On my return to Diyarbakır in the Kurdish region of Turkey, also known as Amed (Northern Kurdistan) in the winter of 2024, I found a post-siege city, in which the conversion of the old Christian district of Sur into an open-air shopping mall was partially complete.
The Tigris river passing through the Hevsel gardens of the World Cultural Heritage site in Diyarbakir. Mehmet Masum Suer/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Neighborhoods I had been visiting since 2004 were now, twenty years later, wiped off the map, only to be replaced by a low intensity tourist park connecting newly built concrete apartment villas and mansions awaiting restoration.
These development projects are one consequence of the 2015–2016 urban war between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In July 2015, the peace process between Turkey and the PKK came to an end. Shortly after, a suicide attack by ISIS in Suruç, a border town on the Turkish side of the Syrian border, killed 33 members of the Federation of Socialist Youth Associations on their way to Rojava for the reconstruction of Kobanê (The attack was part of a spate of attacks linked to ISIS between 2013–2015). Around the same time, the mayors of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP) and Kurdish movement builders declared democratic autonomy in several cities in Turkish Kurdistan. The Kurdish youth formed the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (Yurtsever Devrimci Genclik Hareket, YDG-H). The movement took responsibility for defending these newly declared autonomous spaces, becoming frontline actors in the war against the Turkish state.
While the operations ended in 2016, the sieges continued into 2017. The district of Sur survived this period with tectonic demographic and spatial scars: Half of the district’s inhabitants were displaced and six neighborhoods in its eastern quarter were permanently evicted through anti-terrorist decrees, which led to the further securitization of the area by control units and the development of new concrete blocks of flats.
But even before the 2015–2016 siege, urban redevelopment projects in Sur beginning in 2009 by the Kurdish municipalities had displaced the Kurdish urban poor, dispossessing them of their homes and gardens. And stretching back even further, to the 1990s, during the war between the Turkish state and the PKK that engulfed the Kurdish countryside, Kurdish inhabitants were forcibly evicted from their rural homes, pushing Kurdish civilians, most of whom were farmers, into the nearest provincial capitals and districts like Sur, which have seen their populations double since the 1990s.
This pattern of counterinsurgency violence against the environment fits into a longer, multilayered history of Turkish rule, stretching back to the rubble of the Armenian genocide. A decolonial ecological approach reveals the connections between low-intensity wars and larger historical efforts to reform or destroy the land. In the context of an increasing awareness of these links between ecocide and colonial violence, Kurdish activists are engaging in contemporary struggles over ancestral land claims and ecological initiatives that counteract mass political violence. Kurdish ancestral claims intersect with those of non-Muslim non-Turkish communities, especially the Armenians, who once farmed these lands.
Kurdish Autonomy and the Land
A decolonial ecological approach exposes how the Turkish state has debilitated and contained the Kurdish geography through interventions such as dams, mining, urban renewal and military campaigns. These technologies frame both the built environment and ecological life as the property of the Turkish sovereign state and as commodifiable resources to pave the way for the containment of the Kurdish region. The approach further draws attention to the ecological rubble of colonized Kurdish territories, highlighting how peoples’ alliances with more-than-human beings including fields, gardens and orchards, indigenous seeds, trees, medicinal herbs and plants and animals have been destroyed and scarred.
In Turkey too, agricultural modernization was a racialized and bureaucratic affair. The aim was Turkification, centrally planned by Turkish technocrats, who sought regional alliances with Kurdish confederations and Kurdish landlords.[2] This process included instituting a comprehensive annual plan with targets for key crops, establishing acreage for each crop and providing instructions on which crops could be grown, including how to use seeds, fertilizer and other inputs.
Kurdish local ecological collectives have sought to survive and subvert these intertwined yet distinct processes of racialization.[3] The food cooperatives and farming initiatives in the Kurdish autonomous confederal system in northeastern Syria, as well as a quasi-autonomous network of environmental activists in southeastern Turkey, have intervened in discussions on environmental politics. They put forth the decolonial ecological model as a solution to entangled environmental destruction by war, climate change and disasters, like the 2023 earthquake.
New collective forms of participation, including the Ecological Councils in Kurdistan and the Mesopotamia Ecological Movement (Tevgera Ekolojiyêya Mezopotamyayê), which was founded as a network of local ecological associations in 2011, reflect contemporary Kurdish political praxis. Their commitment to environmental protection is based on the principles of democratic confederalism declared by Abdullah Öcalan of the PKK in early 2005, which marked a shift in political organizations in the Kurdish regions of Turkey toward a program of decolonial self-government based on autonomy rather than state capture.
