On Oct. 25, three Turkish soldiers were shot to death in the back in Yukseova, a predominantly Kurdish town just miles from Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Iran. The killers were two masked men and no one has yet claimed responsibility. Yet the usual suspect for both the government and Turkish society is the PKK, the armed and outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, a group that Turkey identifies as terrorist and has fought for three decades.
This was just one episode in a series of violent acts committed by pro-PKK militants in the past several weeks. In fact, there has been a “peace process” between the PKK and the government since early 2013, and guns had been silent. Yet the Turkish government’s inaction to help Kobani, a Kurdish town on Turkey’s Syrian border, in the face of the onslaught by the Islamic State, frustrated and enraged Turkey’s own Kurds. In early October, Selahattin Demirtas, the leader of the HDP, the People's Democracy Party, the implicit, legal arm of the PKK, called for street protests against the government for not helping Kobani. But some of the protesters turned violent, engaging not only in vandalism, but also lynching whomever they perceived as sympathizers of the Islamic State.
In Diyarbakir, for example, three youngsters who were working as volunteers for an Islamic charity were killed. One of them, Yasin Boru, was only 16 and was distributing free meat to poor families as a part of the Muslim rituals for Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice. A post-mortem report stated that all three victims of the incident had been “severely tortured” and Boru’s skull was “severely broken.”
During these antigovernment protests, most of which took place on Oct. 6-7, 42 people were killed, most of them by pro-PKK militants. Fellow Kurds were targeted simply because they had long beards and looked too Islamist. (See a related Al-Monitor article: “In Turkey, it's all about the beard.”) The government declared curfews in several Kurdish-dominated cities, reminiscent of the days of the military junta of the early ’80s.
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