HASANKEYF, Turkey — “All we want to do is to maintain our heritage and our history, and for that we are called terrorists!” a resident of Hasankeyf told Al-Monitor. In this historic southeastern town, which has been at the top of Turkey's agenda and the site of explosions throughout September, few people are willing to speak on the record for fear of being branded as terrorists.

Hasankeyf, a town in the southeastern province of Batman, dates back 12,000 years. Situated on the banks of the Tigris, the area has been home to many of the civilizations of Mesopotamia. Today, it is at the end of its existence. The old town, with its many visible artifacts and more still awaiting excavation, will be submerged under the Turkish government’s pet project, the Ilisu Dam. When completed, it will be Turkey’s largest hydroelectric dam and the crown jewel of the Southeastern Anatolia Project. The waters of the Tigris will rise by 60 meters (197 feet) in places, leaving most of the historical area under water and forcing about 80,000 people to leave ancestral homes and move to the “new town” — some 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) away — against their will.

The first work toward the Ilisu Dam began in 1954, when a group of people — who the residents thought were eccentric Western tourists — arrived on mules. This group spent the next few weeks measuring the flow of the river with strange and exotic-looking equipment. They were the first group of engineers, employees of the State Water Works, doing groundwork to build the dam, which would modernize the irrigation of southeast Anatolia but leave the historic town under water.

Various civil society groups battled the regulatory dam project for decades, and sometimes they thought they'd gotten the upper hand. In 2009, Germany, Switzerland and Austria withdrew their support from the project because the dam would destroy the cultural heritage and ecosystem of the region. Consequently, Turkey used its own domestic resources to build the dam worth 1.2 billion euros ($1.4 billion), refusing to stop from the construction that was kicked off with a 2006 ceremony attended by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister at the time.