid out like a diorama, spread over a hillside on the other side of the border fence. We could see where each mortar round hit. We could see Isis’s positions outside the town, too, and watch their steady progress to the outer suburbs. We saw with our eyes as they raised their black flag over the hospital on the eastern edge of Kobanî. Later, as the Americans sent F-16s to strike the Isis positions and turn the battle’s fortunes towards the Kurds, the huge thump of their bombs rolled right through the ground we were sitting on, sending the birds scattering from the trees.
It was hard not to join in with the local Kurds’ cheers. Thousands had gathered with us, some watching with tears rolling down their faces and others determined to join in. Kobanî had been cleaved from Suruç, its Siamese twin town on the Turkish side of the border, by the European mapmakers who partitioned the Middle East after the First World War. The frontier between Turkey and Syria follows the old railway line between Baghdad and Berlin, slicing east–west through the heart of Kurdish lands with little heed for human history. The border means little to the families and communities who straddle it, and most think nothing of crossing back and forth on the illegal smuggling routes through the flat fields. Now, with Kobanî in flames, the Kurds living on the Turkish side were determined to cross over to help their kin. Young men and boys, some so childlike they could be mistaken for girls, made dashes for the border in full sight of the Turkish army and riot police, who had lined up to stop them crossing. Every few minutes there was a surge, with up to a hundred pulsing forward at once. Most didn’t make it and were pushed back by the police, but each time a few more managed to cross, to the cheers and applause of those left behind. It was a strange thing to watch young men sprinting towards almost certain death.
‘They are so brave,’ said Aymann, my friend from Aleppo. He had come with me to the border because he knew how it felt to be besieged, and wanted to show his solidarity.
Persistent rumours held that Erdoğan was arming Isis in a bid to wipe out the Kurds in Syria. As the violent protests spread across Turkey, they took on an even fiercer anti-Erdoğan tone. Every Kurd I spoke to would eventually come onto the subject of how the Turkish president was puppet-master of their tragedy.
‘This is a project of Turkey’s!’ said Mehmet Çelik in Diyarbakır, of the battle that had taken his son. It didn’t matter to him that the Turkish authorities had brought his son’s body back across the border and handed it to him to bury, nor that they were sending ambulances into Kobanî to bring out wounded YPG fighters and treat them in Turkish hospitals. The fact that Ankara was providing for the 200,000 Kobanî refugees who had flooded suddenly across its frontier with a brand new, high-quality refugee camp did not even register.
‘For thirty years there has been this war between Turkey and the Kurds,’ Mehmet continued. ‘I myself was in prison for ten years, and my brother died while he was in jail.’
On the night of 7 October 2014, three weeks into the battle for Kobanî, Turkey’s own tinderbox exploded. This time, as Kurds across the country came out to protest they were met by gangs of Turkish nationalists and Islamists. Thirty-one people were killed over three nights in pitched street battles fought with shotguns and swords. Öcalan had warned that an Isis victory in Kobanî would spell the end of the PKK peace process in Turkey, spurring many of his supporters onto the streets. Now, after fanning the flames, he dampened them down. In a statement from his prison cell he begged for calm, and Turkey’s Kurds retreated. He had pushed the country to the brink, and then pulled it back.
The damage to Turkey’s image had been done. Erdoğan, forced to walk a tightrope between his country’s two most bitterly opposed camps, had made no public statements about all the things Turkey was doing to help the people of Kobanî. Instead, he pandered to his country’s nationalists, at one point appearing to gloat about the imminent fall of the town. Officials insist that whatever Erdoğan said about Kobanî was taken out of context, and then spun by a shadowy pro-PKK perception machine to make it appear as if he were waging war on the Kurds by supporting Isis.
The truth about Turkey and Isis is complex. During my time living on the Syrian border in Antakya in the spring and summer of 2013 I witnessed scores of jihadists travelling openly through Turkey and into Syria. For more than a year the border was a revolving door. Refugees, journalists and aid workers also traversed freely and the Turkish government was praised for opening its border to Syrians fleeing the war, but criticised for allowing jihadists to cross it. Later, when it sealed the frontier with a huge concrete wall and instructed its border guards to shoot at anyone trying to cross it, it was criticised for trapping refugees inside Syria but praised for stopping the flow of jihadists. For the policy makers in Ankara the two went hand in hand, with no middle way and no win–win.
