Where the roots of war still run deep

The battle between the Kurds and the Turkish state remains the longest-running insurgency in the world. Owen Matthews visits Turkey’s war-torn south east and finds that the opportunity for peace was sacrificed on the altar of political expediency by the country’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Vedat carries a battle-scarred Kalashnikov that looks much older than he is. This week, he would be back at secondary school studying to become a nurse if a spate of shootings and terrorist bombings hadn’t erupted over the summer holidays.

As it is, Vedat slouches on a street corner by a makeshift barricade made of ancient paving stones. The alley wall behind his little redoubt is riddled with fresh bullet holes and decorated with spray-painted stencilled images of Kurdish separatist heroes and Soviet-style revolutionary red stars. In the street beyond the barricade, middle-aged shopkeepers sweep up glass and shrapnel from storefronts shattered by police bullets in an attack the day before.