The story the villagers tell each other is that CPT has brought her daughter back, Harya* shares with us. She is a mother who had lost two children, and then found one. Her daughter Zhyan* returned home just a few days after our last visit, from her four-year-long engagement with the PKK (Kurdistan Worker’s Party) in an unknown mountain base.
As the Turkish special forces were preparing to invade the home village of Harya at the foot of a high mountain range of South Kurdistan, they killed her son in a deliberate drone strike. Then they entered the village and began constructing bases on the surrounding hilltops and mountain peaks.
Zhyan, in her grief and anger for her older brother’s killing, had left home and joined the PKK in order to fight against the Turkish invasion. For four years, her family had not seen or heard from her. During those years, as we accompanied the family, Harya has often shared with us about the pain she feels for losing not one child, but two. And then her daughter returned! Zhyan left the war behind to take care of her elderly parents.
How lovely it would be to end the story here. Yet in a village where lives had to readjust under the shadows of Turkish occupation, having been labeled as a “PKK family” has turned the family’s life into an ongoing struggle, not only for essential income but also for survival. Harya had walked around all the houses in the village, pleading to find employment for her son. But no one wanted to do it.
One day her son went with a group of villagers to forage wild plants near a Turkish base. Along with a friend, he got separated from the group. The friends panicked that they might be attacked by the soldiers. When Harya, not knowing where her son was, heard a rifle fire from the base, she ran to the soldiers pleading with them not to kill her son. The soldiers heard her and helped her son to leave the area unharmed.
Harya’s family and other villagers began to practice non-violent resistance, without naming it so. They collectively organize and walk to harvest wild plants in large groups. They developed ways to negotiate with Turkish soldiers to access their own blocked-off farmlands. Harya and her daughter, as a means of protection, leave their IDs at home when they need to pass Turkish checkpoints, and keep safe from being identified by moving around in large groups, with their faces covered, as farmers in the mountains do.
The story continues. As does the resistance of Harya’s family, along with a thousand others, under the shadows of 139 Turkish military bases occupying the South Kurdistan border regions. Please keep on praying for these families. Hold them in your hearts and bring them into your conversations. Connect with them by joining one of our upcoming delegations. Elevate the importance of the peace negotiations as they cautiously advance. Join the struggle by supporting the CPT Iraqi Kurdistan team to continue accompanying them.
* The names have been changed for safety reasons.