Throughout 2013 the cheap hotels in the border towns were full of silent, scowling men, with large beards and often dressed in Afghan style. We started to joke that passengers on the flights from Istanbul to the Syrian border could be clearly divided into two groups: journalists and jihadis. One Syrian who had set himself up as a ‘jihadi chauffeur’ would collect foreign jihadists at Istanbul’s Atatürk airport, accompany them on the 24-hour bus journey down to the Syrian border, and then hand them over to the smugglers. They charged $50 to escort their clients through one of the long-established illicit routes used for decades to move guns, cigarettes and drugs, and so open they barely felt illegal – the smugglers unashamedly touted for business in the bus stations of the border towns. The intelligence services turned a blind eye to the extremists traversing the frontier for long enough that Isis mushroomed in northern Syria – and the Syrian chauffeur felt certain enough that he would not be arrested in Turkey that he allowed me to use his name and photograph in my article.
Turkey was openly supporting the broader opposition, including some deeply unsavoury elements of it. One café in Antakya, a place by the river with huge open windows bringing in the fresh air, was constantly packed with rebel commanders who spoke candidly to journalists about their meetings with Turkish officials in Ankara. Meanwhile the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), the opposition’s government-in-exile, was operating from a five-star hotel in a chic-but-bleak district of highways and glass towers close to Atatürk airport. Funded by Qatar, the SNC had begun as a half-hearted stab at an inclusive political opposition and quickly became little more than the mouthpiece of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. Every so often, the SNC would call a press conference to remind journalists that Syria’s revolution was a glorious and vigorous one fighting for democracy and the rights of all Syrians. But it grew further and further detached from the reality of what was happening inside the country until, one day in August 2013, it put out a press release about a battle I had just come back from covering. Menagh military air base was Assad’s last redoubt in the countryside north of Aleppo, and the FSA had kept it under siege for ten months, as the government soldiers inside held out through air resupplies. There seemed no way for the rebels to break the deadlock, until Jaish al-Muhajireen, a brigade of foreign extremists led by Chechen rebel veteran Omar al-Shishani, came in to finish the job.
I had ducked into an abandoned farmhouse just outside the perimeter of the airfield, where one of the lonely few FSA groups taking part in the final battle in August 2013 had based themselves. Even though they were on the same side as Jaish al-Muhajireen, they were overwhelmed, outgunned, and in every way outpowered by the hardliners. The fighters I interviewed were freaked out that I was there; had one of al-Shishani’s men stuck his head in, he would have been unimpressed to find a British female journalist. After an hour I made a swift and low-profile exit, and a few days later, as the final battle got underway one early morning, my fixer Mahmoud went back to the front line dressed in Afghan-style shalwar kameez. He managed to blend in for long enough to bring back footage confirming that this was a victory for the jihadists, not for the FSA. Nonetheless, back up in Istanbul the SNC lauded it as a dazzling victory for the mainstream rebels in the press release they sent out to all correspondents.
Nuance didn’t feature in the good-versus-evil fairy tale of Kobanî. The YPG won in the end, and forged a firm friendship with the US that grew into formal joint operations in Syria that still continue today. The West had already lost heart in the Syrian revolution, and while the rebels turned radical and became further ridden by the infighting that had plagued them from the start, the Kurds seemed the best hope of a unified ground ally against Isis.
Despite the YPG’s links to the PKK, Ankara had initially been willing to deal with the group. The stumbling block, according to Turkish foreign ministry officials working on the file, was the Kurds’ reluctance to break their mutually advantageous détente with Assad.
‘During the initial years of the Syrian civil war the AKP governments were in close contact and conducted negotiations with the Syrian Kurds and their leader, Salih Muslim,’ says Haluk Özdalga. ‘The main purpose was to convince them to join the opposition forces fighting to topple the Assad regime. Several times they flew Muslim back and forth to Turkey with government jets. However, the Syrian Kurds refused Ankara’s proposals. Had they accepted, we would have been seeing an AKP willingly cooperating with the Syrian Kurds.’
Western diplomats working on the Turkey and Syria file say that whatever tensions were already brewing between Washington and Ankara before Kobanî, it was the Pentagon’s ever-tightening relationship with the YPG after it that caused the greatest damage.
