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"text": "A house that was bombed by Turkish forces during the 2015 siege of Cizre, a Kurdish-majority town on the Syrian border. In September 2015, security forces sealed off and bombed the town for eight days, limiting access to food, water and medical assistance, and imposing a curfew. Another curfew began in December that year, lasting 78 days. The operations in Cizre killed 160 civilians, according to locals.",
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"text": "Cows huddle together in a barren landscape near the village of Fındıklı, where I was born. The only source of income in the village is raising livestock.",
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"text": "Caves that were unearthed at the ancient city of Hasankeyf during the construction of the Ilısu Dam. The dam is set to submerge the city, which is nearly twelve thousand years old, as well as 199 Kurdish villages in the region.",
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"text": "Islamic State militants besieged the Kurdish city of Kobanî, in northern Syria, for 133 days in late 2014. Kurdish forces, with US air support, began retaking the city in January 2015. Over four hundred thousand civilians fled to Turkey during the siege.",
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"text": " An archival image of my maternal uncle praying in Fındıklı.",
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"text": "One of the engineers in this photograph is my uncle (standing to the right).",
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"text": " 2015, demonstrators commemorate the twentieth anniversary of an uprising in Gazi, an Istanbul ghetto for Kurdish and Alevi people forced to migrate due to state pressure. On 12 March 1995, anonymous gunmen opened fire on three cafés and a patisserie in Gazi, killing one person. In response, Alevi residents protested at the neighbourhood police station, where one protester died in police firing. Riots broke out throughout Istanbul, lasting four days, and the governor of Istanbul Province declared martial law. The police killed 23 people, and injured over a thousand, during the uprising.",
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"text": "A mural on a house that was destroyed during the siege of Kobanî depicts the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan as the sun.",
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"text": "Mourners attend a funeral in Istanbul for those killed in an Islamic State attack. On 10 October 2015, militants set off two bombs during a rally in the Turkish capital, Ankara, killing over a hundred people. The rally had been organised to call for a peaceful solution to the Kurdish conflict.",
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} ON 2 SEPTEMBER 2017, Çağdaş Erdoğan, a Turkish photojournalist of Kurdish descent, was detained while walking through Istanbul’s Yoğurtçu Park. He was initially accused of photographing the headquarters of the Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, Turkey’s intelligence agency. “But it is entirely fictitious,” he said in an interview with the British Journal of Photography, “because the place where I photographed is just a park, and there isn’t any building, or even signs that show the presence of a restricted area where you cannot take pictures.” On 13 September, he was officially charged with being a member of a terrorist organisation, based on his previous work photographing members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party—known by its Turkish acronym, PKK. After spending six months in pre-trial detention, he was released on bail at the first hearing of his case, on 13 February 2018. “They already knew I was going to be released after the first hearing in court; they just extended my detention to punish me,” he said.
Following an attempted military coup, on 15 July 2016, the Turkish government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared a state of emergency that lasted two years. According to statistics compiled by Amnesty International, over a hundred and fifty thousand people were taken into police custody during the emergency, half of whom were detained under anti-terrorism laws. Over a hundred and thirty thousand public officials were dismissed from their jobs. The government also cracked down on the media, arresting 231 journalists and dismissing nearly three thousand media workers over the course of the emergency.
Çağdaş was born in the Kurdish-majority village of Fındıklı, near the Syrian border. The Kurdish people, Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, mostly live in a contiguous region called Kurdistan, which covers parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. In each of these countries, national governments have systematically persecuted them for decades. Since its establishment, in 1923, the Republic of Turkey has issued a number of decrees banning the expression of Kurdish identity, as well as political parties representing the Kurds. It has committed thousands of human-rights abuses against the Kurdish people, including arbitrary arrests, torture, forced displacement, destruction of villages and summary executions. Since 1978, the PKK and other militant Kurdish groups have carried out an insurgency against the Turkish government. Their demands range from independence to autonomy to greater political and economic rights within Turkey. In 2013, the government began talks with the jailed PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, leading to a ceasefire, but hostilities resumed two years later.
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