Where Turkey Is Already at War: Are Kurdish Militants Doing Syria’s Bidding?

The police station in Sirnak, a town of 60,000 in southeastern Turkey, remains almost entirely covered with blue tarp, obscuring the damage done to its edifice nearly two months ago when a group of Kurdish militants — seven or eight of them, according to a sales clerk at a nearby phone shop — blasted the building with rocket-propelled grenades from the surrounding streets. The date of the attack, Aug. 18, was meant to convey a message, the shop clerk explains. On that day 20 years ago, the Turkish army reduced much of Sirnak to rubble after rebels attempted to take control of the town. Dozens died in the fighting. Anniversaries are a big deal in Sirnak to most of Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast — and to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the group held responsible for the August attack. The day before I arrived, shop owners across the city brought down their shutters to mark the passing of 14 years since Turkey browbeat Syrian authorities into expelling Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s founder and leader, from his base in Damascus. (Ocalan, captured and tried shortly thereafter, is now serving out a life sentence in a Turkish island prison on the Sea of Marmara.) Most of the shopkeepers close their doors voluntarily and out of sympathy for the Kurdish cause, the phone-store employee says. Those who demur risk seeing their shops firebombed by PKK sympathizers patrolling the streets. (MORE: Turkey Rattles Its Saber at Syria but Remains Unlikely to Invade) Over the past year, attacks like the one on the police station in Sirnak have become increasingly common. The most brazen came earlier this summer when the PKK attempted to capture and hold Semdinli, a town tucked between the Iranian and Iraqi borders, as well as surrounding areas. The Turkish army hit back with overwhelming force, deploying artillery, cobra helicopters and tanks, eventually repelling the rebels. By most counts, the clashes claimed over a hundred lives, adding to a grim tally that makes this the bloodiest period in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict since Ocalan’sImage may be NSFW.
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