‘We kept telling [Erdoğan] that the support [to the YPG] was temporary, tactical and transactional,’ said one US diplomat working on the file. ‘The Turks were complaining loudly, especially after the PKK ceasefire broke down in the summer of 2015. We were making calming calls with the PYD [the YPG’s political wing]. They got it. But for Turkey this is existential.’
Erdoğan had also been bruised by another recent development on his doorstep; in Iraq, Kurdish fighters had taken over cities abandoned by the federal army in the summer of 2014 as Isis blitzkrieged across the country. The Kurds’ new acquisitions included Kirkuk, an ethnically divided town sat on top of one of the biggest oil fields in the world. Among Kirkuk’s minorities is a large population of ethnic Turkmen, who have strong ties to Ankara.
The Iraqi-Kurdish president, Masoud Barzani, was one of Erdoğan’s strongest allies and closest personal friends in the region. Turkey had supported Barzani’s project for semi-autonomy for the Kurds in northern Iraq since its inception in 1991. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) shares a stretch of border with Turkey, and trade deals between the two have brought Turkish fashion brands into the malls of northern Iraq, and Kurdish oil to the port of Ceyhan, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, through a pipeline that opened in 2014. But when Barzani’s Kurdish army, known as the Peshmerga, seized Kirkuk in June 2014 and Barzani announced that he would hold an independence referendum, Erdoğan felt he had been stabbed in the back. Kirkuk’s Turkmen fervently opposed the Kurds’ grab for their city. Neither did Erdoğan much fancy the idea of a fully independent Kurdistan on his doorstep.
‘His best buddy in the world, the one place where he had real influence and a guy he was a brother to,’ says one diplomat. ‘I cannot tell you the impact that this had on Erdoğan. When I saw him in September 2015, he went through the motions when he talked about the US sending weapons to the YPG. But when he got to what Barzani did he was shaking with anger. It had been a very lucrative and beneficial project for both sides. The only thing that Barzani could have done to screw that thing up, was exactly what he did. Barzani insulted the Turks and also the Arabs by including Kirkuk and its oil fields in the new independent Kurdistan. Erdoğan felt betrayed, and started to think that even the most cuddly “pro-you” Kurds can go for independence and you have to be careful about them.’
Internationally, Kobanî was the moment Turkey’s – and particularly Erdoğan’s – reputation began to nosedive. Meanwhile, it triggered a chain of domestic events that upended the delicately balanced peace process. First, in June 2015, a bomb exploded at a Kurdish rally in Diyarbakır. Second, there was a suicide bombing in Suruç, the Turkish town directly across the border from Kobanî, in the cultural centre where I had sat for so many hours during the battle, interviewing refugees and local Kurdish politicians. Thirty-two leftist activists who had travelled from Istanbul to take part in a reconstruction project in Kobanî were killed, and a horrific video capturing the moment the explosion ripped through them circulated on social media. I recognised the garden, the gate. After the blast they were blackened, smeared with blood and strewn with limbs. Two days later, two Turkish policemen were shot dead in their homes in the nearby city of şanlıurfa, in an attack that initially appeared to have been claimed by the PKK as ‘revenge’ for the Suruç bombing (the charges against the alleged perpetrators were quietly dismissed in court later, and no other suspects have yet been found). The 2013 peace process broke down, and almost immediately the war in south-eastern Turkey revved up again. One of the first victims was Tahir Elçi, the lawyer who had brought the Kaymaz cases against the Turkish government in 2005. Now serving as the head of Diyarbakır’s bar association, he was shot dead in broad daylight in the city in November 2015, as he gave a press statement appealing for calm.
‘If he was still alive, he would be so angry now,’ Elçi’s widow, Türkan, told me, less than two months after his death. Beautiful, dignified and still moved to tears when she spoke about him, she was horrified at the fresh violence now exploding in the city he loved. ‘He was working for peace. Now I see no one doing that impartially, as he did.’
The descent of Erdoğan’s image from peacemaker to warmonger happened so quickly that even he appeared shocked by it. Doubtless there are many Kurds – particularly those in the diaspora who trumpet the PKK but do not have to live with its endless insurgency – who have always had it in for him. They would feel the same about any Turkish leader, although an Islamist makes for an exceptionally good pantomime villain. But there were two moments when Erdoğan accelerated his own downfall.
