THE NEW YORK TİMES: By Robert F. Worth May 24, 2016 On the morning of Oct. 29, 2014, a long convoy of armored vehicles and trucks rolled northward in the shadow of Iraq’s Zagros Mountains and crossed a bridge over the Khabur River, which marks the border with Turkey. As the convoy rumbled past the border gate, the road for miles ahead was lined with thousands of ecstatic Kurds, who clapped, cheered and waved the Kurdish flag. Many had tears in their eyes. Some even kissed the tanks and trucks as they passed. The soldiers, Iraqi Kurds, were on their way through Turkey to help defend Kobani, a Syrian border city, against ISIS. Their route that day traced an arc from northern Iraq through southeastern Turkey and onward into northern Syria: the historical heartland of the Kurdish people. For the bystanders who cheered them on under a hazy autumn sky, the date was deliciously symbolic. It was Turkey’s Republic Day. What had long been a grim annual reminder of Turkish rule over the Kurds was transformed into rapture, as they watched Kurdish soldiers parade through three countries where they have long dreamed of founding their own republic. Some who stood on the roadside that day have told me it changed their lives. The battle against the Islamic State had made the downtrodden Kurds into heroes. In the weeks and months that followed, the Kurds watched in amazement as fighters aligned with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K. — long branded a terrorist group by Turkey and the United States — became the central protagonists in the defense of Kobani. The P.K.K.’s Syrian affiliate worked closely with the American military, identifying ISIS targets for airstrikes. By the time ISIS withdrew from Kobani in January 2015, the Kurdish militants had paid a heavy price in blood. But they gained admirers all over the world. The Pentagon, impressed by their skill at guerrilla warfare, saw an essential new ally against ISIS. There was renewed talk in Europe of removing the P.K.K. from terrorism lists, often in news articles accompanied by images of beautiful female Kurdish soldiers in combat gear. For many Turkish Kurds, the lesson was unmistakable: Their time had come. I met a 27-year-old P.K.K. activist in Turkey, who asked not to be named, fearing reprisals from the government, and who first went to Kobani in 2012, when the Kurds began carving out a state for themselves in Syria called Rojava. “I remember talking to P.K.K. fighters, and I thought, They’re crazy to think they can do this,” she said. “Now I look back and think, If they can do it there, we can do it here.” Nineteen months after that convoy passed, the feelings it inspired have helped to start a renewed war between Turkey and its Kurdish rebels. Turkish tanks are now blasting the ancient cities of the Kurdish southeast, where young P.K.K.-supported rebels have built barricades and declared “liberated zones.” More than a thousand people have been killed and as many as 350,000 displaced, according to figures from the International Crisis Group. The fighting, which intensified last fall, has spread to Ankara, the Turkish capital, where two suicide bombings by Kurdish militants in February and March killed 66 people. Another sharp escalation came in mid-May, when P.K.K. supporters released a video online seeming to show one of the group’s fighters bringing down a Turkish attack helicopter with a shoulder-fired missile, a weapon to which the Kurds have rarely had access. Yet much of the violence has been hidden from public view by state censorship and military “curfews” — a government word that scarcely conveys the reality of tanks encircling a Kurdish town and drilling it with shellfire for weeks or months on end. The conflict has revived and in some ways exceeded the worst days of the P.K.K.’s war with the Turkish state in the 1990s. The fighting then was brutal, but it was mostly confined to remote mountains and villages. Now it is devastating cities as well and threatening to cripple an economy already burdened by ISIS bombings and waves of refugees from Syria. In Diyarbakir, the capital of a largely Kurdish province, artillery and bombs have destroyed much of the historic district, which contains Unesco world heritage sites. Churches, mosques and khans that have stood for centuries lie in ruins. Tourism has collapsed. Images of shattered houses and dead children are stirring outrage in other countries where Kurds live: Iraq, Syria and Iran. This war, unlike earlier chapters in the centuries-old Kurdish struggle, is also creating a painful dilemma for the United States. