ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Upon hearing news that a Turkish airstrike has hit a Duhok district, its mayor rushes to the scene and spots three crying children in a house of shattered windows.
For residents of the Kurdistan Region's border areas, loss and damage to their homes through bombings is nothing new. Their mountains have for decades hosted Turkish military bases, and the camps of Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerillas they war with.
"Once, the [Deraluk] village of Barchi was bombed, I immediately rushed to the scene where I found that three children had just woken up to the huge bang of the bombing crying out loud as their room's windows had all smashed," Sami Barwari told Rudaw on Saturday.
The districts of Shiladze, Duhok province and Sidakan, northeast Erbil province have also been bearing the brunt of the PKK-Turkey clashes, with the frequent hover of Turkish aircraft instilling fear in residents.
Once thriving districts are now eerily quiet, as locals fled in large numbers for their safety.
Seventy percent of the area around Deraluk has been designated a war zone by the Kurdistan Regional Government. Of 82 villages, only nine remain populated.
"We are prone for target at any moment," Barwari told Rudaw. In the past two years, six people have been killed and two others have gone missing."
"I have been the mayor of Deraluk for two and a half years now. Every day or week, our sub-district is bombed."
In the aftermath of bombings, the government has found it difficult to "access to reach these areas in order to reconstruct and extend services to them," he added.
Shiladze 'housing crisis'
The villagers of Shiladze have abandoned 85 of 91 villages, district mayor Washin Salman told Rudaw Radio on Saturday. Mass displacement from villages has seen local towns overwhelmed by a "housing crisis", Salman said.
"People can't return to their villages," he said. "If they did, then we wouldn't have a housing issue."
Other displaced villagers who found renting a house inside Shiladze difficult have moved further afield, towards or into the city of Duhok.
Sidakan: bombed by both neighbors
In terms of space, Sidakan is the biggest town across the Kurdistan Region and Iraq, its territory amounting to 1,617 square kilometers. Located in northern Erbil's Soran district, it neighbors both Turkey and Iran. Of its 264 villages, 118 have been emptied.
With the suspected presence of PKK fighters and Iranian Kurdish opposition groups, the region is pounded not just by Turkish airstrikes, but Iranian cross-border artillery shelling too.
Turkish observation posts and military bases are just seven kilometers from the center of Sidakan, district mayor Ihsan Chalabi told Rudaw.
"Very few nights pass without hearing the hover of Turkey's warplanes overhead," Chalabi said.
Since 2017, Turkish bombings have killed five civilians, and wounded another seven in Sidakan, he said. Iranian mortar shelling has killed one and wounded another three in the same time period.
"The last bombing took place two days ago. If there is no bombing for a day, it feels like Eid for people," he said.
The ever-looming possibility of attacks are having a profound effect on the area's young residents, Chalabi added.
"The children are always in a state of fear. Sometimes bombings have happened while students have been in nearby schools, shattering classroom windows and forcing their closure for a week or 10 days," he said.
Local agriculture and farming wilts
The mountains of the Kurdistan Region are home mostly to poor farmers who struggle to earn a living at the best of times.
Fearful abandonment of rural areas has seen agricultural and livestock farming in Shiladze dwindle, though some former villagers risk journeys back along dangerous rural roads to tend to their orchards and groves. Since 2016, 21 civilians have been killed in Shiladze's outlying villages amid Turkey-PKK crossfire, according to its mayor.
In Sidakan, more than 1,000 dunams of farmland were destroyed by Turkish bombings in 2019 alone, Chalabi said.
"The losses vary, burning orchards, groves, and bushes, the killing of sheep and hundreds of horses."
Before Turkey's land presence in Sidakan, nomadic families took to the mountainous outskirts of Sidakan to let their livestock graze on the fertile pastures. With little suitable land left to feed from, shepherding has become a dying practice in the area.
"But since Turkey came to the region in 2017, only 10 to 20 shepherds search for pasture in the area," Chalabi said.
"Lack of pasture and the sale of sheep have left the people of Sidakan desperate for a source of income," he added. "Those families who aren't earning a salary are eyeing support from humanitarian organizations."
Volatility in the area has "dealt a huge blow to apple and walnut produce in Sidakan, to the extent the two are on the verge of perishing."
Translation by Zhelwan Z. Wali
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