Turkey’s Alevis on edge after homes vandalized
More than a dozen Alevi homes were recently marked with red paint, setting off alarm bells for Turkey's largest minority group, which has a long memory of sectarian violence.
Members of the Alevi religious community are on edge after vandals targeted several homes in eastern Turkey, recalling earlier violence against the country’s largest minority and rousing fears that a surge in nationalism is stoking ethnic tensions.
Late last week, assailants painted an ominous red “X” on 13 homes in the predominantly Alevi district of Cemal Gursel in Malatya, a conservative city of nearly 800,000 people, said the head of a local Alevi group, adding police had yet to make any arrests.
“We know this wasn’t a couple of hooligans because they knew which houses on which streets to target. It was definitely carried out in a deliberate and organized way,” Mehmet Topal of the Pir Sultan Abdal Cultural Association told Al-Monitor. “We have seen these markings before.”
The same tactic was used in 1978 in the nearby city of Kahramanmaras before right-wing gangs murdered 100 Alevis, Topal said. More than a 100 other Alevis were killed in three more massacres over the next two decades.
