I’m not sure, but I think I’ve set a local record for shortest time between arrival and arrest. Having just crossed the border from Iraq, I step off the bus in Silopi, go in to the store to get a Pepsi, and all of the sudden there’s a plain clothes cop at the entrance, Kalishnikov at his side, yelling at me in Turkish.

I’m told to empty my bag. I do so, grudgingly, but when the policeman is unsatisfied at the rate things were going, he just grabs the bag and dumps the contents on the floor. I’m escorted by a few more agitated police into a heavily armoured van, and driven off to the station.

Their agitation is understandable. They work in a town where they are extremely unpopular among the public, and this is a well-armed public. I’d received the same treatement in Silopi before, just two weeks ago. That time I’d actually had to take a picture of the police to get arrested. It seems, judging by their increased jumpiness, that the situation has escalated since then. I’m escorted to the police station. Eventually the yelling subsides, and gives way to friendly banter. One of the cops speaks some English, which helps. I get the standard questions – “What are you doing here?” etc. When I explain that I’m in transit from Iraqi Kurdistan, the English speaking cop says “Don’t say Kurdistan here. It’s Iraq, not Kurdistan. If you say Kurdistan my colleages will beat you”. It was hard to tell how serious that threat was, but when I next uttered the forbidden word, they failed to make good on their offer. The cop eventully asks “Peter, why did we arrest you?”. “I don’t know, I was hoping you would know.”. “I don’t know either”, he responds. Eventually they tell me I’m free, but there is one little stop along the way. I’m taken to a hospital, where I am marched into a doctors office, so they can get an official record that I haven’t been beaten. The doctor on duty, fluent in English, takes me behind a curtain, and says “You look OK, you’re ok right?”. “Yep”. And thats the medical examination. Incidentally the doctor himself has a cast on his arm. He broke it while surfing in Miami.

It’s around dusk when I’m released at the door of the hospital, on the outskirts of town. I feel something like the character from Grand Theft Auto, reappearing at the hospital door after he’s just been “wasted”. Unlike last time, the police did not offer/insist on driving me back to the hotel, presumably to avoid opening up another opportunity for a hypothetical beating. So I walk back in, and return to the good old Habur hotel. The Hotel’s offering a slight discount, down to 40 Lira (about $13), but the reason for this is pretty clear. The police cut all power to everything at night, presumably to give them the monopoly on communications and light – and to prevent their enemies from scheming. So the hotel is eerily dark. The kids running the joint make sure to point out that it’s the police who cut the power, not the good guys, and to once again reiterate the local conspiracy theory “Turkish Police, Daesh”, followed by a rubbing of fingers to signify their secret friendship. I feel out my room number on the door. It’s pitched black in the hallways and the shower only has as much water as thee pipes on the upper floors can hold. At night, you can hear the action: rat-tat-tat-tat boom. Nobody’s even out on the balconies, and you can see why – olive green armoured police trucks with roof-mounted machine guns creep around neighbourhoods shining spotlights on anthing suspicious. To a nervous cop with an itchy trigger finger, a innocent smoker getting his fix on the balcony could easily be mistaken for something more sinister, and make for an unfortunate accident.

So that was Silopi. Silopi is just half an hour’s drive to the town of Cizre, which has just been through an 8 day government siege to drive out militants. I stop there thinking that was probably mostly back to normal here and it would be a nothing-to-see-here story, but as it turns out that couldn’t be further from the case. Upon arrival in Cizre it becomes pretty clear what just transpired. Dumpster-barricades which once blocked the road in have been pushed aside just enough to allow traffic to slip through. Down the alleyways, you can see walls made of sandbags, rocks, and rubble. 3-foot-deep trenches have been dug out in various places to prevent police vehicles from getting in. And everything is wrecked. Bullet holes all over the place. Graffiti glorifying the PKK, YPG, YPJ, and most of all the beloved Abdullah “Apo” Öcalan, imprisoned leader of the PKK, is everywhere.

