Kurds hope to return home after ceasefire

Iraqi Kurdish villagers, displaced by fighting between Turkish forces and Kurdish militants that has played out for years in northern Iraq, are finally allowing themselves to hope they will soon be able to go home.

Their hopes were raised after the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, on Saturday declared a ceasefire in the 40-year insurgency against the Turkish government, answering a call to disarm from earlier in the week by the group’s leader, Abdullah Ocalan, imprisoned in Turkey since 1999.

The truce - if implemented - could not only be a turning point in neighbouring Turkey but could also bring much needed stability to the volatile region spanning the border between the two countries.

In northern Iraq, Turkish forces have repeatedly launched blistering offensives over the past years, pummeling PKK fighters who have been hiding out in sanctuaries in Iraq’s northern semi-autonomous Kurdish region, and have set up bases in the area. Scores of villages have been completely emptied of their residents.

Adil Tahir Qadir fled his village of Barchi, on Mount Matin in 1988, when Saddam Hussein launched a campaign against the area’s Kurdish population.

He now lives in a newly built village - also named Barchi, after the old one that was abandoned - about 2 kilometres away, south of the mountain.

He used to go back to the old village every now and then to farm his land. But that stopped in 2015 when Turkish forces moved in and set up camp there in the fight against PKK, hitting the group with wave after wave of airstrikes.

Iraqi Kurdish farmers and their lands became collateral damage. The Turkish airstrikes and ground incursions targeting PKK positions displaced thousands of Iraqi Kurdish civilians, cutting off many from their land.

“Because of Turkish bombing, all of our farmlands and trees were burned,” Qadir said.

If peace comes, he will go back right away, he said. “We wish it will work so we can return.”

In the border area of Amedi in Iraq’s Dohuk province — once a thriving agricultural community — around 200 villages had been emptied of their residents by the fighting, according to a 2020 study by the regional Iraqi Kurdish government.

Small havens remained safe, like the new Barchi, with only about 150 houses and where villagers rely on sesame, walnuts and rice farming. But as the fighting dragged on, the conflict grew ever closer.

Associated Press