JINHA

AMED - With two women killed near the old city of Diyarbakır in one week, sociologists say increasing femicides are linked to war in Kurdistan.

In Turkey, where women lack the basic right to life, two femicides have taken place in the last week in villages in a single district of the city of Diyarbakır.

Zümrüt Bayram was married and a mother of two, according to villagers. She recently separated from her husband and went to the province of Malatya to start a new life. One week ago, Zümrüt's family found where she was living and forced her to come back to Diyarbakır.

The family decided to kill Zümrüt. As is common in family-based femicides in Turkey, her 17-year-old younger brother was chosen to carry out the killing, because of the lower sentence he will receive as a minor. With the killing done, Zümrüt's family retrieved her from the morgue and buried her secretly, even neglecting the necessary religious rites in order to avoid attention. Her younger brother turned himself over to the police.

Meanwhile, the body of another woman from a village in the same district is still being stored in the same morgue. No identification has been found for the woman and her body remains unclaimed. She was found shot dead in a rural area, also part of the district.

"There have been two women killed in the Sur district; this is not normal," said Ezgi Yalçın, a sociologist at the local Amida women's center. "Yet women's deaths are not independent from the environment of war." Ezgi, saying that Turkey has become "Daesh-esque" throughout the war, noted that anti-woman policies have increased in this period.

"We're talking about a state and a government that legitimizes harassment and rape, and easily lets the perpetrators [of such crimes] go free with reductions in their punishments," said Ezgi. She noted that as the war has escalated, so have state policies against women--including the recent acceptance of religious marriages without legal marriages, which will give women less legal recourse to divorce in Turkey and permit child-age marriages.

(pk-kt/fk/cm)