SIRNAK, Turkey— When Khalil Musa left his hometown of Sirnak in Turkey’s Kurdistan nearly three decades ago for a new life in Germany, the war between the newly founded Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish army had just started, claiming thousands of lives on both sides of the conflict.
Today, at least on the surface, things in the Kurdish southeast appear to have remained where they were when Musa was last here, he recalls.
“It was a devastated region 28 years ago which I could not imagine as a proper place for my future family and children,” says Musa who returned to Sirnak last year to start his restaurant business together with his wife, Fatima.
“If anything, it is more destroyed now than when I lived here in the ’80s,” Musa says.
Over 90,000 people fled Sirnak last year as daily street clashes turned the once idyllic city into a real war zone in March 2015, according to rights groups in the country. Only some 15,000 have since returned to the city which has still long path to recovery with defunct basic services and streets covered with debris that hold the memory of the war still alive and fresh.
Fatima, who helps her husband in managing their newly open restaurant, says they walk to work every day by foot as transportation has virtually collapsed because of demolished roads and alleys.
“We wake up earlier in the morning just to take the long walk to work by foot,” she says. “One cannot drive in streets that look like a construction site with concrete road blocks and the dirt.”
At least 6 neighborhoods are fully demolished in Sirnak where the fiercest battles took place between the young PKK diehards and the vengeful Turkish security forces last year.
According to the International Crisis Group (ICG), around 2500 people on both sides of the clashes were killed in the one and a half years war that effectively ended the fragile peace process in the country.
The ICG believes the clashes have likely killed many more but it could not independently verify the rest of casualties.
Turkish government has pledged billions of dollars in reconstruction aid to the most affected areas in the southeast. Places such as Sur district in Diyarbakir and Sirnak are believed to receive the bulk of the $9 billion that former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu promised.
But with the Turkish economy currently going through a discomforting recession because of its tourism crisis, it is increasingly unlikely that the government could keep its generous vow.
On Wednesday, the country’s minister of municipality visited Diyarbakir and reiterated Ankara’s commitment to reconstruction.
Mehmet Ozhasek told reporters while touring the city that “the government would reconstruct any place that has been affected by the war.”
Khalil Musa and his wife Fatima, however, seem to have decided to stay in Sirnak even if they do not take the reconstruction promises too seriously.
“There will be life here again eventually, and then, we will earn money. That’s how we see it,” Musa says.
