In December 2015, on the 12th day of a 24-hour curfew in Şırnak province, along Turkey’s border with Iraq and Syria, a family in the Silopi district grew hungry as they hid in the basement of their home. Outside, clashes raged between the Turkish military and Kurdish insurgents. When the elder of the house, 73-year-old […]
Big changes often arrive quietly. On a lovely September day in 2016, the second day of Eid ul-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice, we woke up to learn that Turkey’s government had dismissed the elected Kurdish mayors in two cities and 25 districts across the country’s southeast and replaced them with administrators. I will never forget […]
Ew Dibêjin ‘Hûn Tunene’; Em Dibêjin ‘Em Hene’ They say ‘you do not exist,’ we say ‘we exist.’ On my way to vote in local elections Diyarbakır, the biggest city in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish southeast, I kept thinking of this sentence. I think many Kurds share these sentiments. In spite of everything we have endured […]
This week I was reminded of August 2014, when Islamic State (ISIS) captured the town of Shingal in Iraqi Kurdistan. I quickly joined a group of activists that rushed to support the Yazidis who had escaped Shingal, helping to establish camps in Iraq and Turkey. For more than a year, I worked as a volunteer in Yazidi […]
Five years ago, when meeting counterparts from the Middle East and Europe, we were proud of our vibrant civil society in Turkey. In both western Turkey and the Kurdish region, we had so many active civil society organisations and NGOs dealing with multiple issues – women, children, poverty and development, forced migration, philanthropy, LGBT, environmental […]
I am in Silopi, a district of Şırnak on Turkey’s border with Iraq and Syria. I enter a poverty-stricken home in Karşıyaka Neighborhood. Beds have been stacked in a corner of the room, and an electric heater provides warmth. On the wall hangs the photograph of a small child. His name is Mehmet, Mehmet Mete. […]