The National reports: As the sun drops in this town on Turkey’s border with Syria, young Kurdish men pull black balaclavas over their faces, load their Kalashnikovs with a click and leave the courtyards and homes they were resting in for the streets.

At the entrances of residential neighbourhoods here, roads are cut with sandbagged barricades and trenches filled with dirty, stagnant water. Sheets, blankets and tarps are strung up overhead to protect against Turkish government snipers.

On quiet days, children play on the barricades with simple toy guns fashioned out of plastic pipes. But at night, these barriers become the domain of the young fighters of the YDG-H, a local militia affiliated with Turkey’s main Kurdish nationalist guerrilla group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

Towns like Cizre, Silopi and Sirnak in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority south-east are in open revolt today, with militants fighting against a government they say has oppressed the country’s Kurds for too long. [Continue reading…]