Turkish Peasants Trapped in Cross Fire of War : Hundreds of Civilians Killed as Army, Guerrillas Fight Little-Known Conflict

Peasants in this poverty-stricken eastern corner of Turkey live in fear of both the army and Kurdish guerrillas fighting one of the world’s least-known wars.

“We will either offer the guerrillas food and face military prosecution or deny them any help and get killed,” Yusuf Acu, headman of the nearby Toptepe village, said.

If the military suspects that villagers are helping the guerrillas, their houses could be searched and they might be jailed on charges of collaboration with the enemy.

This dusty township of 12,000 and surrounding settlements are at the center of the conflict, which also has seen Turkish air strikes against Kurdish camps just across the border in Iraq, including one March 4.

Marxist State Sought

The rebels, most of them members of the outlawed Kurdish Labor Party, want to set up a Marxist Kurdish state in the area near Turkey’s borders with Iraq and Syria.

Since hostilities began in 1984, the rebels are reported to have killed 300 civilians and soldiers and lost an equal number of their own.

Before the latest air attack, the army added more anti-guerrilla units to the border region inside Turkey.

“It is only a few hundred insurgents that give us such a headache, but the rough terrain and their skill at guerrilla warfare make it difficult for our troops to clear the area of rebels,” a military commander said at the time.

Hidden Caves

Thousands of caves hidden by granite boulders give the guerrillas an advantage, he said.

The commander, forbidden by military regulations to give his name, said it is also hard to provide security for more than 3,000 tiny hamlets, each with a population of 100 or fewer, scattered around the mountainous area.

Two years ago the government began distributing arms and two-way radios to the peasants. The military also started paying informers and put prices on the heads of guerrilla chiefs.

The guerrillas changed their tactics, targeting informers and armed villagers instead of army troops.

‘Natural Targets’

“Local guards armed by the military are natural targets for the guerrillas,” villager Osman Yildiz said. “We prefer not to be armed and to be safe. But we cannot turn down the military.”

The military blamed Kurdish rebels for killing 42 civilians, including 24 children and 11 women, since late January in the border area.

When hungry guerrillas came down from mountains to Toptepe village in search of food in February, military authorities took 27 villagers into custody the next day for interrogation.

Sirnak, 750 miles southeast of Ankara, Turkey’s capital, is only a few miles from Iraq. The guerrillas sneak through the mountains to Iraq where they have base camps.

Retaliation Attack

In the attack March 4, 30 Turkish air force jets bombed Kurdish camps and ammunition depots in northern Iraq for half an hour. Turkey notified Iraq in advance and said the attack was in retaliation for the Kurds’ killing of civilians.

“All the hide-outs, camps and ammunition depots were totally destroyed,” a military statement said.

An estimated 10 million Kurds, one-fifth of Turkey’s 52 million people, live in backward eastern Turkey. It is estimated that an equal number are spread across neighboring Syria, Iraq, Iran and the Soviet Union--in an area that until the 7th Century was the nation of Kurdistan.

Turkey has been trying to assimilate the Kurds and bans education, publications and broadcasts in the Kurdish language.

Primitive Conditions

A sign on the wall at the entrance of Sirnak’s city hall says that it is forbidden to speak any language other than Turkish.

However, the employees in the building speak Kurdish to each other and heavily accented Turkish to others. Most women do not speak any Turkish.

Villagers live in small mud-brick, flat-roofed houses. Many hamlets don’t have electricity or sewerage. People carry buckets of water to their homes from one communal fountain.

People say they yearn for economic development and few profess sympathy for the guerrillas.