eneath the world’s radar, a serious insurgency has been simmering in Turkey’s Kurdish regions for months. Urban clashes, with three or four casualties each time, are a daily occurrence. Youth groups affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are controlling parts of major Kurdish cities, fighting government forces for greater autonomy. And the Turkish government is responding with a harsh military crackdown that not only targets the militia but ends up affecting civilians.
Things are looking far from stable in the most stable country in the region.
But somehow, the fact that NATO’s second-largest army is fully mobilized on the Syrian border in a war against 16-year-old kids with AK-47s who have carved out “liberated zones” in their neighborhoods is getting almost no coverage in international media. European institutions — happy that they secured a money-for-refugees deal with Ankara last November— are mum, and Washington is unwilling to rock the boat in its complicated relationship with Turkish PresidentRecep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The Turkish government has, of course, been fighting the PKK for decades; and the tranquility over the past few years was a result of the peace negotiations between the two sides, which abruptly ended this summer. Each side blames the other for ending the ceasefire, but the truth is that neither is much in control of the catastrophe we are witnessing now.
