For three hard years, Halise Aksoy searched for the remains of her son after learning that the young Kurdish rebel had fallen in battle against Turkish security forces on May 23, 2017. Her quest for Agit, which means “brave” in Kurdish, ended on April 10 at the central courthouse in Diyarbakir, the informal capital of the mainly Kurdish southeast. “Aunty, look! Your son’s bones are there,” said a court official, breezily motioning toward a plastic bag with a yellow tag attached. The bag was on a table and contained a rectangular box.

“They offered me a glass of water,” recalled Aksoy in a telephone interview from her native village of Elmabahce in neighboring Mardin province. “I said, ‘I don’t want your water, keep it to yourselves,’ and took my son and left.”

Images of a dazed Aksoy sitting in her living room with the bag on her lap surfaced on social media soon after, triggering uproar. “My mother was in a state of shock,” said Mizgin, the sixth of Aksoy’s four daughters and three surviving sons. “Now she is angry. Very angry.”

Aksoy's case is not unique. It fits a broader pattern of the state dehumanizing Kurdish rebels even in death and denying families the opportunity to accord them a proper burial and grieve in peace.