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is furious about American support for the P.Y.D., a leading Kurdish party in Rojava, which the Erdogan government considers a P.K.K. front. The White House says it has little choice: Erdogan has offered limited help in the fight against ISIS, despite years of American lobbying. That has pushed the United States to rely more and more on the P.Y.D., which it views as distinct from the P.K.K. American Special Operations troops now arm, equip and advise these Kurdish fighters, even as Turkey shells their bases farther west — and pays Islamist militias to attack them. As the war in Turkey grinds on, the United States is confronting a perilous sideshow that has begun to drain the energy and attention of the two allies it needs most. If it continues to spread, it could be worse than a distraction. As one Obama administration official put it to me: “Post-Paris, post-Brussels, we have to clear ISIS out. If it turns out that the coalition can’t operate in that space” — because of Turkey’s conflict with the Kurds — “then we have a serious problem.” The Turkish city Nusaybin sits directly on the long southern border with Syria, a faded cluster of stone and cinder-block dwellings where truckers often stop on their way eastward to Iraq. Driving by, you would scarcely guess that it has been an outpost and a battleground for a half-dozen empires over the past 3,000 years, from the Aramaeans to the Ottomans. It still contains Roman ruins and one of the Middle East’s oldest churches. It has been a Kurdish town since a century ago, when Christian residents fled southward from Turkish pogroms that started during the upheavals of World War I. Last summer, when the fighting broke out, Kurdish youth affiliated with the P.K.K. built barricades around several neighborhoods making up about half the town. The Turks initiated several short military operations during the autumn and winter, but the defenders kept them at bay with a mix of well-placed roadside bombs and snipers. I entered in early March with the help of a local activist, who acted as a translator and guided me as we drove along a winding road on the edge of town. We had to carefully avoid army and police checkpoints; journalists are strictly barred by the Turkish government from reporting on the insurgency, and even the mildest expression of sympathy for the rebels can earn a prison sentence. As a result, what has happened behind the barricades and under “curfew” has gone largely unreported. Editors’ Picks How a TikTok Cook Spends Her Sundays Read These Books Before They Hit Your Screens in 2025 21 Nonfiction Books to Read This Spring Image Omer Aydin, 27, a Kurdistan Workers’ Party (P.K.K.) fighter in Nusaybin, Turkey.Credit...Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times We stopped near a bridge over a shallow creek with big holes blasted into it, the legacy of a car bomb several months earlier. The rusted carcass of an upturned water truck, riddled with bullet holes, marked the start of the insurgents’ territory. We walked around it, and after a block or so we reached the first barricade, built of paving stones. It was about six feet high and three feet thick. We soon passed several more; the streets had been torn up to build them and were now mostly dusty earth. The area seemed deserted, but at last we heard voices and emerged into a vacant lot between houses. A young man came out to greet us, wearing a tan vest and clutching a walkie-talkie. He led us into a half-open patio that once served as a garage, where other fighters and activists were slumped on battered old couches, chatting and drinking tea and smoking. They were all in their 20s, apart from a heavyset middle-aged woman who introduced herself laughingly, in Kurdish, as the “cook of the terrorists.” They wore rumpled clothes and gave off a relaxed, faintly bohemian air; they seemed more like leftist college students on a weekend morning than guerrilla fighters. They told me they had all been protecting what they called the “liberated zone” since the summer. Some grew up here and had families still living alongside them. Nineteen civilians and 12 fighters were killed during the fighting in Nusaybin, they said. On the walls were big posters of several of the dead, with their names and the word sehid, or martyr. One of them looked no more than 16, a kid in a soccer jersey with the sweetest of smiles on his face. Also on the walls were two big portraits of Abdullah Ocalan, the founder of the P.K.K., with his unmistakable log of a mustache and tussocky black eyebrows. Ocalan, a man of titanic ego who ruthlessly ordered the execution of rivals and dissidents, has been in prison on the Turkish island Imrali since his capture in 1999. He still lords over the