Syria’s Qamishli a window onto Turkish-Kurdish conflict across border
For months, residents of a northern Syrian city have watched helplessly as their neighbors and fellow Kurds battle Turkish forces across the border.
QAMISHLI, Syria — On the top floor of an unfinished concrete building in the northern Syrian city of Qamishli last week, a group of journalists milled around a video camera trained a few hundred meters away across the Turkish border to the city of Nusaybin. With the steady dull thuds of shelling in the background, the reporters, who were camped out to document the bombing in Nusaybin, smoked, drank tea, talked quietly around the recording equipment and ducked out to the balcony to snap photographs as a laptop showed a live feed of the action.
On the screen was construction equipment, beginning what they guessed was an extension of a separation wall between the two cities by Turkey. After one particularly loud explosion, the camera zoomed out past a foreground of destroyed residential buildings to catch a fast-rising white plume of smoke.
