THE birds of Diyarbakir are doing very little perching these days. Just when they manage to settle on a satellite dish, a blast of artillery or machine-gun fire sends them dashing skyward. The humans who live here are distraught, too. “We can barely get any sleep,” says a woman walking her son to school just outside the Sur district, the city’s historic centre, where Turkish forces are battling militants aligned with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
In July the PKK, which has waged a decades-long war for Kurdish self-rule, returned to killing Turkish police and soldiers after a two-year ceasefire. The group accused Turkey of tacitly supporting Islamic State (IS). (The jihadists had tried to wipe out the Syrian Kurdish border town of Kobane as Turkish soldiers looked on, and have killed scores of Kurds in bomb attacks across Turkey.) Turkey responded with air raids on PKK camps and a crackdown in the largely Kurdish south-east. Since then, fighting in Diyarbakir and other Kurdish cities has killed at least 230 Turkish security officers, up to 240 civilians and hundreds of PKK fighters, says the International Crisis Group, a think-tank. Last week a…