For three hard years, Halise Aksoy searched for the remains of her son after learning that the young Kurdish rebel had fallen in battle against Turkish security forces on May 23, 2017. Her quest for Agit, which means “brave” in Kurdish, ended on April 10 at the central courthouse in Diyarbakir, the informal capital of the mainly Kurdish southeast. “Aunty, look! Your son’s bones are there,” said a court official, breezily motioning toward a plastic bag with a yellow tag attached. The bag was on a table and contained a rectangular box.
“They offered me a glass of water,” recalled Aksoy in a telephone interview from her native village of Elmabahce in neighboring Mardin province. “I said, ‘I don’t want your water, keep it to yourselves,’ and took my son and left.”
