Children describe day of terror

Zehra Doğan/JINHA

KANDİL - In the village of Zergelê, after a Turkish jet bombing killed eight civilians one week ago, children are left with the memory of a "terrible war."

On August 1, between the hours of 4:15 a.m. and 6:00 a.m., Turkish jets bombed the village of Zergelê, located in the Federal Kurdistan Region's Qandil region. Six of the 37 houses in the village were destroyed in the attack, and eight civilians (among them a pregnant woman) were killed. 15 were heavily wounded.

Turkey has justified its attack as a strike on a "PKK camp," despite the presence of all the trappings of a village, including a mosque. In the village, where all the windows have shattered, that mosque's courtyard was the only place for the children to play. Meanwhile, the Turkish government has posed the question, "what business did civilians have there?" in reference to the village.

As we made our way through the destroyed village, children trailed behind us every step of the way. We met six-year-old Bavêl Muhammed as he looked for his toys in the ruins. Bavêl pulled out the brown and yellow pillow decorated with Kurdish designs to show us, saying, "look, this was my pillow." He pointed to the place where his grandmother Ayşe was killed.

"I saw, the planes hit her. Erdoğan flies the planes; my mom told me," said Bavêl. Bavêl ran ahead to pull his grandmother's torn prayer rug from the ruins. "She had gotten up to pray. Mama Ayşe died on this," he said, with a child's matter-of-fact attitude. Bavêl went silent to concentrate on excavating some dirt, in the hope that the brand-new tablet his father had just bought him might emerge.

"I used to like planes a lot; now I'm scared," Bavêl said.

The local grocer, Zagros Rojhilat, was also killed in the bombing, five-year-old Melisa Ibrahim told us. Zagros had fled the Iranian regime to relocate to this village, where he opened a grocery.

"The bombs exploded and our neighbors died. We don't have a grocery any more," said Melisa simply.


16-year-old Mahruf Mecid lost his father Mecid Abdullah in the bombing. Mahruf expressed anger at the Federal Kurdistan Region press' total silence about the bombing and the Turkish press' distorted representation of the incident.

"He was my father, not a guerrilla," said Mahruf, showing us pictures he took on a Muslim holiday with his father. "No one hears us. They act like we deserve death." On the day of the massacre, his father had run towards the site of the explosion to carry away the wounded.

"My mother, my siblings and I were watching my father. I saw the planes come over the hill a second time; I called out, but no one could hear anything because of the noise," said Mahruf. "I cried, 'dad,' but he didn't hear. The bombing started and I ran to him; he had died. I embraced my father's destroyed body for hours; I cried. That's always how I'll remember my father."

(fk/cm)