Horizontal and collective forms of participation, like the Ecological Councils, have been used by eco-activists to organize for the more active involvement of the larger Kurdish movement in environmental protection. These Ecological Councils have campaigned against the militarization of the region through the development of new high-security police stations, against fracking for shale gas and for protecting cultural and natural heritage sites.
The Kurdish movement’s emphasis on autonomy is intimately tied to the land through training and educational seminars on food sovereignty, ancestral land rights and decolonial heritage. The Amed branch of the Agriculture, Seeds and Food Commission, for instance, campaigns for food sovereignty and the collection of ancestral seeds native to Kurdistan.
Slowly emerging, contested and still in progress, agricultural initiatives and food cooperatives working on the basis of food sovereignty in the Kurdish autonomous confederal system in Rojava have coexisted, albeit separated by borders, with a quasi-autonomous network of environmental activism and initiatives in Kurdistan in Turkey.
An Ecological Renaissance
Before the siege, Amed witnessed an ecological renaissance, embodied by the city’s urban gardens and orchards.[4] Their very existence, as eco-activists explain, was meant to short circuit and push back against the racialized and violent alliances between the Turkish state, industrialized cash-crop business and collaborating Kurdish landlords and contractors. They also challenged the industrialized policies of monoculture that took control of food sovereignty away from small farmers, most of whom were forcibly displaced for the second or third time.
The produce from these orchards would be distributed at urban markets, sold at the municipality’s pop-up markets or sold directly to consumers. In some cases, the municipalities leased plots of land from Kurdish landowners. Municipal workers provided the seedlings and indigenous seeds and linked the farmers directly to local markets. This approach eliminated the need for male vendors and stallholders at the local markets and allowed women to capture more of the value of their produce. In Sur’s Hevsel Gardens, some Yezidi women worked as asheftis (women who collect herbs from gardens to sell at markets).
During the siege, pro-Kurdish municipalities run by the HDP were taken over by state-appointed administrators. Social and cultural associations and community centers were co-opted or closed. Amed’s political, social and cultural workers were arrested, including the provincial mayor and co-mayors, or forced to resign.
In 2016, shortly after the arrival of municipal trustees appointed by the Turkish state, cultivation on the plots was banned. The remaining produce, which the displaced farmers could not take home, was left to rot. Since, all signs of prior community work and cultivation have been erased. Eco-activists who collaborated with Yezidi families to design and cultivate urban orchards in 2014 underscore the difficulties of practicing decolonial ecological principles in the state’s sporadic spiral of military sieges, where “war is the climate,” as one common refrain goes.
Catastrophic layers, Decolonial Claims
A destroyed mansion in the Dabanoğlu neighborhood in 2024, courtesy of the author.
In 2024, almost all of my friends, committed movement builders, declared that they had no choice but to criticize themselves in the face of the fall of Sur and the deaths of young people defending the city’s neighborhoods. Their self criticism turned into a ceaseless call for political accountability, sometimes to the point of self-recrimination.
Some of them were involved in preparing inventories for various international organizations, seeking to document the damage done to the built environment during the siege. In 2019, I learned from them, and from interviews with Kurdish contractors managing agricultural plots in the ancient gardens of Hevsel, that the contractors’ hopes of obtaining building permits to develop the gardens were partially dashed by the UNESCO World Heritage Program. UNESCO had arrived in the city prior to the siege. It was Kurdish cultural heritage experts and municipal-level politicians who, by liaising with academics and UNESCO experts, had placed the old town center and the gardens on the World Heritage list. But according to project managers and field workers who have been on the ground in Amed as data collectors and administrators for UNESCO—and are well versed in the Kurdish movement’s environmental campaigns against the counter-insurgency—the organization has failed to pressure the state to stop Kurdish landlords, developers and contractors allied with the Turkish government from expropriating Sur and the gardens adjacent to the city walls.
Refusing to witness defeat, my friends no longer go to the old city, where they had worked as social workers and municipal-level politicians in the early 2000s. Nevertheless, these ex-movement builders continue to self-identify as revolutionaries despite now being involved in the political life of the city mainly during elections. With the exception of the thousands who were imprisoned by counterterrorist decrees during and following the siege and those who were able to flee Turkey, most former movement members are resigned to the city’s newly formed middle-class districts, with blocks of high-rise residential buildings, many 20–30 stories tall.
