Ahval news and the Centre for Turkey Studies (CEFTUS) hosted a joint panel discussing Turkey in light of the latest developments unfolding in its troubled region. Nurcan Baysal, Ahval columnist, was one of the panelists. Here is the text of her talk: I am a Kurdish activist and a writer coming from Diyarbakır. Today I […]
“We are awaiting for our fate,” a Yazidi woman told me in a refugee camp in Silopi in southeast Turkey four years ago. After Islamic State (ISIS) attacked Yazidi towns and villages in northern Iraq in August 2014, massacring male inhabitants and forcing women and girls to become sex slaves, thousands of Yazidis fled to […]
A history class 50 years from today… Today, kids, I am going to tell you the story of the country that disappeared for trivial reasons: This country was full of endless cruelties, injustices, persecutions, and massacres. Even its foundation had rested on the massacre of other people. For hundreds, even thousands of years, some of […]
A history class 50 years from today… Today, kids, I am going to tell you the story of the country that disappeared for trivial reasons: This country was full of endless cruelties, injustices, persecutions, and massacres. Even its foundation had rested on the massacre of other people. For hundreds, even thousands of years, some of […]
Devastating forest fires, sparked by military operations, have raged for two months in Dersim, a Kurdish province in eastern Turkey. Officially named Tunceli, Dersim is populated by Alevi Kurds and was the scene of a brutal massacre carried out by security forces in 1938 in which tens of thousands were killed and displaced. The city of Dersim […]
These were the last words of a 65-year-old seriously ill prisoner, Koçer Özdal, who died in a Turkish hospital last week while his hands and feet were cuffed. Özdal was jailed in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison in 2016. In 2018, he was diagnosed with cancer but denied treatment. Human rights organisations campaigned for […]