JINHA

AMED – Yesterday, Turkish police and soldiers launched an assault on the Sur district in the main Kurdish city of Diyarbakır. A JINHA reporter and women’s rights activist were among those wounded in the assault.

Yesterday morning, the governorate of the province of Diyarbakır, Turkey announced a curfew in the Sur district of the city of Diyarbakır. With that began a heavy assault on the district. As local youth formed self-defense units to resist the assault from makeshift barricades, police devastated the historic neighborhood. JINHA reporter Şehriban Aslan was among the many residents wounded in the clashes.

Police raked residential neighborhoods with gunfire and deployed explosives yesterday as part of the intensive attacks in Sur. Local residents protested the curfew by refusing to abandon the streets despite the curfew. They maintained a noise demo throughout the day and night. Tension was high in the district, where police damaged many buildings and electricity was cut throughout the day. Residents from other districts attempted to march into Sur yesterday afternoon, but police blocked the march.

Clashes were particularly intense in the Hasırlı neighborhood, where police set fire to the local Neighborhood Assembly’s building. The Neighborhood Assembly was among the many to declare self-government in the wake of intensive police arrest raids across Kurdistan. The fire destroyed the assembly building and everything in it, including the aid that assembly activists had collected for the people of the war-torn city of Kobanê. As the blaze spread to a nearby building, municipal firefighters struggled to enter the blockaded neighborhood.

Elsewhere in the district, police also started a fire in the Fatihpaşa neighborhood. The neighborhood is adjacent to the Hevsel Gardens, recently declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Police also raked the neighborhood’s historic Kurşunlu Mosque with gunfire.

On three separate occasions, police opened fire on reporters from JINHA and other agencies attempting to cover the clashes, wounding JINHA reporter Şehriban Aslan. Şehriban’s fellows journalists performed first aid after she came under police fire. By chance, she was only lightly wounded. Police also pointed their guns at and threatened to kill Parliamentary representatives from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), who had entered the district with the hope of observing conditions on the ground.

26-year-old Abdullah Erdem, wounded in the assault, described a police policy of deliberately stopping ambulance access to the Sur district. Abdullah reported that police began opening fire at random in his neighborhood, wounding him and a seven-year-old boy named Efe Güngör. “When I was wounded, my family called an ambulance, but the police didn’t let it through. They were shouting at me: ‘our friends died; now you die too,’” said Abdullah. Abdullah and Efe were unable to reach the hospital for three hours.

Clashes continued overnight, with a large explosion in the Fatihpaşa neighborhood damaging several buildings. Clashes also spread to other districts of Diyarbakır. Youth in the Bağlar district attempted to hold a protest against the assault on Sur. As police blockaded the protest with armored vehicles and began firing tear gas, youth responded with stones. In the Kaynartepe neighborhood, youth began to dig trenches to defend against intensifying police violence despite a hail of police tear gas and bullets.

This morning Turkish officials lifted the curfew in the Sur district, signaling a possible break in the nonstop police assault. Şükran Yıldız, an activist with the women’s group Congress of Free Women (KJA), has been hospitalized with broken ribs. Police injured Şükran during an arrest yesterday.

(ekip/fk/ny/gc/cm)