It was before I came to Turkey, in 2006, that I had a conversation with a friend and fellow journalist in my home country, the Netherlands. I was already thinking of going abroad but hadn’t decided yet where to go. He asked: ‘Do you have any aspirations to become a war correspondent?’ I didn’t think […]
As the battle for Kobani rages, up to 200,000 Syrian Kurds have fled into Turkey, where long-running animosities mean a suspicious reception at best. Frederike Geerdink reports from Suruc, close to the border. (written in cooperation with a foreign desk editor)
‘Life in Diyarbakir’, some Turkish media reported, ‘has returned to normal’. The curfew that applied for a few days was lifted. As I drank coffee, I heard the sound of teargas shots outside. Around 7 in the evening (every evening since a few days) a protest started in which people banged pots and pans on […]
The broken pieces of Ronahi El Hamu’s shoulder are held together by metal. She was hit a week ago by a bullet fired by Islamic State (Isis). Now Ms El Hamu is recovering in a state hospital in the Turkish city of Sanliurfa, close to the Syrian border. “I want to get out of here,” she […]
The Kurdish political movement has no intention of giving up on the three private schools they opened to teach exclusively in Kurdish. The opening of the schools last week led to a cat-and-mouse game between the schools’ administrators and the local governors — the latter closing the schools, the former reopening them several times. Clashes […]
A new year of indoctrination started this week in Turkey. Not only of Kurdish children, who will be forced once again to learn a curriculum that excludes them in a language that is not their mother tongue, but also of Turkish children, who are made to believe that there is no diversity in their country. […]
The young generation versus the old guard: for years now, those are the two groups referred to in analyses of a solution of the Kurdish issue. The idea is that the Turkish state had better hurry up making peace as long as the ‘old guard’ is still leading the PKK, because the younger generation, which […]
‘Please, don’t publish about it’, she begged me with tears in her eyes. So I cannot give any further information about the case of the woman who joined the PKK, fought for them for years, got into some internal dispute and was reportedly killed by the organization. Her name, her age, her city of origin, […]
Mehdin Taskin is dead. Murdered because the state can not handle a statue of a man who is a hero to many Kurds. He is the thirteenth Kurd killed by the state since the beginning of the ceasefire. Was it too early for such a statue? No, it was not, in my humble opinion. The […]
The US army has started arming the Kurds in Iraq to fight Islamic State, who have been making huge advances in the country. The weapons will be provided to the peshmerga forces of the semi-independent Kurdistan region. They are fighting IS alongside forces of the PKK, the group that is on the list of terrorist […]