“International Crisis Group [ICG] has long worked to track the rising cost of violence using open-source data, including reports from Turkish-language media, local Kurdish rights groups and the Turkish military,” reads a statement from Berkay Mandiraci, an ICG researcher in Turkey.
“[T]he problem is that information is tightly controlled, travel is limited for some, and it can take months to work out what exactly happened even in high-profile incidents,” he continues, noting that both sides of the conflict obfuscate their casualty figures for political reasons.
In the year since the conflict renewed, the ICG has documented the deaths of at least 1,761 people. This includes 307 civilians, 582 state security forces, 653 PKK members, and 219 “youth of unknown affiliation” who could be either civilians or PKK members and were mostly killed in zones under Turkish military curfew.
By tracking the casualties, the ICG has also documented changing trends in the conflict.
Through 2016, the PKK has engaged in more “high-profile attacks, killing more security forces with single IED [Improvised Explosive Device] attacks, which has resulted in an increase in monthly security force casualties since March 2016.”
The ICG also noted a move in the conflict from urban to rural in recent months noting that the ratio of deaths in urban areas compared to rural areas has increasingly shifted to the latter over May and June. “This clearly shows that the PKK is withdrawing from urban areas and shifting back to its traditional rural tactics.”
The ICG proffers growing resentment of Kurds towards the PKK in urban areas as a reason for the change in tactics.
The group also documented a decrease in casualties among the “youth of unknown affiliation,” correlated with a rise in deaths among the PKK’s youth wing, the YPS. “This could be an indication of two dynamics: either the PKK’s young militants are increasingly joining the YPS, or the PKK has begun reporting these deaths to give the appearance that its “resistance” is embraced by a broader group of youth in conflict areas.”
The International Crisis Group has been documenting the PKK-Turkey conflict for years and describes the past year as “one of the most violent episodes in its 32-year history.”
