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In Turkey's Kurdish heartland, anger over Syria war finds a stage

By Daren Butler DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Turkish Kurds turned an annual cultural festival into a rare mass political protest on Wednesday against the government's two-month-old military campaign against a Kurdish militia in neighboring Syria. At a rally to mark the spring festival of Newroz in the southern city of Diyarbakir, demonstrators said Ankara risked provoking violence at home if it pressed on with its Syria offensive. The event was the first major public demonstration against the campaign in Syria, in which the Turkish army has battled a Kurdish militia, the YPG, which Turkey says is an extension of the banned PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party. It fell just days after Turkish forces stormed the Syrian city of Afrin. In a city still scarred by fighting between the PKK and Turkish troops, young women and men linked hands and danced to traditional Kurdish music in the warm spring sunshine, chanting for Afrin and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. "Long live the Afrin resistance," sang the crowd. Political rallies are heavily restricted in Turkey's state of emergency imposed in the wake of an attempted coup in 2016. Hundreds of people were arrested across Turkey in the runup to the Diyarbakir rally, accused of planning illegal protests. Celebrating Newroz, the Persian New Year which falls on the Spring Equinox, has long been a mark of national pride for Kurds, who make up around a fifth of the population of Turkey, mainly in the southeast. Demonstrations for the holiday frequently led to violence during the PKK's 40-year insurgency. Southeastern Turkey saw an escalation of violence after a ceasefire between the Turkish state and the PKK collapsed in 2015. Much of Diyarbakir’s historic heart, the Sur district ringed by Roman-era walls, was left in ruins. Although fighting inside Turkey has subsided since then, the army's two-month-old cross border campaign against the YPG in Syria has again raised passion among Turkey's Kurds. President Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to extend the offensive beyond Afrin to other YPG-held areas. If that happens, said Ziya Pir, a parliamentarian from the pro-Kurdish opposition HDP party, "there will not just be an emotional rupture between Turkey and the Kurds here, it will go further and none of us want to see that". Many Turkish Kurds have close ties to the YPG and the conflict across the frontier. One woman at the demonstration said her daughter left university to join the YPG after being detained and tortured in Diyarbakir, and had fought Islamic State in Iraq and Syria where she was killed. A cousin of hers also went to Afrin, and her fate remains unknown, said the woman who declined to give her name. EVEN IF WE DIE "My surviving children and I will continue with this struggle even if we die," she told Reuters. Erdogan's government says its offensive targets militants who pose a direct threat to Turkey's security. The local head of his ruling AK Party in Diyarbakir, Serdar Budak, said Turkey's enemy was the YPG, not the Kurdish people. "If they have suffered harm, the wounds of all civilians will be bandaged," he told Reuters. Pir said there was "no concrete justification" for Turkey to send troops into northern Syria. The displacement of 200,000 people in Afrin and looting by Turkey's Free Syrian Army rebel allies showed that "what Turkey did is wrong, not just in a legal sense but also in a human sense." Another HDP politician, Berdan Ozturk, criticized the lack of international intervention to prevent what he said was Turkey's occupation of Afrin, a sentiment echoed by many in the crowd, where purple and green flags of the HDP were waving. "Afrin belongs to the Kurds but Turkey occupied it. Hundreds of thousands fled," said Tarik Dalkiran, a 52-year-old farmer from Bismil district of Diyarbakir province. "Britain, France, America, nobody did anything. I have lost faith in the West." (Editing by Dominic Evans and Peter Graff)

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