Dutch journalist arrested in Turkey while reporting on Kurdish issues

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkish authorities have arrested a Dutch journalist who was reporting in a town located in a predominantly Kurdish region of Turkey.

Frederike Geerdink, a freelance journalist who reports on Kurdish issues, wrote on her Twitter account Sunday that she was taken into custody in the town of Yuksekova.

She added that she was with “a human shield group,” who are all in custody, and that she expected to be questioned by the prosecutor “today or tomorrow.”

Geerdink was also arrested last January, accused of disseminating terrorist propaganda and acquitted of those charges in April.

Two British journalists from Vice News were released this week after they were arrested on terror charges while reporting from the city of Diyarbakir, the bastion of Turkey’s Kurdish region and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Turkey and the PKK have been locked in a three-decade conflict in which some 40,000 people have been killed. 

The conflict re-ignited in late June, after the PKK claimed responsibility for the killings of two Turkish policemen in late July. Turkey responded by bombing PKK targets in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and in its own Kurdish southeast. The resumption of the conflict ended a peace process began in 2013.