Diyarbakir, Turkey: It was the end of the day in an underground tavern with no name. Beneath a domed Ottoman ceiling, with the lights down low and the music muted, patrons could just hear a distant rumbling through the basalt block walls, five centuries old.
"Bulldozers," explained the waiter, who also had no name. He was clearing the table. The bulldozers were clearing the rubble away from what used to be residential neighbourhoods in the Sur municipality of Diyarbakir city, the informal Kurdish capital and former stronghold of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK.
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On a video monitor a soulful version of Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me to the End of Love" played, the audio coming from speakers scattered in nooks. The waiter turned up the volume with a remote.
It has been more than a year since the fighting started in Sur, with young supporters of the PKK guerrillas digging trenches and manning barricades, and more than four months since that fighting ended, with at least 120 civilians, PKK and Turkish security forces killed and scores of homes and buildings destroyed.
![Locals inspect damage in parts of the historic district of Diyarbakir last May.](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/k/5/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
The Turkish army and police won, but victory brought a landscape more reminiscent of Syria. An area of about 10 hectares in the old city has been cleared of rubble so far, leaving a featureless circular gash on aerial maps. The damage is mostly invisible from street level though, because alleyways leading up to the most devastated areas have been walled up where they intersect with streets that have reopened for business. Three of Sur's neighbourhoods still remain under curfew.
The only apparent entry road to the levelled heart of Sur has a huge curtain strung from building to building across it, and a Scorpion armoured police vehicle parked in front painted a menacing shade of black instead of the usual white.
Sur was one of the most pro-PKK neighbourhoods of the heavily pro-PKK city of Diyarbakir, the biggest Kurdish city in the world and the unofficial capital of Turkey's eastern Kurdish regions. Kurds make up an estimated sixth of Turkey's population, and most of them either openly support the outlawed PKK, or vote for the legal party, the Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, or HDP, which shares much of the guerrillas' political platform.
The name "Sur" means "wall", and refers to the five-metre-thick ancient Roman walls, longer than Jerusalem's and better preserved than Rome's, which loop around the municipality and embrace the older parts of Diyarbakir. Once a magnet for tourists, Sur is now festooned with numerous little police posts, parked Scorpions everywhere, and plainclothes officers sauntering around with assault rifles and holstered pistols.
![Diyarbakir residents on a nearby rooftop view damage to their city.](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/k/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
About the only foreign visitors to Sur these days are occasional European leftists showing solidarity, and foreign journalists, who seem to get arrested on sight - two on a recent Saturday, just a day before my visit.
"You journalist?" asked the waiter, who preferred to be nameless than be jailed. "Don't worry, you can trust us."
![A close-up view of the damage in the historic district of Diyarbakir.](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/l/k/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
He recommended an Assyrian red, a young wine from a combination of local grape varieties, okuzgozu and bogazkere, served slightly chilled in a large goblet. "Homemade, 100 per cent organic." He poured it from a bottle with no label.
On the video monitor "We Are the World" started playing. Possibly that was the waiter's idea. He got right to the point without being asked a question. "Every day my friends are going to the mountain, teachers, lawyers, doctors, so many," he said. "There is no one who believes in talking anymore."
![A bus is damaged by a roadside bomb in Diyarbakir on January 16. The bomb killed three policemen and wounded two ...](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/j/v/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
"Going to the mountain" is what people say here about joining the PKK, whose redoubts are in the rugged mountains of northern Iraq. Nearly every family in Kurdistan has someone up there, or knows someone, or has had someone come back down to be buried.
The fighting in Sur was mirrored in half a dozen other Kurdish towns and districts, the first time the 40-year-old Kurdish conflict in Turkey had erupted on such a scale in urbanised areas. While the fighting mostly ended last northern spring, arrests of people accused of supporting the PKK have gone on ever since, punctuated by terrorist bombings blamed on the PKK.
![Turkish authorities stand outside a damaged police station after an explosion near Diyarbakir in August. Kurdish rebels ...](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/m/f/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
After a failed coup in July - which had nothing to do with Kurds - the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and used those powers to greatly increase arrests of mainstream politicians, especially in Diyarbakir.
The Kurdish journalist Sedat Yilmaz pulled up a chair and the waiter also poured him a glass of the Assyrian red. Yilmaz's online news agency - like nearly all Kurdish publications - has been shut down under the emergency powers.
![Residents stand by belongings they salvaged from their homes in Diyarbakir.](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/k/z/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
"Eman Dilo", a tune by Kurdish folk singer Mihemed Sexo, was up on the screen.
Yilmaz had tears in his eyes, but not from the music. "This is my first time back to Sur since it all happened," he said.
![Politicians from the pro-Kurdish Peoples's Democratic Party (HDP) march as they protest against the detention of ...](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/l/p/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
The tavern was half full. Ten other customers were at several tables but the waiter said there was nothing to worry about in talking to any of them. The only pro-government people in Sur, he said, were the police.
And there were no plainclothes officers in the tavern with no name.
![Turkish soldiers carry the coffin of Lieutenant Murat Taylan Oncel, 33, killed in an October mortar attack by Kurdish ...](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/m/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
Anyway, said Yilmaz, "Nowadays we don't even worry about arrest. We worry about death."
Four Kurdish men in their late 20s, all old friends, were at one table sipping from curved tea glasses, and at first wanted to give their full names, but then thought better of it. They had all recently lost their jobs in the purges of more than 100,000 state employees that followed the failed coup.
![Satellite imagery shows the Sur district in Diyarbakir on November 8, 2015, before the major curfew put into effect on ...](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/k/0/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
Two were teachers who had participated in a one-day protest strike, and all strikers were fired. One was an auditor for a government office who was forced out of his job because, he said, he subscribed to a now-banned Kurdish newspaper. Mahmut, who gave his first name only, was a manager in a government office, purged just three days earlier without any clear reason. He was told his continued employment would be "inconvenient", he said.
"They cannot discipline us by taking our bread from our hands," Mahmut said. "We want our collective rights. They don't want any democratic space for anyone, they destroyed every peaceful means and our young people, they have no other solution, they're going to the mountain, there is no other way."
![Damage in the historic district of Diyarbakir in May of last year.](/web/20170126070852im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/z/b/k/l/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gthq3w.png/1485410872851.jpg)
One of the other men, the Kurdish newspaper reader (who has a master's degree in Kurdish literature), reminded everyone of the bulldozers.
"Just near us, all of Sur is demolished, almost a year and they're still clearing it up," he said. "They're still finding pieces of human bodies in the rubble."
Everyone lapsed into silence, staring at the dregs in their glasses. Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" played.
New York Times