SHARE
In January 2016, I paid a visit to Diyarbakir, the largest city and de facto capital of Turkey’s Kurdish-majority south-east. The previous month, its ancient centre, known as Sur, and more than a dozen other regional cities had been put under a 24-hour curfew as the Turkish military moved against the urban positions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
Labelled a terrorist group by the US, EU and Turkey, the PKK has fought an insurgency in the south-east since the mid-1980s. The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) initiated a peace process with the militant group in 2013, which made considerable progress leading up to the June 2015 parliamentary elections.