Turkish gendarmerie raided a village near Mount Bagok in Turkey’s Kurdish-majority city of Nusaybin (Nisêbîn) and arrested three people, including a minor on Wednesday morning. The detainees, identified as 15-year-old B.A., Gülperi Aslan, and Nergiz Okan, who had recently been released from prison, were reportedly severely beaten during the arrest. According to JIN News, the gendarmerie were looking for Gülperi’s husband, Abdulkerim Aslan, and his brother Rıdvan Aslan, who is B.A.’s father. Both men were not at the house during the raid.
Eyewitnesses reported that the raid was marked by extreme aggression, with Hafsadi Aslan, the mother of Abdulkerim, describing the traumatic experience:
“They did everything they could to us. I am an old woman and they pointed a gun at me and said they were going to kill me. They swore at us…What did we do to deserve this?”
She continued: “They tore the house apart. They tortured our children. They are irreligious, they are faithless.”
Family member Zekiye Aslan described the brutality inflicted on the 15-year-old. “This is inhumane. They tortured a 15-year-old child until blood came out of his mouth. Is this humane? When we tried to protect them, they started beating and cursing us too,” she said.
“What do they want from us?” Zekiye Aslan asked repeatedly. “What have they seen around us? For 1,000 years they have been attacking our village, what have they seen around us?”
The villagers’ accounts paint a grim picture of the gendarmerie’s behaviour and raise serious concerns about human rights violations in the region.
The Lawyers for Freedom Association (ÖHD) has issued a statement on the raid, claiming that those detained were subjected to physical abuse, sexual harassment, threats, verbal abuse, humiliation, exposure to hate speech and discrimination, and unjust detention. The association also declared their intention to monitor the situation by providing legal representation and reporting complaints of harassment and torture.
The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TİHV), one of the country’s leading human rights organisations, recently published its annual report on torture cases in Turkey for 2023. The report reveals a dramatic increase in cases of torture in public places involving law enforcement officials.
The villagers’ testimonies, coupled with the findings of the TİHV report, highlight the urgent need for international attention and intervention to address the escalating human rights violations in the region.