The Gezi Park protests, and Erdoğan’s rough handling of them, was the first, a mere two months after Öcalan announced the ceasefire at Newroz. Kurds played a major part in the Gezi demonstrations, even taking advantage of their newfound freedoms to wave banners bearing Öcalan’s image and the red star logo of the PKK in Istanbul’s Taksim Square – something that would have been unthinkable a few months before. The Gezi movement was a soup of unlikely alliances. Football hooligans stood with environmentalists, and staunch Kemalists stood with Kurds. It was the kind of broad consensus that Erdoğan himself had managed to craft in his early years. No wonder he got the jitters.
‘Gezi was important in showing clearly how such spontaneous demonstrations, even though [they were] held within the democratic and legal frame, completely misfit into Erdoğan’s agenda. Therefore, he reacted tough,’ says Haluk Özdalga. ‘One could discern he had a sense of urgency as he occasionally spoke about having to hurry up, that he didn’t have much time. That a leader feels like that after having been in power for a decade may look puzzling, but for him the time to enact his true agenda had actually only just begun after waiting for so many years.’
Other senior AKP figures openly opposed the harsh crackdown on Gezi, among them Abdullah Gül, then president, who counselled a softer approach, and Kadir Topbaş, the mayor of Istanbul. Erdoğan ignored them all. Some have attributed that change in his once-open mentality to his physical health problems – Erdoğan discreetly endured treatment for early stage colon cancer at around the same time.
Ertuğrul Günay, culture minister at the time of the protests and an opponent of the redevelopment plans that sparked the unrest, put it more bluntly. ‘Erdoğan saw the Gezi protests as the rehearsal of a possible insurgency against him,’ he says.
The June 2015 parliamentary elections, in which the AKP lost its majority for the first time, was the second key moment. The success of the Kurdish-rooted Halkların Demokratik Partisi, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), which was partly down to the support that it leached from the AKP, clearly infuriated Erdoğan. There was no outright winner, and between June and the rerun of the elections in November that year the peace process broke down. Erdoğan began building an alliance with the hard-right (and staunchly anti-peace process) Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) – and the seeds of mistrust between him and the Kurds grew into unnavigable forests of hatred. Erdoğan, who had once spoken of peace in Diyarbakır, began adopting a stridently nationalist tone in his rhetoric about the PKK in order to keep his MHP allies onside.
‘We want to speak again about peace but how can we continue? The government says it is fighting terrorism and has explained the new rules,’ Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş told me in the south-eastern city of Mardin in February 2016, as the fighting raged in Cizre ninety miles down the road. It was the day that the military curfew was meant to expire, but the violence continued in the town. Demirtaş spoke of the people trapped in the basements, claiming that the ambulances were attacked by the security forces every time they tried to reach them.
Nine months later, Demirtaş was arrested on charges of promoting the PKK. The first leader of a major party to openly oppose Erdoğan’s plans to switch from a parliamentary to an executive presidential system, he believed that that was a major reason why he and his party, the HDP, were targeted. He remains in prison to this day.
‘We were still hopeful for Turkish democracy, and because of this the AKP attacks us,’ he had told me in Mardin. ‘They are scared.’
It is September 2016, a year since the war re-erupted. I count the graves in the Diyarbakır cemetery.
A whole section is decked out in red, yellow and green trinkets, the flowers fresh and the soil on top of the plots newly turned. There are thirty, forty, fifty … I stop as a group of gypsy girls approaches me. The oldest is sixteen, maximum. Her two little sisters are a lot younger, all of them dressed in age-flattening outfits of long, flowing skirts and loose headscarves. They sell water to mourners and keep the graves here tended for pennies.
‘I want to be a guerrilla when I’m older!’ says the smallest.
Her big sister rounds on her.
‘Shut up!’ she snaps. ‘All these people died for nothing. It’s stupid.’
I weave in and out among the grey marble, noting down the dates on the graves and the details that adorn them. Some are wrapped in the scarves their occupants died in. One has no headstone or marker, just a few wilting flowers on top. One of the dead was named Latife, like Atatürk’s wife. Few were born before the turn of the millennium and most were fifteen and sixteen years old when they died.
