Kurdish war

News in Brief

The Kurdish peace process that was killed off by the Turkish state last summer shows no signs of reviving. Instead, the Turkish civil war continues between the state and the country’s Kurdish minority.

In June, the Turkish military moved heavy military operations into the countryside, and away from the Kurdish cities that were so heavily damaged in earlier months. (Though long curfews continue in many of these cities.)

Airstrikes on the Turkish Kurdish guerrilla army, the PKK, took place in both southeast Turkey and northern Iraq. For its part, the PKK continued killing Turkish soldiers and paramilitary ‘village guards’, and were accused of carbomb attacks on police targets in Istanbul and Midyat which together killed 14 people. (The Istanbul bombing was claimed by the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, which broke away from the PKK in 2004. The Midyat bombing remains unclaimed.)

There are thousands of political prisoners in Turkey, many of them what Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan calls ‘unarmed terrorists’.

On 21 June, Erdoğan said that civil society groups ‘working against the state’ had largely been ‘destroyed’, according to the leading Turkish daily Hürriyet.