Siege at Edge of Fallen Empires Tests Erdogan's Hold on Turkey
As President Erdogan consolidates power in Ankara, separatists 1,000 kilometers away test the limits of his reach.
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The curfew in this former Roman and Persian imperial outpost was announced the modern way, online, but word quickly spread like it has here for three millennia. By dawn, tens of thousands of people were gone.
For separatist Kurds in Turkey, curfew is code for crackdown. So when one was declared in Nusaybin on the Syrian border in March, most of its 90,000 residents ran with whatever they could carry. Two months and hundreds of killings later, what began as a quick-strike campaign to oust scores of militants from the banned Kurdistan Workers Party has turned into a siege by thousands of members of NATO’s second-largest military.