Word: turkish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...morning, men dug three small holes in the ground on the slopes of Dugen mountain, barely inside the Turkish border with Iraq and near the town of Uludere. Crying softly, a young woman approached through heavy rain, opened a blanket held close to her chest and handed the body of an infant swathed in a burial cloth to a man in a large turban. He laid the small body in a hole already filling with water; he and others shoveled in earth. The men crouched and, as one prayed aloud, murmured after him in low voices. Their faces, and those...
Worse, distribution of whatever goods have come close to the Turkish frontier has been held up by some appalling snafus. Late in the week 21 planeloads of relief supplies had been delivered to the eastern Turkish town of Diyarbakir, but much of the material failed to get past the airport. Other supplies are rotting in the rain aboard trucks stuck on the dirt roads of southeastern Turkey...
...Turkish authorities say they have been overwhelmed by the sheer mass of refugees. The total number of northern Kurds and southern Shi'ites fleeing toward Iran or Turkey is estimated at almost 2 million. Many, like the 200,000 or so on the mountaintops around Turkish Hakkari, can be reached only by dirt roads often made impassable by mud. "We can send aid only on mules," says a Turkish official...
...Kurds on Dugen mountain are not permitted to descend into the valley below because that would mean allowing them deeper into Turkey. So about 20 Turkish doctors waiting with medicine and ambulances in Cizre, 29 miles away, cannot reach them; the vehicles cannot navigate the dirt track up the mountain. Every once in a while, when the track dries out a bit, Turkish soldiers send up a tractor-trailer piled with loaves of bread -- the only food that reaches the refugees. On the mountaintop, the trailer is swarmed by struggling, fighting Kurds. The Turkish soldiers fire shots...
Caught between a furious army and a closed border, the Kurds are forced to cling to their cold, granite friends. Supplies must traverse precipitous land routes to reach them, hampered in part by the dilapidation of the two bridges in the area of the Turkish border. Ankara, however, does not appear to be in any hurry to come in with repairs...