CIZRE, Turkey — In the wee hours of Sept. 6, the Yaramis family in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish city of Cizre watched helplessly as their baby boy died before their eyes. Mehmet Tahir, only 25 days old, had fallen sick with fever the day before, but repeated calls for an ambulance were to no avail. Cizre was under a round-the-clock curfew as special police forces moved in for what officials described as an operation against Kurdish militants entrenched in residential areas. The Nur neighborhood where they live was right in the middle of the deadly clashes, and not even ambulances were allowed in.
“He died in my hands,” the boy’s distraught mother, Sosin Yaramis, told Al-Monitor after the weeklong curfew ended Sept. 12 and journalists entered the city. “We kept the body at home for two days and then in [a freezer] in the mosque.”
