Istanbul: Big Trouble in Little Kurdistan

Pro-Kurdish demonstrators chant slogans during a protest in Istanbul on Dec. 29, 2011, against a Turkish air strike that killed 35 Kurdish smugglers in southeast Turkey

Mustafa Ozer / AFP / Getty Images

By Piotr Zalewski / Istanbul Monday, Jan. 09,2012

In Karayollari, a Kurdish-majority neighborhood in Istanbul, the locals are seething. On Dec. 28, Turkish warplanes flying over Uludere, close to the Iraqi border, rained bombs on what pilots believed to be a column of militants from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist group. It turned out to be civilians smuggling diesel. Thirty-five people lost their lives in the attack. Karayollari might be over a thousand miles away from Uludere, but the impact of the tragedy on local Kurds is palpable. Since the beginning of the year, protests have erupted there and in surrounding neighborhoods on an almost daily basis.
The recent surge in fighting between the Turkish military and the PKK — punctuated by the Uludere massacre and the killing of 24 Turkish soldiers by the Kurdish rebels two months earlier — has revived fears of an imminent return to the bloody 1990s, when civil war ravaged Turkey's Kurdish-populated southeast. Today, not only does the violence threaten to intensify, it also threatens to spread. With interethnic tensions and clashes on the rise across the country, there is increasing evidence that Turkey's cities, home to millions of Kurds, may be becoming a new front in the conflict.


"Unless the government can manage the situation, there is a risk of ethnic tension at the societal level," says Nihat Ali Ozcan, a retired army officer. In Istanbul, the Turkish city with the largest population of Kurds — with an estimated 2 million to 4 million out of the city's total of 12 million — the risk of conflict appears more acute than anywhere else.

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