Militias in eastern Turkey aligned with the insurgent Kurdish PKK have taken the war against the state to the streets, and Turkish security forces are panicking.
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Earlier in the day, Istanbul’s Yenikapı Square was host to a rally that was attended by more than 100,000 people and resembled an election rally, with President Erdoğan vowing in a barnstorming speech to pursue the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) “to the terrorists’ last redoubt”.
More than 120 soldiers and police have been killed in rebel attacks since the escalation began, according to pro-government media. Before long their anger was directed at the offices of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).
The conflict was re-ignited in June after the PKK claimed responsibility for the killing of two Turkish policemen.
Turkey and the PKK have been locked in a three-decade conflict in which some 40,000 people have been killed.
These figures have been compiled from families informing the Turkish authorities about the abductions.
Gurcan, who is now a research fellow on security policies for an Ankara-based think tank, noted that security forces are not familiar with the PKK’s new model of warfare, which calls on insurgents to form “neighborhood” self defense forces inside the cities.
After the election, ruling AKP also lost majority in the southeastern provinces of Turkey. When he heard the demonstrators chanting “We don’t want the PKK in the parliament” he said: “Then you will work hard for the November 1 [election] and leave them under the [election] threshold”. If they were old enough, PKK militants handed over guns, children said.
The United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, voiced its “profound concern” in 2010 that the PKK recruited child soldiers.
A police spokeswoman declined comment on the report. Referring to themselves as the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement, or the YDG-H, after their Turkish acronym, the organization consists of Kurdish youths that have taken up arms against the state and are in their own words “no different from the PKK”.
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Analysts have linked the military’s air strikes and ground operations against PKK strongholds in northern Iraq and southeast Turkey, which shattered a two-year ceasefire, to the AKP’s electoral setback.
