The shootings of the police officers were retaliation for a July 20 suicide bombing in the border town of Suruc that killed at least 32 people. Many of the victims were youth activists who had been planning to travel to Syria to help rebuild the Kurdish town of Kobani, which has seen intense fighting between Islamic State and Kurdish fighters. While the Islamic State is believed to have been behind the Suruc bombing, the PKK has blamed Turkish officials for collusion in the attack. Turkey’s Kurds have long criticized the government for what they perceive as inaction against ISIS inside the country and along its border. What’s more, many Turkish Kurds accuse the government of supporting the Islamist militants against Kurdish fighters in Syria—an allegation the Turkish government denies.

Turkey has since launched a bombing campaign against PKK rebel bases in the mountains of northern Iraq and southeastern Turkey. According to AFP, nearly 40 members of Turkey’s security forces have died in the latest flare-up of fighting with the group.

Over the past decade, relations between Kurds—a disenfranchised minority that makes up a fifth of Turkey’s population—and the Turkish government have improved dramatically, as both sides have invested in a peace process that aims to bring the protracted conflict to an end. But with a two-year ceasefire now broken, many here fear a further delay in meaningful reconciliation, which leaves people like the Cedinkaya family caught in the crossfire.

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At around 40-million strong, the Kurds are the largest stateless ethnic group in the world. They stretch across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, and have faced discrimination (and far worse) in all countries.

Ever since the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the Kurdish minority has sought more rights. After the disintegration of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire, which led to new nation-states but not to a Kurdish one, the republic embarked on a nationalist agenda of “Turkification” that eschewed pluralism. “How happy is the one who says, ‘I am a Turk,’” declared Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey and object of an enduring national cult of personality. Kurds weren’t able to speak their language in public until 1991. Broadcasting in Kurdish was banned until 2002. In 2013, the government lifted a prohibition on the usage of the letters Q, X, and Y, which appear in the Kurdish but not the Turkish alphabet. To this day, many Kurdish children don’t have access to Kurdish-language education.

In Syria, amid the civil war, Syrian Kurds have carved out their own territory with the PKK’s support. Though the PKK is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union, the U.S. and EU have found an ally in the PKK’s Syrian sister organization, known as the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG). The YPG has proved vital in the international military campaign against the Islamic State, but the Turkish government has long been reluctant to aid the Syrian Kurds for fear that their gains could revive the PKK’s own desire for greater autonomy and threaten Turkey’s territorial integrity.