PKK defiant over long war with Turkey

Mild-mannered and polite, the young man with the nom de guerre Sinjar asked us how we liked our tea, with sugar or without? To his small band of guerrillas, he was the local commander whose word was law. 

To the Turkish government, Sinjar represented the enemy within, a leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, which it has vowed to destroy.

A woman mourns for her dead son, a suspected PKK fighter, having just heard that his body has been recovered from the streets of the Sur district of central Diyarbakir

Since mid-December, the Turkish military has intensified its campaign against PKK separatist militants, focusing on those towns and cities in predominantly Kurdish south-eastern Turkey that declared "self-determination".


Last September, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his troops had killed more than 2,000 PKK militants, but the group seems as resilient as ever. Sinjar told the BBC: "This is war orchestrated personally by Turkey's President Erdogan.

"We know the state's mentality from years of bitter experience. "The Kurds have been here for centuries.

"This is now the 21st Century, and there's actually supposed be something called 'democracy' and the government's not going to be able finish the Kurds by killing them."

He said the PKK would not stop fighting until it had achieved its objectives, a separate state with its own parliament in a Turkish federation.

The PKK has been proscribed as a terrorist organisation by many countries, as well as international organisations including Nato and the European Union.

A two-and-a-half-year ceasefire broke down last year, following national elections in June 2015. But Sinjar denied the PKK were terrorists.

"The war's been going on for years, but the world didn't know what was going on or understand what was happening here," he said

"People talked about the Arab Spring and what happened in the Middle East and how people were just claiming their rights. "But people don't apply that to the Kurdish people and their demand for human rights.

"No-one can choose what they are, and we are Kurds. "Please, don't not forget… this war has been going on for 40 years. "People should stop thinking about us as terrorists.

"We are not terrorists. "We are just people who want their human rights."