The cobbled alleys of Diyarbakir’s ancient Sur district are filled with shell casings and shattered glass. Black-masked teenagers touting Kalashnikovs and hand grenades mill around sandbag fortifications.

“We will defend our neighborhood till the last drop of our blood, till the revolution in Kurdistan is complete,” one of the youths told an Al-Monitor correspondent in Sur. That was on Dec. 11, when the Turkish authorities briefly eased a curfew that was slapped on six neighborhoods in Sur almost two weeks ago, allowing trapped residents to flee with the few possessions they managed to grab. “We are caught in the war. What else can we do? All we pray for now is peace,” said Remziye Kaya, a mother of six, as she hurried away with a small electrical stove.

Peace seems an increasingly elusive goal ever since a two-year cease-fire between Turkey’s Islamist government and rebels of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) collapsed in the wake of a deadly suicide bomb attack carried out by the Islamic State (IS) in the town of Suruc. Some 33 peace activists, many of them Kurds, were killed.

The PKK has long claimed that Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has used IS to sabotage the Syrian Kurds’ experiment with self-rule in the steadily expanding band of territory they control along the Turkish border they call Rojava.