movement — including its Syrian affiliate, the P.Y.D. — like an absent philosopher-king, issuing cloudy leftist declarations through his lawyers. Ocalan no longer directs the P.K.K.’s day-to-day operations, and no one has been allowed to see him for more than a year. I asked the fighters what they would do if Ocalan told them to take down the barricades and stop fighting. “We would stop,” one of them said, with no hesitation. “We see Ocalan as our leader.” No one in Nusaybin had any illusions about what was in store for them. A few days earlier, the war’s realities burst into public view in Cizre, about two hours to the east. Cizre had been under curfew and closed to the outside world for almost three months, with tanks on nearby hillsides firing down on it. Few images had leaked past the military’s blockade until the town was declared free of terrorists and partly reopened, early on a Wednesday morning. I drove in with the first wave of returning residents. The damage was visible as soon as we passed the first checkpoint on the edge of town: Burned debris and shattered glass littered the main boulevard. Huge holes left by tank rounds gaped in the walls of buildings. Moving onward on foot, I followed the returnees into a residential district where the streets were half-blocked by piles of rubble. Roofs had collapsed earthward, the buildings’ innards — mattresses, curtains, chair legs — sticking out at odd angles. A weird silence reigned. I saw people clutch their faces as they found their ruined homes. Others sobbed or shouted curses. Some were looking for children who were trapped in basements during the fighting. The smell of rotting corpses played in the spring breeze, hinting at what lay buried below. One man stared in wonder at a featureless pile of bricks and stones. This, he explained, had been the local mosque. Another grabbed my shoulder and stammered: “What is the accusation against us? That we are Kurds, and we refuse to be slaves. They are telling us, ‘If you refuse to be slaves, we will kill you.’ ” Now, on the patio in Nusaybin, the rebels talked to me about friends who died in Cizre, and they made clear that they expected an equally merciless assault any day. I asked whether by staying behind the barricades they were committing suicide. No one appeared to have survived the Turkish blockade in Cizre. One of them said: “The other side has more powerful weapons. We fight with our belief, so they can’t stop us.” Another one told me: “If you die, you die with honor.” The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, was bent on melding his fractious array of peoples into a single, homogeneous state. Starting under his rule in 1923, the Kurds, whose presence in the area goes back well over a thousand years, were rebranded “mountain Turks,” their language and customs suppressed. Kurdish schools, organizations and publications were forbidden; even the words “Kurd” and “Kurdistan” were prohibited. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled to western Turkey and Europe, and the southeast became a neglected backwater. The P.K.K. aimed to reverse all of this, preaching a reverence for transnational Kurdish identity and language under the banner of a secular, leftist program. Its war with the government has cost at least 30,000 lives since it began in 1984. The group’s leader, Ocalan, cleverly played on Turkey’s rivalries with neighboring states to gain refuge for his fighters in Iraq, Syria and Iran, which are home to about half of the Middle East’s roughly 30 million Kurds. Kurdish men carrying the body of 14-year-old Yilmaz Gegim, killed as he sought shelter in the basement of a building in Cizre.Credit...Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times The Nusaybin rebels I met were mostly born in the mid-1990s, when the Kurdish conflict last crescendoed. One of them, a lanky 27-year-old with a lean, foxlike face, seemed startled when I asked about his childhood; I got the sense that no one had bothered to ask him before. He went by the nom de guerre Omer Aydin. He spoke quickly, hunching forward in his chair and steadily tapping his feet, his dark eyes glinting with a nervy, cheerful energy. He was born in a village near Nusaybin, the son of a farmer. His village was full of P.K.K. sympathizers, including his parents, who ardently supported the group’s vision for a Kurdish state, and would shelter and feed its armed rebels as they slipped back and forth from their strongholds in the mountains. The military raided Aydin’s village so many times — arresting young men, shooting up houses and animals — that Aydin’s father gave up and moved the family to an Istanbul slum. Aydin’s parents sent him