‘It started filling up after Kobanî,’ says Farkin Amed, who has come to visit his son’s grave. He tells me that, just a month ago, his younger son also ‘left for the mountains’ – the bucolic euphemism the Kurds use for joining the PKK, even though their wars are now mostly fought in the grimy squalor of the poorest city districts. His daughter has tried to go, too, but the PKK sent her back; she is only fourteen. He seems unbothered by the thought that she will likely try again and succeed within a year.
‘At least my son died in honour, not in shame!’ he says.
Farkin is forty-six but looks older – a malignant mix of sun, stress and sorrow has beaten the youth out of his face. His son, Mehmet, died in June 2012, one of six young Kurds who set themselves alight in the western city of Bursa to protest at the lack of progress towards a peace deal. Farkin clings to the belief that it was their self-immolation that finally pushed the parties to a ceasefire nine months later, in March 2013. But now it is September 2016, the peace process has been dead for a year, and his son’s sacrifice has been in vain.
‘I come three times a week,’ says Farkin. ‘First I water the graves of the new martyrs, then I come to my son. In some months recently there have been only three or four days with no funerals, especially during the curfew in Cizre.’
Two low-flying Turkish fighter jets scream over us. A police car prowls around the perimeter road. A burial is taking place on the other side of the cemetery, where the people who have died natural deaths are laid to rest. Two young men sit silently at a nearby grave draped in the flag of the BDP, the political party that had rallied for the Yazidis in Silopi two years earlier.
‘I didn’t put it there,’ says Murat, the brother of the dead boy, eighteen-year-old Süleyman Güzel, who was killed in clashes in Diyarbakır earlier this year. Not even his family had known he was going out every night to build burning barricades with a scarf wrapped round his face and a gun in his back pocket.
‘I don’t know, he was a boy who never shared anything. He was like a closed box,’ says Murat.
Süleyman had been a normal high school student until Kobanî, his brother says. Some of his friends went to fight in the town, and those who didn’t joined the protests in Diyarbakır. The violence simmered down but their anger did not. After the PKK called off the ceasefire, they started blocking off their neighbourhoods and clashing nightly with the cops. Even when the tanks rolled in and the Kurdish youth fired back with rockets and assault rifles, Murat was reluctant to call it a civil war. The real fighters had gone to Kobanî, he said. The ones who died in Diyarbakır were just kids.
But a policeman I had met in the city while the fighting was at its heaviest told a different story. Diyarbakır in the worst days of its war, over the winter of 2015–16, looked like it had been hit by the apocalypse. The centre, the old neighbourhood of Sur, was under complete military curfew and a heavy snow had dumped on the city. Around the battle zone a network of metal police barricades weaved in and around the old city walls. There were sandbagged sniper positions and tent structures with chimneys for wood-burning stoves where the police drank tea and smoked. Baroque plumes of cigarette and wood smoke twirled together as they rose into the frigid night air.
The hotel where I always stay in Diyarbakır was now on the front line – to get to it I had to pass through the police checkpoints with a paper the receptionist had written out and rubber-stamped for me. Each night, as dusk fell, the soundtrack started, the staccato rhythm of each Diyarbakır night for the last eighty days banged out by the crackle of gunfire and the thump of explosions. I spent New Year’s Eve in the city that year, locked into the hotel together with a few other journalists by the fighting and the heavy snowfall. We were the only guests, and we got blasted drunk and made a game out of deciphering the gunfire from the celebratory fireworks. As we stood swaying in the doorway and smoking cigarettes at three in the morning, a line of Turkish tanks filed past us down the silent street.
The PKK’s youth militants had been pushed back to a small circle in the centre of Sur, but left webs of mines and improvised bombs behind. Ambulances screamed in and out of the curfew zone. Enes, the policeman, was tall, bearded and imposing, with a scar running through his left eyebrow. Most of his face was hidden by his balaclava, but as we started chatting he took it off to show a mop of boyish hair.
Enes was manning the last checkpoint before death alley – and he was bored. The special forces cops, with their camouflage uniforms and German-made weapons, were fighting the battle inside Sur. He, though, was a normal policeman with the misfortune to have been posted to Diyarbakır as the peace process broke down. He was a sitting target for the young PKK radicals who saw any cops as fair game. All he could think of was what he would do in five months’ time, when he was due to be posted back to western Turkey.
I asked Enes whether he enjoyed his job. He laughed, and said he had joined up when he dropped out of university, pursuing an English literature degree, little guessing that he would end up on the front line of a civil war. His marriage to a policewoman had broken down. Here, he had fallen in love with a Kurdish girl, but neither her family nor his would accept the relationship.
