Last week, the BBC World Service broadcast a new documentary, The Forbidden Zone, which investigates Turkey’s unacknowledged occupation of Iraqi Kurdistan and the military operations in the region. CPT has been present in Iraqi Kurdistan since 2006, documenting the loss caused by Turkish and Iranian strikes, and accompanying the surviving family members of murdered civilians.
Turkey justifies its presence by claiming to target PKK operatives, but most of its victims have no connection whatsoever to the group. “Since 1991 until now, 711 people have been killed and injured only in the Turkish military operations,” CPTer Kamaran Osman says in the film. “They have been killed in their villages, on their farming fields, while they were driving, while they were home. There were not any PKK guerillas, there were not any armed people inside the farm.”
Since 2018, Turkey has escalated its occupation of Iraqi Kurdistan, creating an archipelago of bases inside its territory. This buffer, the “forbidden zone”, has left the Kurds who live there open to arbitrary attack, decimating the communities that steward the land. The Kurdish Regional Government, headed by the Kurdistan Democratic Party, refuses to give to the civilian dead the status of “martyr”, which would entitle their surviving family to financial compensation, since doing so would mean acknowledging Turkey’s responsibility for their deaths.
Sitting with the father of Alan, who was killed in a Turkish strike on his car, Kamaran asks how the death has affected the family. “It was a disaster”, he says. “It has destroyed us. It’s like killing the whole family”. Asked who is to blame, Alan’s father tells Kamaran “the Turkish government is guilty. Iraq has no sovereignty in these matters. Nobody asks Turkey the reason. No one dares to ask them why they’re bombing this area.” Meanwhile, Alan’s cousin Hashem, who was injured in the same attack, was arrested by the Kurdish authorities after filing a complaint demanding compensation, accused of aiding the PKK and imprisoned for eight months.
In another context, Edward Said wrote that “facts do not at all speak for themselves”. They need a “narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them.” For years, CPT Iraqi Kurdistan has worked alongside communities to rescue the facts – names, perpetrators, causes of death – from the silences and distortions of occupation. Next it is creating a narrative that might carry them.