to work in a clothing factory when he was 10. One day the factory boss overheard Aydin speaking Kurdish, the only language he knew, and rounded on him, shouting: “Never speak that language in here! You will speak Turkish.” Aydin told me he would never forget that. In those years, the Turkish military destroyed and evacuated thousands of Kurdish villages, creating a flood of displaced people. The state supported shadowy proxy groups like Kurdish Hezbollah (no connection to the Lebanese movement), which tortured and killed with impunity and fostered an atmosphere of terror. The P.K.K. responded with raids that killed hundreds of Turkish soldiers and police officers. Kurdish children born in the ’90s are known to their elders as the “youth of the storm.” They grew up with a legacy of anger. Tens of thousands were arrested as teenagers, and prison contact with P.K.K. members radicalized many. They are more likely to be unemployed than their non-Kurdish peers. And there are a lot of them: The bulk of the population in some Kurdish areas is under 20. Older Kurdish political figures often declare, in talks with the state, that they are the last generation the government can have a dialogue with; the next one, they say, is far more radical. It’s a pressure tactic, and it has become a talking point. It may also be true. By the time Aydin was in his teens, his father and all of his eight brothers had been arrested on charges of P.K.K. activity. So had many other relatives; one childhood friend was shot dead by Turkish soldiers in the mountains. Aydin had spent a total of four years in school. He learned Turkish there; he still didn’t speak it well. “When you are 15 or 16 years old, you are looking for something,” Aydin told me. “After what happened to my brothers, my father, all the arrests and the killings, I looked at my life and said: I should do something toward a revolution.” He joined the P.K.K. I asked him how it happened, and he grinned mischievously. “When there is a light in the dark, you will find your way to it,” he said. Aydin trained in the mountains, learning how to handle a gun, set bombs, evade capture and communicate with fellow members. He then spent a decade in a series of Turkish cities, mostly helping to recruit other young Kurds. This, too, is a mark of his generation. The Kurds were a rural people for thousands of years, but in the past two or three decades that abruptly changed, and most now live in cities. By 2014, the P.K.K. had ordered Aydin to Nusaybin. His primary task was to supervise the recruitment and training of young locals. These youth affiliates were given a new name: the Y.D.G.-H., which later grew into Y.P.S. (The P.K.K. is known for its love of abbreviations.) Many were only teenagers. At the time, there was some hope for an end to the conflict. After its high point in the 1990s, violence had lapsed under Erdogan, who quietly loosened restrictions on Kurdish language and culture after he came to power in 2002. He also promoted economic development in the long-neglected southeast. Many Kurds were moved and impressed when Erdogan said in a 2005 speech that “the Kurdish problem is not only the problem of one part of my nation, it is a problem of every one of us, including myself.” Progress was slow and halting, but after a cease-fire was declared in 2013, Turkish security forces largely withdrew from Kurdish cities in the southeast, softening old resentments. Some Kurds told me they felt free to walk late at night without fear of arrest for the first time. You could even wave a P.K.K. flag without receiving a jailhouse beating. Erdogan had long appeared to believe that peacefully resolving the Kurdish issue would bolster his reputation as a unifying leader and win more votes from Turkish Kurds. He needed those votes to accomplish a larger goal: revising Turkey’s Constitution to create a presidential system that would augment his own powers. To get there, he would need to offset the rise of a new Kurdish political party, the H.D.P., which was expanding beyond its base to appeal to other minorities and even to some liberal Turks. The party’s soft-spoken leader, Selahattin Demirtas, seemed to embody widespread hopes for a new center of gravity that would marginalize Ocalan and the militant P.K.K. leaders in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq. He spoke of a more pluralist Turkey, with greater local control within the Kurdish areas in exchange for a reconciliation with the Turkish state. This vision was very popular with ordinary Kurds, which made the H.D.P. a real political threat to Erdogan. To outflank it, he would need to tackle the Kurdish issue himself — and get credit for it.