JINHA

ŞIRNEX – Turkish police and soldiers killed eight, including women and children, in an overnight bombardment on the Kurdish town of Cizre. The death toll in the town has now risen to 20.

For one week now, the Turkish state has been maintaining a bloody blockade of the Kurdish town of Cizre. Last night explosions rocked the neighborhoods of Nur, Sur, Cudi and Yafes as police and soldiers bombarded the town with heavy munitions. Eight residents of the town were killed in the attacks, including a 10-year-old girl shot dead when she stepped outside her home to plead for her father to be allowed to go to the hospital.

“Tonight, we are facing a massacre,” Tweeted Ferhat Encü, one of the province’s Parliamentary representatives, from inside the town.

Soldiers bombarded a single street, Varol Street in the Nur neighborhood twelve times last night. The bombardment killed a man named Eşref Edim. When his 10-year-old daughter went out into the street with her hands up, trying to tell police that they needed to get to the hospital, snipers shot her down in the middle of the street. Elsewhere, in the Cudi neighborhood, a heavy bombing killed two women and injured three more, among them one child.

Many were heavily wounded in the assaults. Because security forces have forbidden ambulances from traveling to the neighborhoods, the death toll rose quickly. In just one night, security forces killed two women, one child and five men in the town—a total of eight, and the bloodiest night in Cizre yet.

The people of Cizre protested the assault by banging pots and pans throughout the night.

(zd-ma/fk/cm)