Kurdish militants: the wild card on the border

The drive through town had become something of an obstacle course. On some streets, young boys, stones in hand, squared off against policemen, each group waiting for the other to make the first move.


In other parts of the city, chunks of broken pavement, remnants of recent clashes, rendered any attempt at passage impossible. It was the evening of March 20 and Nusaybin - a town in Turkey's Kurdish-dominated south-east - was still on edge. Earlier in the day, riot police had fired tear gas and water cannons on men and women marching back from a rally to celebrate Newroz, the Kurdish New Year. Similar scenes were to play out across the region throughout the week, after Turkish authorities decided to ban Newroz celebrations held on any day other than March 21.

At the offices of Mar-Has, the final stop on our ride through Nusaybin, the focus - rather than on the festering conflict between Turkey and its Kurds - was on events in Syria. Nusaybin lies within earshot of the border and Mar-Has, an NGO, helps people fleeing the country find their footing in Turkey, says Mir Mehmet, one of the group's members. "We provide them with food, with blankets, and we help find homes for them," he says.

Syria is said to be home to at least two million Kurds, many of them descended from families who fled Turkey after a series of bloodily suppressed Kurdish rebellions in the 1920s and 1930s. The government in Damascus having denied these Kurds citizenship, hundreds of thousands were left in limbo, unable to claim basic rights in Syria and - lacking national identity papers - unable to travel abroad.

That impasse was finally broken in April 2011 when Syrian president Bashar Al Assad, doing his best to appease the Kurdish minority and ensure that it remain on the sidelines of the anti-government revolution raging across Syria, promised to grant citizenship to 300,000 stateless Kurds. For those who hoped to take advantage of the measure to travel to Nusaybin, if only to call on relatives, the opportunity to do so proved short-lived. At the beginning of 2012, Al Assad's regime decided to close the border crossing between Nusaybin and its neighbouring sister city, Qamishli. Syrian Kurds attempting to enter Nusaybin now have to do so illegally, with the help of a smuggler, or via the closest border crossing still open, at Kilis, almost 500 kilometres away.

Although there may be as many as several hundred Syrians currently living in Nusaybin, few were willing to be interviewed, citing security concerns. Of those who agreed to speak, Munteser Sino claimed that during his first attempt to sneak across the border he was detained by Turkish border guards and sent back to Syria.

To date, Turkish authorities have received and accommodated well over 25,000 Syrian refugees, nearly all of them arriving in Hatay, a southern province of Turkey. The government in Ankara remains wary of new arrivals from Kurdish-populated northeastern Syria, however.

Some of these, Turkish officials fear, may be infiltrators from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a militant group that has waged war against the Turkish army since 1984. (Some 40,000 people, including militants, soldiers and civilians, have died since the beginning of the conflict. Turkey, the United States and the European Union all list the PKK as a terrorist organisation. Many of Turkey's 12-15 million Kurds would disagree. To them, the group remains a symbol of resistance against a Turkish state that is yet to meet the Kurds' demands for cultural rights and some measure of political autonomy.)

Sino had been involved in the anti-Al Assad revolution from the start, he says. Among other things, he had helped diffuse videos of protests in Qamishli. Apprehended by Syrian agents during a trip to Lebanon, he was brought to Damascus and tortured for three consecutive days, he recalls.
Source http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/kurdish-militants-the-wild-card-on-the-border