SILOPI, Turkey — The two-story building in the foothills of the Cudi Mountains, not far from the Turkish-Iraqi border, can hardly be called a house anymore. It lies in ruins, hit by shelling from a tank or a howitzer.

“What wrong did I do to deserve this?” an elderly woman laments at the debris. One cannot help but wonder whether this is a scene from Syria. But no, this is Silopi, a town in Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish southeast.

Home to some 121,000 people, Silopi saw some of the worst clashes that have raged in the southeast when security forces waged a ferocious campaign against militants of the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), the armed youth wing of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), who had sought to gain control in a number of urban areas, digging trenches and erecting barricades to keep the authorities away.

Silopi was placed under a round-the-clock curfew on Dec. 14, effectively cutting it off from the outside world. The security operation there lasted more than a month, before the curfew was partially lifted and journalists were allowed to enter the town on Jan. 19.