The grim face of terrorism is forever etched into the minds of several families who lost members in a brutal massacre by the PKK on Nov. 24, 1989. The killing of 28 people, from infants to adults, in execution style is still fresh in the memory of the nation that has suffered from terrorism since the mid-1980s.
The Ikiyaka village, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the Yüksekova district of the southeastern province of Hakkari, paid a hefty price for opposing the terrorist group. Descending on the village, terrorists rounded up members of families who refused to aid terrorists who previously visited the village and sought to recruit members. The village was home to several people serving as voluntary guards against terrorists. Going door to door, a large group of terrorists randomly fired on civilians while separately rounding up a group of men for execution. As they were leaving, they set houses on fire.
Besna Boz is among the survivors of the massacre. When terrorists ordered family members to gather in a larger room in their house, she grabbed her 14-month-old daughter and hid her amid sacks of flour in another room. When she realized that terrorists had set the house on fire, she took her daughter Hasret and jumped from the second floor of their house. She managed to flee, though terrorists noticed her and shot at them, injuring the mother in the leg.
Hasret does not remember the incident and only found out about the massacre that killed her father from her mother and other relatives. “I lost my cousins and other relatives. The only thing I remember about my father is a black and white blanket they used to cover his body,” Hasret Boz told Anadolu Agency (AA) on the anniversary of the massacre. “I grew up with this pain. I don’t remember it, but I always felt shaken at that time. May Allah not let anyone suffer from this pain. I am left with nothing,” Boz said.
“I lost my father, but I did not want to lose that affection the word father symbolizes for me. So, I call my uncle as father,” she said. Boz says she was devastated at every anniversary when she looked at the faces of her uncles, who also lost their children.
Besna Boz, now 65, vividly remembers the evening of the massacre. “We first heard gunshots. I rushed to my daughter. They were firing at our home and the lamps were broken. We hid, but they broke in,” she recounted. She said they found them hiding and ordered everyone to line up.
“Men were lining up, but I slipped out and grabbed my daughter. They started firing and everyone on the line fell down,” she recalled. Besna ran away with her daughter despite her injury and remembers smoke rising over her house. She found shelter in another house far away before running for another house for fear of terrorists pursuing them.
“I met my sister in the morning and found out everyone in our house was killed. May Allah inflict the same pain on those terrorists. These people they killed were innocent,” she said.
Halil Aykut, who lost 16 people from his family, including his mother, says they were forced to abandon the village after the massacre and settled in central Yüksekova. “They killed 13 babies and six women. I still don’t understand why they’ve killed these people. But we will not forget it,” he said.
Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya, who visited Aykut and other surviving victims of the massacre earlier this year, issued a message on the occasion, along with a photo he took with victims. Yerlikaya listed the names of some victims, including 1-year-old Elif, 2-year-old Muhammed and 75-year-old Hazal. The minister emphasized that the PKK has yet to abandon its campaign of terrorism. “But we won’t give up as well. We will continue strangling those terrorists with blood in their hands. We will continue until the last terrorist is neutralized,” Yerlikaya said in a social media post.
On Sunday, the Ministry of National Defense announced that nine PKK terrorists were eliminated in operations in Syria’s north, in two locations near Operation Euphrates Shield and Operation Peace Spring, which was held by the Turkish military against terrorists in the neighboring country.
The terrorist group launched a brutal campaign of violence in the 1980s for their so-called fight for Kurdish self-rule. The first attacks were in the southeastern and eastern Türkiye, where the group also drew recruits from the Kurdish population. Hiding in rural, mountainous areas in the region, terrorists often raided villages where they stole food and water and extorted the population they intimidated. Those opposing the group joined a budding paramilitary force known as village guards, who aided security forces in counterterrorism efforts. Seeking to discourage the population from opposing them and in a show of force, the PKK often carried out massacres like in Ikiyaka. A similar massacre took place one year later in the Şırnak province's Güçlükonak district. PKK terrorists slaughtered 27 people, including 12 children, when they stormed the Çevrimli village populated by families of village guards on June 11, 1990.
