Dozens killed in besieged Turkish city

Turkish police stopped pro-Kurdish politicians on Thursday marching to a town where they say 21 civilians have been killed and a humanitarian crisis has unfolded since authorities imposed a curfew to combat Kurdish rebels. Turkish authorities said nearly all of those killed in the week-old curfew were Kurdish militants. Cizre, near Turkey’s borders with Syria and Iraq, has become a flashpoint in two months of deepening violence in the mainly Kurdish southeast.

What is under way in Cizre, a blockade of the town and a seven-day curfew, is completely illegal…This is a humanitarian crisis.

Saruhan Oluc, one of the HDP lawmakers.

Hundreds have died since Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) militants and the state resumed hostilities after the collapse of a ceasefire in July. Lawmakers from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which draws most of its support from Kurds, say civilians in the town, which has more than 100,000 inhabitants now under a round-the-clock curfew because of the fighting, are in a dire situation, with the dead going unburied and food and water running short.

We have been waiting for a week without word from our family, our children. They won’t allow us to enter at the gate so we had to cross the border here.

HDP lawmaker Sibel Yigitalp.

Middle East PKK