I’m quickly greeting by one local resident, who we’ll call Aras. Aras is a pretty calm and sober type of kid, probably about 18. He leads me on a tour through the town. We start in his neighbourhood. The guerillas, as they like to be called (Their group is called the YDG-H, a youth movement of the PKK, but the strength of this affiliation isn’t really clear), have made holes in the concrete walls between houses, to allow them more freedom of movement.

We walk through the streets, which are totally trashed. With my camera in hand, everyone wants to show me how badly the “Turkish Terrorists” destroyed their own little section of town. We walk past a van that is so riddled with bullet holes that you can basically see through it. I faithfully stick to Aras, who seems keen to be my official guide on this tour of destruction. One man of about 50 stops us, and with a weird kind of enthusiastic dispair, shows us just how badly the police fucked up his shop and home. Somethıng defınıtely exploded in his shop, and the walls of the second floor are pretty much gone. It’s pretty clear that this was not just a bunch of guys with Kalishnikovs. There are some very big holes in the walls and some very big chunks of buildings missing.

I’m taken past a nice little bit of symbolism. The locals have made a pile of dead doves and next to it, spelled out in bullet casings, are the words: “Cizre de katliam var” – “There are massacres in Cizre”.

A common refrain, (apart from the standard “Turkish Terrorists”) is that Cizre is the second Kobane. Kobane, a town on the Syrian side of the Turkish border, was besieged by Daesh over the winter of 2014-15, as Turkey watched, doing (at best) nothing. Kurdish YPG/YPJ forces eventually broke the siege and started taking land from Daesh, in what has been called the “Rojava Revolution”. Turkeys indifference throughout this whole seige, which was happening right on its border, led to the widespread perception amongst the Kurds that Turkey was quietly working in collusion with Daesh. Having an independent Kurdish state in Syria, run by an offshoot of the PKK, certainly isn’t in the interest of the current Turkish government.

The next exhibit on the tour doesn’t look like much at first, a worn out pair of flip flops on the street. Until I saw the bloodstains and the decaying remains of somebody’s foot nearby.

Once they discover that my camera was video capable, the speeches begin. Inside one house, an old woman is there. Further inside, in a darkened room, lies an even older man. The man lies on a blanket in a rubble-strewn room. The woman says it is her father, who is 100 years old. He now sleeps in a cellar with chickens. “They told us that we are terrorists but it is he [Erdogan] who is the terrorist. He is the heretic and he is the devil. They have finished all of us, look at my father, how miserabe he is. He is 100 years old and he cannot drink water without us. What kind of right has he [Erdogan] to do this?”. Her sentiments were widely echoed across the town.

Another woman descibes how the police, from inside their truck, had tried to lure them out. “Come Armenians, come outside the house.”. “Armenian”, as the man who translated the videos later on described, is used as a kind of insult to imply that they weren’t real Muslims. “We were afraid to go outside the house because we were unarmed. We, with our child, tried to get far away”. Her husband proceeded to give such an eloquent speech that it should be left verbatim.

“Erdogan wants to break the freedom of the Kurds, thats why he is doing these barbaric acts. Even if they kill us, collapse our houses, finish all of us, and plunder us, they will not break our will for freedom. The Kurds’ will for freedom is steel. What he has done will not be enough to take our will for freedom. Erdogan has been losing and he will not rise. I think he is not thinking healthily. He is making a mistake. He says “All of Turkey is mine”, but he discriminates between Kurds and Turks and he is making them enemies of each other. We want Turks and Kurds living as brothers. And Erdogan wants us to be his servants, but we refuse that. He has treated us like slaves for thousands of years. After this, we are not going to accept it. We are not giving our freedom to him. As Kurdish people, we will not accept him. We want to live free like a of the people in the world. We are a people of the world and we are not small and we have rights like the others. It is not like in the past when the Kurds were deceived. We are not going to be treated like that. We are well-informed now. If they take all of our souls and bodies and kill us and torture us we are not going to give our freedom to them. We are not going to obey him.”

