Kurds demand answers after battles in Cizre

CIZRE, Turkey — At the entrance of the Nur neighborhood in Cizre, the Oytun family’s house stands as a grim testament of the bloodshed that unfolded in this mainly Kurdish city after Turkish authorities cut it off from the outside world in early September. The walls of the two-story house are riddled with bullets, and a pile of large rocks blocks the entryway.

One has to climb over the rocks to enter the courtyard, where the house’s mistress Kevser Oytun stands with tearful eyes, showing journalists a handful of bullets. She says she extracted them from the walls. A hole gapes in the bathroom door. The refrigerator, too, is riddled with bullet holes, as is the closet where she keeps the bedding. Even the mattresses in the closet are perforated. “What wrong did I do to deserve this?” she asks, no longer able to control her tears.

Her husband, Turan, says they barely escaped with their lives. Cizre was placed under a round-the-clock curfew in the afternoon of Sept. 4 as special police forces moved in for what the authorities said was an operation to purge the area of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants holed up in residential areas. Neither the media nor lawmakers and ministers could enter the city until the morning of Sept. 12, when the curfew finally ended amid reports of many civilian deaths, including children.

“Our house is wrecked. The air conditioner, the fridge, the TV set, everything is gone. We barely survived,” Turan told Al-Monitor. “For nine days, we hid inside this house — a total of 23 people — without water, food and electricity. The kids kept crying. Some of us hid in the rooms, others in the basement or in the back of the house. There were two military vehicles firing in our direction.”