Daren Butler
A Free Syrian Army member is seen behind sandbags at a checkpoint during a siege on the Kurdish city of Afrin, which is under the control of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), in the Aleppo countryside (Hamid Khatib Reuters, / June 30, 2013)
DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) – When gunmen stormed a wedding and shot dead a guest in southeastern Turkey, they stirred fears of a new outbreak of bloodshed in a region increasingly destabilized by Syria’s civil war.
The killing in the city of Batman highlighted divisions between Kurds which echo the faultlines of the conflict in Syria, complicating Ankara’s efforts to draw a line under a three-decade Kurdish insurgency on its own soil.
Turkey’s peace process with the armed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), aimed at ending a conflict that has cost more than 40,000 lives, was already fragile.
But the emergence of a Kurdish Sunni Islamist party, Huda-Par, has reopened old wounds in the southeast, poorer than the rest of Turkey and scarred by the wider Kurdish-Turkish fight.
The party, established in December and now campaigning for local elections in March, draws support from sympathizers of Turkey’s Hizbullah militant group which fought the PKK in the 1990s.
“That bloodshed is the source of animosity between the two sides and is not easy for people to forget,” said Ayla Akat, member of parliament for Batman from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), which shares the same grassroots support as the PKK.
The historical animosity has been given a new twist with the war that has fragmented Syria, where radical Sunni Islamists are now fighting fierce battles with local Kurdish forces in the north, near the border with Turkey.
via Wedding murder exposes Kurdish divisions in Turkey – chicagotribune.com.