It seems that everyone has an impromptu speech at the ready, and everyone has a grisly story to tell. Another woman says, “They placed their snipers on the high places. The children could not poke their heads outside because they would be shot by snipers… In the past they told us that the peace process was in the fridge. … And today he says that we are goign to kill you and keep your families in the fridge. A small girl 4 or 5 years old was killed. Her funeral was held at a fridge, they didn’t let us bury her in a grave.”

The sun goes down, and I’m taken back to the home of Aras’s family. As is typical of the region, they offer an almost unbearable degree of hospitality. We eat dinner and they turn on the news. Most of what’s on TV was filmed less than a kilometer away – I recognise the bullet-ridden car, the numerous destroyed buildings and barricades. They switch to the PKK channel, which is apperently available on satellite. Various montages of brave young fighters singing together in the mountans fill the screen.

We communicate via Google translate. While infinitely worse than a human interpretor, it’s infinitely better than nothing. It’s an odd idea, that the latest developments in artificial intelligence are opening up this field of extremely-low-budget journalism that I seem to have walked into. Ubiquitous smart-phones have already killed many a foreign-desk at major news corporations. Ubiquitous machine-translation may make the final blow, but it’s not there yet. I hear an interesting statement from one of the family members. I learn that “our Syrian brothers” may have been involved in this struggle. This could spell bad news for Turkey’s relations with the YPG – the Syrian Kurdish group currently battling Daesh to the south. Indeed, YPG flags and graffitti can be seen throughout the city. Frustratingly, I’m unable to get any more confirmation of this claim.

Later in the night, I’m told that we can go and get a statement from a PKK fighter. I’m led down a dark alleyway, and a large young man is called over. He insists, of course, that no video be made, but I can make an audio recording.

His statements seem defensive cautiously prepared. “There are no guerillas within us. We are the youth Cizre Botan. We are here. There are no guerillas within us, and the guns belong to the people. We have bought them with our own money. We have to defend ourselves.” Throughout the recording, one of the family members asks leading questions, making for a somewhat artificial discussion. The questions all seemed geared towards making appeals for Western support. When asked what they want from Turkey, the fighter responds: “We want to punish he who has got his finger in Turkey. He should be punished the way Saddam was. Like what America did to Saddam in 1991, they should do to Turkey.”, referring to the no-fly zone set up to protect the Kurds in northern Iraq after their 1991 rebellion. He continues, “All of our friends are being killed in front of our eyes. Theis brute should be stopped. If this brute is not stopped, Turkey will pay a heavy price, if not by way of the law, he is going to pay his price by way of the youth of Cizre”. When pressed to ask if a neutral mediator is would be useful, he acknowledges that yes, “Without Europe, without a mediator it is not going to be solved.” He went on to request that the West stop selling weapons and vehicles to Turkey.

All told, the whole thing came off as being a bit scripted. I would have liked to know what their real links were with the PKK, the YPG. Was the fight going to continue or had they really been damaged by this operation? But what can you expect when you go there without an interpretor and without the ability to respond to statements with more questions?

The next morning I depart to Diyarbakir with the intention of getting everything translated as quickly as possible. One little thing gets in the way. In Diyarbakir, a minor riot is going on. The belligerents are about 20 kids with firecrackers, versus a police barricade-buster and armored truck. Another group of people look on and film the scene. As protests go, it’s fairly low key. A fire is cracking away in the middle of the road, and the armored truck is kind of lackadaisically driving back and forth firing rounds of tear gas. A bunch of kids have identified an unmarked van as belonging to the police, and claim that there is a gun inside. In between passes of the armored truck, they smash the windows of the van, grab the gun (or whatever was in that black plastic bag, and run off). Tear gas is great for clearing the sinuses. The protestors are prepared, and dispense lemons to counteract the burning effects of the gas, but still there’s much coughing and spitting. I start filming the whole event, because that’s what you do. Of all the other people filming this little riot, the police somehow seem to have the most interest in the blond guy, ie me. They first becon me over to their truck by cracking open the door and making a little “come hither” gesture. When I decline their offer, they make another pass and send a bunch of cops to chase me down and arrest me. I make a kind of half-hearted attempt to run away, but they catch up pretty quickly and I’m escorted once again into an armoured truck.

