“The mission of our battalion was to set fire to villages. We burned down 30 villages during our deployment there. … After we entered the villages, our commanders allotted houses to burn to teams of two to three soldiers. We used to enter the houses, tell the people to get out. We didn’t allow them time to move their belongings out."

These were the words of a person who had done his military service in the southeast in the 1990s and recently gave a testimony to the public prosecutor of Diyarbakir.

In the '90s, more than 3,000 villages and farm settlements were emptied of their inhabitants, burned and razed. In those days, the soldiers routinely emptied villages suspected of assisting the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) or refusing to cooperate with the state and burned them to the ground to prevent the villagers from ever coming back.

This catastrophic practice was adopted as a method of combating terror. This inhumane practice that wiped out entire villages was one of the main reasons so many Kurds from the southeast migrated to the western provinces of the country.