‘No one enjoys being a policeman in Turkey!’ he said. ‘But here it is worse. In any other area, when I finish my shift I am a normal person. Here, I’m always looking behind me.’
He had a very different view of the militants to Murat in the cemetery, who insisted his brother was just a kid playing at protest. There were about forty PKK fighters left inside Sur, Enes said, and the police were waiting for them to surrender. But the ones who remained there were the hardest of the hard core – the crack-shot snipers and expert bomb-makers. The young guys throwing Molotov cocktails had been weeded out long ago. The ones who were left were professionals, armed with rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles and land mines.
Eventually, inevitably, Turkey won in Diyarbakır. It took months and almost none of the militants came out alive. The whole area was left in ruins. Again and again, I saw the same thing repeated. Each time it was announced that a curfew had been lifted I raced to the town to report before too much of the clear-up began. It became so predictable that I struggled to find fresh ways to write about it for the newspaper, but each time I entered a newly devastated town, the wide eyes of the children and the sight of the elderly wandering around expanses of flattened masonry stunned me. Yet at the same time as this war was sweeping through the region, destroying almost everything it touched and displacing hundreds of thousands of people, Europe was handing billions of euros to Turkey in a sweetener to stop refugees flowing from its shores on the other side of the country.
A cloak of secrecy hangs over what really happened in south-eastern Turkey after the ceasefire broke down: who the militants were, who armed them, and how many civilians were caught in the crossfire. Time and again I managed to reach people who might give me an insight, like a doctor who was charged with carrying out the autopsies on the bodies brought out of Cizre. He told me that all were charred beyond recognition, and seemed willing to give a full interview – and then abruptly changed his mind and stopped answering my calls.
It was not only the Turkish government who tried to hide and fudge what was happening. So did the PKK leadership, who insisted that the youth militants were not under orders from them. By the time the ceasefire broke down the main Kurdish party was Selahattin Demirtaş’s HDP, which had stormed to electoral success in June 2015 by appealing to liberal Turks as much as to Kurds. But it too was picked apart by the conflict. Demirtaş refused to criticise the violence while other members of his party openly praised the PKK militants. Some even went to the funerals of PKK suicide bombers who had slaughtered dozens of civilians in Ankara – and were promptly charged with terror offences. Even then, they were unrepentant.
‘As the parliamentarian for this city, I have the responsibility to participate in most funerals,’ Mehmet Ali Aslan, the deputy for the Kurdish town of Batman and one of those charged, told me. ‘However the children died, we have a responsibility to their mothers.’
I pushed him on whether he would do the same if the bombers had carried out their act of terror for Al-Qaeda or Isis, rather than for the PKK. After dodging the question for more than ten minutes, he eventually conceded that he wouldn’t.
The HDP released daily lists of the dead in the south-eastern towns, insisting that all were civilians. They were not.
Back in Silopi, one of the first towns to fall under curfew as the new whirlwind of violence hit, I tried to untangle the case of Necati Öden, an eighteen-year-old whose bloodied body appeared on Twitter with a soldier’s boot in the background.
‘That is how we found out he was dead,’ said Öden’s sister, Aysel, when I met her in January 2016, days after the military operations had finished. Bloated cow carcasses were still strewn around their neighbourhood; the underground water pipes exploded by roadside bombs. Families were returning to find that the militants had used their homes for shelter, and that the police had shot them – in situ – in their struggle to dislodge them.
Nine days after Necati’s photo appeared online, his family were permitted to collect his body from the government mortuary and bury him in a small and hurried ceremony in his home town. The Turkish government said he had died as he fought alongside the PKK. His family, meanwhile, insist that he was not a militant, but was summarily killed by security forces as part of a campaign of collective punishment against the young men of Silopi.
‘They had covered his whole body up to his face and would not let us open the sheet to see what happened to him,’ said Aysel. ‘They’re not only killing the militants – they’re killing the young men like my brother, too.’
The photo of Necati’s body was thought to have been taken and first posted by a policeman who then deleted his account; after that, it was shared thousands of times. It became a rallying call for both sides – those who rejoiced that a dangerous terrorist had died, and those who claimed him as an innocent Kurdish civilian killed by the Turkish state.
