DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — In his 1853 travelogue about Diyarbakir, German orientalist Julius Heinrich Petermann described how he reached the city after sunset to find the fortress gates locked and had to wait for the morning to enter the city. More than 160 years later, those waiting at the gates of the old walled city — now Diyarbakir’s district of Sur — are its own Kurdish residents, forced out from their homes amid clashes between the Turkish security forces and armed militants entrenched in residential areas.
On a cold winter day last week, dozens of people — refugees in their own city — waited at the checkpoint at the entrance of Sur, desperate to be let in to take a few belongings from their homes, since they had fled with only the clothes on their backs. The police would not budge, leading one resident to exclaim, “We’ve sheltered the Syrians, but who is going to shelter us?”
