Beritan Canözer – Şehriban Aslan/JINHA

AMED – Turkish police imposed a two-day curfew on the Sur district in the largely Kurdish city of Diyarbakır, opening fire on civilians. In the wake of the blockade, women in the Sur district said that they would resist such assaults no matter what.

Turkish security forces killed 23 civilians in the Kurdish town of Cizre over the course of a nine-day curfew, in which snipers fired on anyone seen outside and fired on residential neighborhoods with heavy ammunition. Soon afterwards, security forces enforced a similar curfew on the Sur district of the largely Kurdish city of Diyarbakır throughout Sunday and Monday.

JINHA reporters entered the besieged Sur district last night, afer Turkish security forces lifted the curfew. What we saw was houses destroyed and burned, doors forced in, people treating their wounded in their homes—and neighborhood residents who refused to give up.

“Who’s the terrorist—the state, or us? There are civilians living here, children, mothers. Who are the terrorsts—the 3-year-old children?” asked Hülya Varan, who lives in the Hasırlı neighborhood of the Sur district.

“From children to young people, from young people to old, we’re all the people,” said Hülya. “So they say we’re terrorists; let them prove it. And let’s lay out what they’ve done and see which one of us is the terrorist.” She said that the Turkish state needed to understand that “the people are the PKK”—the Kurdistan Workers’ Party that Turkish officials have said they want to “eradicate.”

“You will get out of our homes, our streets, our neighborhoods, our land,” said Hülya. “We haven’t surrendered to you before and we won’t surrender now. All you can take from us is our lives, and that we can sacrifice for this people, this land.”

Hasırlı resident Hanım Altı said that she woke up on an ordinary morning at 5 a.m. for her morning prayers. There were no clashes with police and no disturbance in the neighborhood, but she woke up to the sound of police loudspeakers announcing a curfew.

“They came into the streets absolutely arbitrarily and attacked,” said Hanım. “You can see what our houses look like now. They broke down our doors just to position snipers on the roofs of our houses; they turned everything upside down.”

Hanım said that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan could attack “with tanks, with pistols, with mines—it doesn’t matter;” the Kurdish people refused to surrender. She said that the neighborhood residents had no intention of leaving their neighborhoods or their land.

“We will stand behind our young people,” said neighborhood resident Ayten Ergün, referring to the youth fighting in the streets to defend the neighborhood from police, “and we will not abandon our homes.”

(dk/fk/cm)