Passage through besieged Cizre: What I saw and heard

By Omid Barin

My journey began on the evening of September 5. I was going to take a break from all the war news with a short vacation in Turkey.

My first crossing point was the Ibrahim Khalil gate on the Kurdistan Region-Turkey border. I got there at sunset and came face to face with a huge number of people stranded behind the gate. Many of them were sleeping on street pavements and by the side of the road.

The Kurdish border authorities told me that the gate had been closed by the Turkish government. It was temporary, they said. I soon heard that it had to do with the situation in the city of Cizre where the Turkish army had imposed a curfew.

The news was that street fighting was raging between the army and the YDG-H—a group of armed youth—believed to be connected to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

It was reported that the army was trying to flush out the armed youth before lifting the siege on the city.

The fighting was going on miles away. My own immediate concern was when would the border gate open, and every time I asked the authorities said, “Maybe in an hour or two. Nothing is for sure.”

I decided to stay there and wait.

On the evening of September 7, after two days of sleeping on the street and exhaustion, the crowd rose and began clapping. The gate was opened, but still temporarily, and I quickly crossed to the other side.

It was half an hour to midnight when I reached the small town of Silopi, about 30 kilometers from Cizre. Most people were still anxious and stayed away from the streets as if the curfew had reached Silopi too.

I spent that night in Silopi.

The next morning I went to the bus station and asked about the road to Diyarbakir (Amed in Kurdish) and I was told the road was closed. I sat there sipping my tea.

I asked someone what was happening in Cizre?

“Cizre has become like Gazza,” he responded. “The Turkish army has besieged the town. No one can leave their home. There’s no food, water or electricity and cell phone and internet connections are cut off.”

Someone else jumped in and said, “They’re killing civilians. They show no mercy. They’ve killed a 10-year-old girl in her home with a sniper. Her family has been keeping her body in their fridge. They cannot go out and bury her.”

At that moment a third man who was from Cizre but was stranded in Silopi, came in and said with tearful eyes, “The baby of a relative of mine who was only 45 days old has died because they have run out of condensed milk,”

I left the bus station and went for a walk. Everyone was talking about Cizre.

A few hours later I heard that the road to Cizre had been opened briefly. I ran to the station and with 12 other people got into a minibus and headed to Diyarbakir. To get there, we had to pass through Cizre.

Half an hour later we reached the main Silopi-Sirnak-Cizre intersection two kilometers outside Cizre. Two tanks, six armored personnel carriers and dozens of soldiers had set up a checkpoint. They didn’t stop us but kept a stern watching. I wanted to take out my camera and take photos, but one of my fellow travelers stopped me.

A short while later we entered Cizre. All the entry and exit points were blocked. There were tanks and armored vehicles everywhere. Soldiers had taken position with their weapons aimed at different directions.

Civilians couldn’t be seen anywhere. There was the sound of distant gunfire. Trenches had been dug in some of the alleys. Some streets had been blocked by dirt mounds and rocks.

A passenger next to me said that those alleys were under the control of the armed youth. There were some destroyed vehicles on the streets and bullet holes on the houses.

Our minibus drove slowly and carefully forward under the watch of the soldiers. Suddenly an armored vehicle came out of an alleyway and got in front of our minibus. The passengers began yelling at the driver to keep away from it in case it was attacked or blew up.

The passengers said the PKK guerrillas had started planting bombs on the road to blow up tanks and such vehicles. The safest thing was to keep a good distance between yourself and the army vehicle ahead.

We reached some heights where we had a view of the whole city. From there I saw more soldiers and tanks. I spotted some snipers who lay on the ground and aimed at the city.

From that hill Cizre looked like a dead city.

Lastly, Cizre disappeared behind us but we still passed three more army checkpoints. Our driver then turned to us and said, “The risk is over now,”

I asked Murat, a Kurd from Batman, why he thought the war had started again.

“The AKP lost its parliamentary majority and it blames the Kurds for it and this is a revenge war,” he replied.

In Diyarbakir’s main bus station I couldn’t get a bus ticket to continue my journey. I was told some buses had been attacked on the main highway. So I bought a plane ticket and stayed that night in Diyarbakir.

I visited Khatib, a student at Dicle University.

“Northern Kurdistan has a weak economy and killing Turkish soldiers wouldn’t make it any better,” he told me. “This war is even killing the little progress that was made during the peace period and now all the investors are fleeing.”

Together we went to Dagkapi. The streets weren’t lively as before. We sat in a teashop and the TV screens were covered with the news of the war between the PKK and the army. Most of it was about Cizre.

There I met a 25-year-old man from the city of Van who was in Diyarbakir in search of a job.

“I was working in a factory in Van, but as soon as the war started the owner fired all the workers and closed the factory. This war is terrible to us.”

The next day I flew out of Diyarbakir and landed in Istanbul. I took a cab from the airport into the city. The driver happened to be a Kurd from the city of Mus.

“In the previous elections I voted for the HDP,” he said. “But this time around I will vote for the AKP because I believe that the PKK should not fight the government in the Kurdish areas. All the soldiers in that area are Kurds. The government is killing Kurds by Kurds.”

It was a personal war for this driver.

“My son is a soldier in that area and since the war started his mother has had two strokes. Now we don’t even dare to pick up the phone anymore. This war must stop.”

Omid Barin is a staff reporter at Rudaw’s Iran desk.