JINHA

ŞIRNEX – After Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu claimed that “no civilians died in Cizre,” residents of the besieged Kurdish town criticized the statement as they mourned their dead.

Over the course of a nine-day blockade of the Kurdish town of Cizre, starting on Septemer 4, Turkish security forces killed 21 civilians. Two of the women civilians killed in the attack were Maşallah Edin and Zeynep Taşkın, both shot in the street outside their home in the Cudi neighborhood.

On the night of September 9, snipers shot Cizre resident Zeynep Taşkın. The bullet killed Zeynep, who threw herself over her one-year-old baby Berxwedan to protect him from the gunfire. When Zeynep’s mother-in-law Maşallah Edin went outside after her daughter-and-law and wailing grandson, snipers shot her as well. Both women died in the street.

Eyaz Edin, Maşallah’s son and Zeynep’s husband, heard at around 11:00 p.m. headed home, hearing gunshots and reports that his uncle had been wounded. At home, relatives told him that his mother and wife had both gone to his uncle’s house so that they could make a phone call to his father, who is currently working across the border in Iraq. Eyaz left the house, only to find his mother and wife lying on the ground in the street.

“We tried to get them inside for hours, but we couldn’t. We waited for help, but none came,” said Eyaz. His mother and wife remained lying in the street for three hours. Both died of blood loss.

Eyaz was angry about Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s claim in the press that “no civilians were killed” in the blockade of Cizre. “My wife was shot in front of her own home with her child in her arms,” said Eyaz. “How is it that they’re not civilians?”

Maşallah’s daughter Şükran described the evening when her mother went to her uncle’s house to make the phone call to Iraq.
“She said goodbye to my father and hung up,” said Şükran. “My mother was going to go home, but my uncle and his family said, ‘have a tea and then go home.’ My mother didn’t drink the tea.”

Şükran’s aunt asked why Maşallah was going home so early; Maşallah replied that the children would be scared at home without her. That was when Zeynep and Berxwedan stepped into the street and were shot, and Maşallah after them. In the wake of her mother and sister-in-law’s death, Şükran said that she wants “peace, nothing more.”

“My daugher lay in the street for hours and died of blood loss,” said Hüsna Dayan, Maşallah Edin’s mother and Berxwedan’s great-grandmother. “Meanwhille Davutoğlu is saying ‘we didn’t kill civilians.’ Weren’t the dozens of coffins out there civilians? They killed this many civilians; why are they hiding it?”

(ekip/gc/cm)