The 36-day crackdown in Silopi, the first major operation of the war, left a fog of fear over the town. The PKK’s graffiti still covered the walls in the neighbourhoods at the centre of the fighting, yet only one person I spoke to – a businessman who refused to give his name – would admit to knowing anything about the militants.
‘Every single person in Silopi knows someone who is with the PKK or the youth,’ he said. ‘The people who fought here are sons of this town.’
This is the life Necati Öden appeared to have been leading. By day he worked on the minibuses ferrying foot passengers back and forth across the Habur border crossing with Iraq, six miles down the road from Silopi. As his family spoke about him they held out photos of a smiling young man wearing the fashionable clothes and haircut of any normal teenager.
I have taken those cross-border minibuses countless times as I have travelled in and out of Iraq. During Turkey’s ceasefire years, as the PKK switched its attentions to other parts of the region, you could be sure that your driver would blast out pro-PKK music on his stereo. (One particular favourite in those times was a thumping tune with a chorus that endlessly repeated biji biji YPG – ‘long live the YPG’. Its video shows the militia’s gunmen on the front line and participating in huge North Korean-style military parades.) Meanwhile, Necati’s Facebook page was a shrine to Kurdish militancy. A picture of a Kurdish fighter with the flag of the Syrian YPG was emblazoned across the top, and he described himself as a YPG sniper. Does that mean he was a member, or even had any contacts with the PKK? Not necessarily – it could have easily been teenage bravado. But Silopi is a place where smuggling, poverty and PKK militancy come together in a poisonous tangle. Those same minibuses are used to bring contraband cigarettes and tea, and probably much else, from Iraq into Turkey, the drivers stuffing their loot into custom-made spaces around their vehicles at the same time as they are carrying passengers. Other smuggling routes running through the mountains that cradle the Habur crossing are used for weapons and drugs. In both cases, the PKK takes huge cuts from the profits. For young men growing up in such places, life at all levels is intertwined with the PKK – it’s not a black-and-white case of being in the militia or out.
After five months of escalating violence the police announced a total curfew in Silopi on 14 December 2015. The Öden family’s neighbourhood, which had been laced with IEDs and explosive-filled trenches by the PKK’s local youth militants, was at the deadly heart of the ensuing battle. ‘Not even a cat could move outside without being shot at,’ Aysel said.
Necati remained there as the rest of his family fled to a safer area – they were hazy about the reasons why, insisting that he had wanted to stay in the house because he wanted to protect it. Seventeen days later he was dead. His family say he was hunkering down in the house, and trying to find a way to leave the area. The Turkish government was unequivocal in its response.
‘He was a PKK member,’ said the government official whom I contacted about the case. Generally he was a chatty guy willing to talk through the nuances of any situation. Not this time: ‘There is no further comment to make.’
Victory in Diyarbakır, Silopi, Cizre and the other towns of the south-east has not brought any rest for the Turks; still, the PKK fights on in the countryside, killing Turkish soldiers and policemen almost daily. It has also brought its terror campaign to western Turkey with a series of car bombings that have killed scores of people in Istanbul and Ankara. Meanwhile, the YPG has grown into a powerhouse in Syria, where it is no longer an outlying militia but the world’s best hope against Isis. Kobanî, always more of a fairy tale than a news story, has already been twisted into a great myth. Those of us who were there saw that the YPG was on the verge of miserable defeat at Isis’s hands until America steamed in with its game-changing airstrikes. Now, to hear the revisionists and propagandists speak of it, you would think the Kurds had managed to grab huge territories in Syria with Kalashnikovs and guts alone, rather than with the backing of the world’s mightiest military.
Turkey’s Kurds don’t have such victories to brag of – only a new chapter to add to their litany of grievance and revenge. It will make for another festering wound when future PKK leaders want to radicalise a new generation. No one believes another peace process could begin any time soon.
On a bright Saturday afternoon in September 2017, I wander through Diyarbakır with my friend Xezal, a small, wide-smiling Kurdish woman with the gentle soul of an artist. The city is recovering. Thick crowds of shoppers throng the pavements and the kebab sellers are frying their delicacies on portable griddles. In the windows of the jewellery shops, the bright gold bangles and necklaces that Kurdish brides deck themselves out in for their wedding day dazzle behind the glass.
