CIZRE, Turkey’s Kurdish region,— In Kurdish parlance, “going up to the mountains” has always meant joining the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), the armed group ensconced in the highlands of Iraqi Kurdistan. But in Cizre, a Kurdish town in Turkish Kurdistan on the border with Syria, the phrase may be losing its meaning amid a violent stand-off between Kurdish militants and Turkish security forces.

“We don’t need to join the PKK, because the PKK is the people,” says Ridvan, a young local, as he picks up his automatic rifle and prepares to go on patrol, a woollen balaclava pulled over his face.

Six of his friends, all in their late teens or early 20s and armed with machine guns follow him. One of them is carrying an rocket-propelled grenade. (Their names, and Ridvan’s, have been changed.) Some members of the squad refer to themselves as the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H). Others do not appear attached to the name. “Call us whatever you like,” says one. “There’s no difference between us and the PKK.”

Over the past month and a half, according to figures cited in the Turkish media, clashes in the Kurdish south-east have claimed the lives of at least 60 members of Turkey’s security forces, 88 militants, and 15 civilians. Police have also rounded up over 1,000 suspected PKK sympathisers in operations across Turkey and have declared over 100 areas in the south-east “special security zones”.

The fighting began when the PKK claimed responsibility for the assassination of two Turkish policemen in what it referred to as retaliation for a July 20 suicide attack linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) in a Kurdish town that killed 33 people, most of them Kurdish activists.

The PKK has accused the government of complicity and negligence in the attack. The government responded with a military offensive, including air strikes against PKK targets in northern Iraq, killing over 800 insurgents, according to the semi-official Anadolu Agency. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once credited with granting Turkey’s 15m Kurds new cultural rights, has since been accused of stoking violence in the south-east to shore up the nationalist vote ahead of snap elections this autumn.

The unrest reached Cizre at the end of July when Abdullah Ozdal, 23, was gunned down during street protests. Just days later another young man, Hasan Nerse, 17, was killed by police. Locals, as well as the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic party (HDP), allege he was shot at close range after being handcuffed.

Anticipating arrests, militants across Cizre raised barricades, dug ditches, and mined a number of roads to prevent police vehicles from entering their neighbourhoods. A policeman, Salih Huseyin Parca, was killed here two weeks ago in a PKK rocket attack. A civilian died when a roadside bomb planted by the militants exploded under his car.
The town shuts down early. “In the summer, this place used to be buzzing until one or two in the morning,” says Kadir Kunur, the HDP co-mayor. “Now it’s a ghost town at night.”

Armed groups appear to be in control of large parts of the city, as well as a number of other towns in the south-east, patrolling streets, raising new barricades, and staging regular attacks on police targets.

The sight of locals sporting rocket launchers inside the city has raised eyebrows in Cizre, where clashes between the PKK and the Turkish army claimed scores of lives in the 1990s.

“A few years ago, these kids were throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails at police, and some went to jail. Now they have guns,” says Cihan Olmez, a local journalist, who reports seeing well over 100 young gunmen in Cizre this month.

“The PKK is a organisation that learns,” says Nihat Ali Oczan, a former major in the Turkish army and security analyst. “In the 1990s their strategy did not work, but now they have adapted, they have decentralised, giving a bigger role to volunteers and local groups.”

“The difference this time around is both sides, but especially the PKK, have had time to prepare and train,” says Aliza Marcus, a Washington-based Kurdish expert.

The Cizre militants deny taking orders from the PKK leadership in northern Iraq, insisting their decision to take up arms was their own. They also have little patience for ceasefire calls made by their own politicians, including the

HDP, which won 92 per cent of the vote in Cizre during parliamentary elections this June and garnered 13 per cent of the vote nationally.

“Let them appeal for peace, but the only one who can make us lay down our guns is Apo,” says Hewal, another young militant, referring to the PKK’s jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan, who was central to peace talks but has been denied a chance to meet visiting delegations of HDP lawmakers, his main channel to the outside world, since April.

The war in Syria has added to the mobilisation of young Kurds in Cizre, with scores slipping across the nearby border to join the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a PKK offshoot, to fight Isis militants.

Not so Hewal and his group, who take positions atop a barricade looking out for approaching police vehicles. “We didn’t go to the mountains and we didn’t go to Syria, because we guessed this was coming,” says Ridvan. “Now the war is right here.”