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Parts of Diyarbakir, the de facto capital of Turkey's Kurdish regions, have been under a Turkish army imposed curfew for two months now. Tom Stevenson reports from a destroyed city under siege.

Thousands left Sur, the historic walled center of Diyarbakir, on Wednesday clutching suitcases and the few possessions they could carry. On their way out residents filed past groups of Turkish soldiers and the armoured vehicles they will soon use to bulldoze their way through streets and homes alike in their fight against Kurdish militants holed up in the city.

The government says the operations, which it dubbed a "winter offensive" in November, are necessary to rout out militants linked to the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is fighting for an autonomous Kurdish region within Turkey and has been battling state forces in multiple Turkish provinces.

But for those who haven't already fled, electricity and water services are cut off and city officials and rights groups say the bodies of those killed - civilians and fighters alike - have lain in the streets for days because families are unable to recover the corpses or send them for burial.

Earlier this week, Turkey announced the area under curfew would be expanded to both sides of Gazi street, the main thoroughfare that bisects historic Diyarbakir, taking in a further five of Sur's 16 districts.

"Sadly the government is pushing forward this conflict," said Raci Bilici, head of the Diyarbakir branch of Turkey's Human Rights Association (IHD).

"Especially in Sur, many Kurdish people want self-governance because they feel they can't trust the state at this point, and the government and army are paying no heed to international law," Bilici told DW in the organization's office in the city.

Harrowing figures

In a report IHD presented in Diyarbakir on January 27, the organization documented 198 civilians killed during the curfews, as a result of fighting and the conditions, across the south-east, including 43 women and 33 children. Of those civilians, 40 were killed in Diyarbakir's Sur district.

The central command of the Turkish army claims it has killed more than 500 "PKK terrorists" in Diyarbakır and Şırnak since December 15.

"The only solution is a ceasefire from both sides," Bilici said.

The Turkish state has been carrying out military operations across the country's predominantly Kurdish south-east since July last year, after the People's Democratic Party (HDP), a political party representing the Kurdish rights movement, won enough seats in a general election to pass the threshold needed to enter the Turkish parliament for the first time in history.

After the elections, the security services rounded up hundreds of HDP activists and party members, particularly in the south-east where the party won huge electoral majorities. Local residents in the most active Kurdish neighborhoods organized into armed groups known as the YDG-H, and responded by digging trenches and erecting barricades, declaring the areas off-limits to Turkish security forces and going on to announce "self rule" in the neighborhoods.