A recent photo of the Turkish town of Nusaybin and its Syrian neighbor Qamishli across the border was circulated widely on social media June 5, and it went viral in no time. The photo appeared only in daily Cumhuriyet under the headline "Nusaybin leveled." In the background of the photo, which was taken from a high building in Nusaybin, an abandoned city was captured with buildings full of holes caused by artillery rounds and roads blocked by rubble. In the foreground about 30 Turkish soldiers are seen moving through a town square covered by dust and debris, protected by six armored vehicles and massive Turkish flags hanging from the destroyed buildings lining the square.
If someone had seen the photo without knowing of the destruction caused by the war Turkey has been waging in the southeast since July 2015, he would have assumed it was a Syrian town occupied by Turkey. Any sane person would have thought the photo depicted a scene from Syria, which after all is a country destroyed by war, and not a city in Turkey destroyed by the national army and decorated with Turkish flags. But as we know it is actually a photo of Nusaybin, the first thing that comes to mind is that a part of Turkey is being "Syrianized."
The caption of the photo read, “Yuksekova, Sur [Diyarbakir], Cizre, Sirnak and now Nusaybin. The same scenes all over. Operations, clashes and rubble left behind. The Mardin governorate announced that 70 security personnel were martyred and 495 PKK [Kurdistan Workers Party] militants were killed in the operation that concluded at Nusaybin.”
There are two main reasons why on March 14 the security operation, which included tanks, artillery and assault helicopters, against the PKK was launched in this town of roughly 113,000 residents and where the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) had received about 90% of the votes in two general elections in 2015 — first, because hundreds of armed PKK militants had deployed to Nusaybin to achieve the PKK’s ambition of autonomy, and second, faced with a surge in casualties because of the booby-traps PKK used extensively in buildings. As a result, almost all buildings in the zone of operation were destroyed by tank fire.
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