CIZRE (Turkey): With a son in the Turkish army and a brother in the Kurdish rebel PKK, Gule Uysal will do anything to avoid an escalation of violence in this restive southeastern region of Turkey and avert a wider conflict with Iraq.

“I don’t want my brother to kill my son or my son to kill my brother,” Uysal, 41, said in her apartment in a town close to the Iraqi border.Cizre, in Sirnak province, has been at the heart of a bloody conflict between the Turkish army and the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has waged an armed campaign for self-rule in southeastern Turkey since 1984 at the cost of more than 37,000 lives.

Uysal has already lost one brother who died fighting for the PKK and says her father died after being tortured by the military.

“Because my brother joined the PKK in the early 1990s, the military burned down our home and we just managed to escape. My father was then arrested and tortured and died a month after he was released,” Uysal said.

Now the prospect of more violence looms, with the Turkish government declaring an all-out campaign to stamp out PKK fighters after rebels on Oct 21 ambushed a military unit.

Turkey is also threatening military action into the Kurdish-administered autonomous north of Iraq, where Ankara says 3,500 PKK rebels use bases to conduct cross-border attacks in Turkish territory.

Considered a terrorist organisation by Turkey, the US and the European Union, many here, like Uysal, nonetheless credit the PKK with fighting for the basic rights of Kurds.

She said she no longer believes violence is the best way to achieve the goals of the Kurdish people.

“I don’t want anyone else to die, be they army or PKK. I don’t want any mother to go through what I had to go through. I don’t want any more conflict,” Uysal said.—AFP