Racists in Turkey attack a Kurdish family

A Kurdish family from Iraqi Kurdistan has been subjected to a racist attack in Turkey’s southern Kurdish province of Mersin, Mezopotamya news agency reported on Friday, May 14.

Three people cursing and making grey wolf signs, attacked the family with stones and batons and one seriously, two have been injured, it said.

The attackers who were taken into custody by the security forces in the following hours, claimed that the fighting erupted because of a traffic accident, the news agency said.

The attackers hit the man who was seriously injured with stones on his head and face several times and that the man has fainted in blood, a citizen named Cihan Kutluk, who helped the family after the attack, said.

The other family member who was attacked was a 12-13-year-old child, Kutluk said.

“The person whose name I later found out to be Mehmet Fatih Oflaz got a huge stone in his hand and hit the head and face of the driver of the white car [belonging to the Kurdish family] four times. The person lost his balance and collapsed on the barriers next to the road. They later tried to throw him down from the cliff, and the man fainted in the last blow,” Kutluk said.

The eyewitness said that although the Kurdish man had been already unconscious and blood was coming all over his body, perpetrators continued to hit him.

Kutluk said that one of the attackers had threatened the people at the scene of the incident with killing them, should they give testimony with regard to the incident.

Kutluk later took the severely injured man in his car and drove to the hospital. He later submitted video footage showing the license plate of the perpetrators and the severely injured man to the gendarmerie.

The “grey wolf” sign, in which the middle and ring fingers are placed on the thumb with the remaining two fingers sticking up like a wolf’s ears, has long been associated with the Grey Wolves, an extreme nationalist street movement and is also used by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) far-right coalition ally, Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

In 2019, a group of tourists from the Kurdistan Region of Iraq had been also attacked by fascists in Turkey's Black Sea province of Trabzon. The gendarmerie had at the time detained the Kurdish tourists and released them a day later.

Reporter's code: 50101

News Code 887

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