These spaces contain a vibrant social life with gated blocks, cafes and restaurants. Some businesses are named after the toponymy of the Kurdish landscape, including the PKK training camps in the mountains. Though the city is currently experiencing a development standstill after years of heyday, construction is continuing, producing new market relations that intertwine Turkish contractors from the Black Sea region and Kurdish businessmen with diverse portfolios. Some members of this new elite business class self-identify as partisans, dropping the names of PKK commanders and fighters into conversations as they remember them as glorious markers of a revolutionary struggle.
In Xançepek, I walked from the city walls toward the Grand Mosque, past concrete villas and the remains of old mansions waiting to be restored. Among the old mansions here, one building still stands; according to the newly erected plaque on its entrance door, it is the Hasırlı Masjid, and it is likely that the building’s first owners were Armenians. A young Muslim woman, an intern with a restoration company, approached me and we walked together. We passed the Chaldean church, which has been confiscated to be transformed into a hybrid space functioning as both a church and an art center for Dicle University—a model they are considering for other restored buildings. She showed me the new concrete villas, lined up one after the other in what used to be Xançepek. In her view, the villas destroy the soul of the city—they don’t reflect the historical reality of its urban past. Instead of offering me a mental image of the reconstruction work, built on the ghostly rubble of entire neighborhoods as a sign of the Turkish state’s victory, she bequeathed the area by linking it to a history with only Kurdish features. With her distinction between conscientious restoration and soul-destroying reconstruction, she offered a glimpse of a new generational political position that has matured since the current regime consolidated its power during the siege: culturally Kurdish, politically Islamic, socially committed and sensitive to Kurdish urban heritage.
I continued my walk towards the city walls. It was a sunny winter day, and I saw families of mostly women resting on the benches set up in the well-kept gardens along the old city walls. Displaced a second time in the same city, homesick for their destroyed homes and lives, former residents of Sur often come here during the day to smell the air of their old neighborhoods, one woman told me. She was unhappy with the new buildings erected by the Turkish Administration for Collective Housing (TOKI) to house people like her, who were forcibly displaced during the last siege.
Another young woman I spoke to was from Melikahmet with extended family in Dabanoğlu, two adjoining neighborhoods. The first of these neighborhoods is still alive—its streets are full of children, women chat in the alleyways and laughter erupts from coffeehouses. The second was partially destroyed during the siege and through legal expropriation of the land by the same state that had destroyed it. Like the other five neighborhoods in Sur, it has fallen prey to low intensity planning.
After a long chat, we realized we had mutual acquaintances. “When do you think they will destroy Melikahmet?” she asked me, knocking on wood. Before I could answer, she added, “First the bombs will come.” She gestured to her old neighborhood, which sits on the ruins of mansions destroyed during the Armenian pogroms, or possibly the Armenian genocide, and has seen subsequent periods of sieges against the Kurdish population. Restoration is continuing in these mansions, their courtyards filled with the rubble of basalt stone and uprooted trees. “The state will destroy, the youth will defend and die, and we will always return,” she told me.
Seen through a longer historical lens, this zeal for restoring confiscated property began with the Armenian pogroms of 1895, leading to the Armenian genocide of 1915, long before Turkey began its low-intensity eradication of the Kurdish countryside and the cities to terraform the land. Taken together, the layer-upon-layer of restoration suggests that there is not just one single claim to decoloniality in this frontline geography.
[Umut Yıldırım is an assistant professor of anthropology at the Geneva Graduate Institute.]
Endnotes
[1] Miriam Ababsa, “The end of a world: drought and agrarian transformation in Northeast Syria (2007–2010),” in Syria: from Reform to Revolt, Volume 1, eds. Raymond Hinnebusch Tina Zintl (Syracuse University Press, 2015), pp. 199–222.
[2] Begum Adalet, “Agricultural infrastructures: Land, race, and statecraft in Turkey,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 40/6 (2022), pp. 975–993.
[3] Stephen E. Hunt and John P. Clark (eds), Ecological solidarity: thought, practice, challenges, and opportunities (Lexington Books, 2021).
[4] Umut Yıldırım, “Resistant breathing: ruined and decolonial ecologies in the Middle East,” Current Anthropology 65/1 (2024), pp. 123–149.
