Many families flee Turkey’s Kurdish Sirnak after tense clashes

DIYARBAKIR, Turkey - The mayor of the Kurdish city of Sirnak in Turkey says an estimated 60,000 people have fled from the town since violent clashes between the Kurdish guerrillas and Turkish army reached the city in March.  

Serhed Qadirxan told Rudaw that some 2,400 families currently live in temporary tents outside the city, while the rest of the population has taken refuge in nearby villages and communities.

“According to our own information, more than 60 percent of the city has been heavily destroyed by the shelling and there are less than 5,000 people left in the city,” Qadirxan said.

Sirnak is the main city in the area with over 65,000 population, located some 300 kilometers east of Diyarbakir near the Iraqi Kurdish border.

The latest clashes started after authorities imposed a curfew in the city on March 14. At least 24 guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have been killed in the town since March, hospital officials say.

The new round of clashes continued to rage in the nearby townships of Silopi and Cezire on the outskirts of Sirnak after an unofficial ceasefire was put in place in the rest of the war-torn cities, such as Sur and Diyarbakir.

Rights groups say the army’s “indiscriminate operations” in the cities have been “out of proportion.”

“Sirnak is leveled to the ground but there is no information available because of the curfews,” said Abdulla Ekinci at the Mezlumder rights organization. “The central parts of the town are  being continuously shelled,” he told Rudaw.

The government, however, has accused the PKK of deliberately taking the war to the urban areas where they launch attacks on army bases from the ditches they have dug throughout the cities.

But Kurdish representatives say the army is shelling indiscriminately even in the areas with no ditches.

“The military is attacking Sirnak in spite of the curfew and the marshal law imposed in these areas; they have even bombed areas where there have been no ditches,” said Aycan Irmez, a Kurdish lawmaker from the Peoples Democratic Party (HDP).

Irmez, who represents Sirnak in the Turkish parliament, told Rudaw the majority of the refugees from his hometown have set up temporary camps outside the city in appalling conditions.

He believes Ankara’s long-term policy is to displace the population of these areas and settle them elsewhere.

“People from Sirnak have decided to live in the tents outside the city until the fighting is over and then return to their homes,” he said.

A fragile ceasefire was imposed in early March, which ended the curfews and the larger clashes, although guerrilla bombings and army airstrikes still frequently take place in many parts of the Kurdish areas.

The city of Sur was one of the more affected areas in the extended clashes between the army and Kurdish guerrillas last year with many of its private and public constructions leveled to the ground in the bloody fighting.

Ankara says it will invest some $9 billion in reconstructing the country’s southeast where Sur and most other Kurdish cities are located.

Kurdish groups have denounced the government’s reconstruction projects as part of larger plans to dislocate the local population.