Ongoing violence, curfews keep doctors from tending to sick in southeast Turkey
Alarm bells are ringing for the health sector in Turkey’s conflict-ridden southeast as draconian security measures and simmering violence disrupt medical services and lead to civilian deaths.
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.”
In another grim scene from Cizre, footage reportedly shot during the curfew shows an ambulance trying to navigate a residential area as a threatening voice shouts at the driver from a loudspeaker, “Get out! Don’t move or I’ll shoot!”
The rekindled conflict between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) has crippled medical services across the Kurdish-majority southeast. In Cizre alone, several civilians, including children, died from lack of treatment during the weeklong curfew — either of illnesses or from injuries from the clashes.