Xezal and I have spent three days shuttling between artists, activists and politicians in the city, building a story of how Erdoğan won and then lost the love of Turkey’s Kurds. The heart of Diyarbakır has been decimated and the fledgling civil society that was beginning to blossom under the peace process has been crushed. Yet everyone, from an illiterate grandmother standing in the ruins of her home in Sur to a lawyer in his leather-trimmed office, tells us they had once hoped the pious man from Rize might be different.
‘When the AKP came to power in 2002 most people were uneasy about their approach. But they said they were different and gave signs of change,’ says Gule Ulusoy, an actor from Diyarbakır. ‘There were Kurds, secularists, nationalists among them. We thought it could be a coalition. But now we realise that it was all a project of Erdoğan. He was just building power. At the start he was close to the Kurds. Now he has changed to being a nationalist. It is all for the benefit of him.’
Diyarbakır’s municipality, a citadel of Demirtaş’s HDP, has suffered great waves of closures and sackings since the breakdown of the peace process. In the wake of the coup attempt the crackdown has accelerated. The HDP mayor has been arrested and replaced with a government appointee. Kurdish and Armenian signs put up before 2015 have been removed. Xezal’s husband, a teacher, has already lost his job. She works for the council’s culture department and she fears that she could be next. We have spent the afternoon with Gule Ulusoy and a group of other actors who used to work for Diyarbakır’s municipal theatre, once the hub of the city’s colourful arts scene. Thirty-three of them were sacked at a stroke on New Year’s Eve 2016 by the trustee appointed by the government to run things.
The trustee had claimed that the actors did not have the diplomas required to be working in a public sector job. The actors say they have been punished for putting on plays in the Kurdish language to sold-out audiences three times a week. It was only in the Erdoğan era that the ban on Kurdish had been lifted. Now, still under Erdoğan, it seems to be crashing down again, even if the government would never formally re-impose it.
Determined to continue, the sacked actors have rented a space in the basement of a decrepit shopping centre next to the main council building. The chain stores and more upmarket boutiques have long abandoned this place; all that are left are the bargain stores selling cheap plastic tat. It looks an unlikely place for high culture. But the actors have lucked out here – this basement space was once a theatre and the stage and seating are still intact. Their ticket sales just cover the rent.
‘In legal terms the Kurdish language is not banned. But there are still people who claim it is an “unknown language”,’ says actor Ruknettin Gün. ‘This is what happens when Islamist governments come to power – the first thing they do is to close down all the culture.’
An art gallery and a cultural centre in Diyarbakır have also been shuttered, as has the city theatre in nearby Batman. For a short while, a television network dedicated solely to broadcasting children’s cartoons dubbed into Kurdish was taken off the air. The Diyarbakır Film Festival has been cancelled, and the archives of the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre destroyed. An independent cinema in Batman was closed by government decree, and then gutted in an unexplained fire. Several Kurdish-language institutes have been closed.
Meanwhile, a statue commemorating twelve-year-old Uğur Kaymaz and his father Ahmet has been removed from the spot where it had stood in Kızıltepe since 2009. Even the Kurds’ ultra-Islamic party, HUDA-PAR, who once supported Erdoğan in almost everything he did, now accuse him of reverting to the old mindset of the Turkish nationalists.
‘The AKP’s position on the Kurdish issue has become like that of the Kemalists,’ says HUDA-PAR’s president, şeymus Tanrıkulu. ‘To say that they are totally Kemalist would not be true, but they support the Kemalist system. There are two columns to it: firstly Turkish nationalism, and secondly secularism. In our history many ethnic groups have been rejected by that system. Now, we see that the AKP’s policy and approach has not changed anything. They said that the Kurdish language would be formalised in the constitution but nothing was done. Recently, they have started to move far away from these topics. They are using the language of the nationalists.’
Xezal and I walk across Diyarbakır’s open plaza, where Sheikh Said’s rebels were hanged by the Turkish state in 1925 and where the first Kobanî protests kicked off eighty-nine years later, towards the old walls that mark the perimeter of the city’s latest tragedy. A black-and-white rendering of Atatürk peers out over the crowd of early evening shoppers from the top of one of the wall’s watchtowers. I ask Xezal how today’s Kurds feel about the founder of the republic.
She bursts out in a peal of laughter. ‘I think we have started to like him more,’ she says. ‘Compared to Erdoğan, he was perfect.’