So this is arrest number three. It’s more or less the same routine as the others. They take you back to the station, ask what you’re doing in this godawful place. Their angry yelling eventually subsides and the best English speaker kind of becomes the good cop. Good cop, in this case, emphatically wants to make the case that they, the police, are the good guys in this whole situation. He shows me numerous pictures of Turkish children crying over the coffins of their dead fathers – police, soldiers, and traffic cops killed by the PKK. Meanwhile, a young man who has clearly seen better days limps out of his cell. The cop explains – “This is a Syrian refugee. We found him, fed him, gave him water, and now we are setting him free. We are good people.” He makes the point that the PKK are killing children, inciting violence, that they, all in all, are the problem. And this isn’t false. While the PKK doesn’t specifically target children, when you set off bombs in civilian areas, bad things happen. But all the same claims could be made of the Turkish police and army.

Which is why this whole conflict is so vexing. Both sides claim to want peace, and both claim that peace is the last thing the other side wants. So why isn’t peace happening? The current wave of violence started when Erdogan decided to go after Daesh and the PKK “together” which primarily meant bombing the shit out of the PKK in the Qandil Mountains of Iraq. This, it has to be said, was after the PKK killed two Turkish police, which in turn was after the Daesh suicide bombing on the largely Kurdish town of Suruç on July 20 of this year. This was largely blamed on Turkey, who was seen to have acted at best indifferently and at worst maliciously as Daesh beseiged the largely Kurdish border-town of Kobane, Syria over the winter. So as usual, there’s not a clean answer to the “who started it?” question, but it’s clear that Erdogan at some point this summer made an about-face from appeasement to crackdown. Some say it’s a strategic move to gather right-wing support for the November 1 election, in which Turkey gets to decide whether Erdogan’s AKP gets to keep its precious majority or not. Anyway, it’s complicated, and it’s not really clear if either side actually wants the peace they claim to want.

One uncomfortable point of denial seems to be the level of public support that the PKK has. Talking to GoodCop, I bring up the possibility of having a referendum, like there was in Scotland, for an independent Kurdistan. He insists that the people would not want that, that they want to be part of Turkey. The police always say this – that the people want peace with Turkey and that the PKK – a small group of Iraqi rabble-rousers, just want Turkey to burn. Not exactly the sentiment that you here when talking to the people.

GoodCop also says something else interesting. This is the same jail that Vice News reporters Jake Hanrahan and Philip Pendlebury were brought to. GoodCop talked to one of them, I forget which, and claimed that he was not a good man. “He was not neutral” says GoodCop, claiming that he had been carrying around 7000 Lira in 10 lira notes to give out to children so they could tell him whatever they wanted to hear. A tough claim to believe, given that local people seem plenty happy to dispense pro-PKK propaganda free of charge.

In the end, it was the same routine. Marched to the hospital, asked if I’d been beaten, and released.

As I returned to the hotel I was hailed over by a group of local journalists. Real journalists, like with press cards and everything, sitting in the park. They’d been filming the protests too. One came around and commented that it wasn’t safe to all be sitting together like this with the police around and all, so please, disperse. Diyarbakir is in a pretty heavy state of lockdown nowadays. In the morning, the power and phones are cut and the center cordoned off for yet another police operation. Those ancient walls have found new use, now to section off the core of the city for various police “cleanouts”. Sporadic gunfire can be heard at night. As I get a Kebab from the shop in the morning, the storeowner gestures to the place next door. It’s totally blackened and destroyed – a police grenade had apperently found its way in there at some point the previous night.

I manage to get the videos translated at the chronically overstaffed Diyarbakir tourism office (the number of tourism staff far exceeds the number of tourists in this city). As I sit in the internet cafe writing this up, a teenager in the next stall sits mesmorized, watching PKK propaganda videos on YouTube, while another little boy terrorizes a virtual LA from another computer.