Ahmet Turk is a man with posture. He appears to be the embodiment of nobility and dignity. His noble personality comes with his feudal background; he is the scion of a Kurdish landlord and tribal chiefs in a vast land along Turkey’s frontier. While his dignity gives the impression that it comes from within rather than its being part of his Kurdish aristocratic ancestry, the combination of both creates a very charismatic leader.

Even his surname, in a sense, makes him unique and a center of attraction. Turk is an ironic surname for a Kurd who dedicated his life for Kurdish rights in his struggle against the Turkish state. Still, it also suggests that the destiny of the Kurds is inseparable from that of the Turks in Turkey.

With his growing age — he is 75 — and his ever-graying hair, mustache and eyebrows, Turk has earned the image of a wise man. Yet he has not taken care of his body as well as he could have; he is a very heavy and incurable chain smoker despite having health problems that have included surgery. For him, lighting cigarettes one after the other is a form of comfort. It is a kind of a necessary relief from the permanent tension that has been his fate his entire life.

He was the oldest and longest-serving Kurdish politician in the Turkish parliament. He was first elected in 1973, from a center-right Turkish party. He was elected from Mardin six times, has been involved in Turkish social-democrat politics and from the mid-1990s on he emerged as the fatherly figure on the Kurdish political scene. He has been the chairman of a number of Kurdish political parties — they were banned one after another — until 2011. That is the last time he was elected to parliament. In 2015, he left Ankara politics to serve Mardin as its mayor.