According to Kurdish media in Turkey, an Iranian Kurdish family traveled from Iran to Turkey three times to receive their son’s body, but Turkish authorities have not yet delivered it to them. The young man was a member of the PKK armed group who was killed in Sirnak.
An Iranian Kurdish woman, Shoret Nurizadê, whose young son was killed in clashes between the PKK terrorist group and the Turkish army in Sirnak, has traveled to Iran three times in the past year to verify the identity of her son. He has left Turkey, he faces new problems every time and he has not yet been able to receive his son’s body.
The family traveled three times from Iran to Turkey to collect the body of her son, but the authorities have still not handed it over to her
The body of Kamal Salimi, an Iranian member of the PKK (HPG), who lost his life in a clash with the Turkish army on the outskirts of the southeastern Turkish city of Sirnak, was initially kept for two weeks in the morgue of Sirnak Hospital. But after this time, the police, without informing the families, transported the bodies in armored vehicles and buried them in a mass grave. The families’ request for the bodies remains unanswered.
The body of Kamal Salimi, an Iranian member of the PKK, who was killed in a clash in the Silopi district of Sirnak on September 2, 2020, is one of them. After receiving the news of Kamal’s death, Salimi’s family left the Salmas region of Urmia in Iran for Sirnak, Turkey. The family arrived in Sirnak State Hospital on October 12, 2020 to identify the body. But they failed to receive the body and returned to Iran.
Some time later, at the request of the Turkish police, Kamal’s brother, Argesh Salimi, went to Sirnak for a second time to obtain a DNA sample. After his DNA test, he returned to Iran. But officials contacted him and said the DNA should be taken from Kamal’s mother. As a result, Kamal’s mother, Shoret Nourizadeh, went to Sirnak again last week for a DNA sample.
Nourizadeh has been fighting for a year to get her son’s body. “As soon as we heard the news of the death of our beloved son, the family members first went to Istanbul, from there to Diyarbakir, and then to Sirnak by bus,” she said.
“The first time we arrived, the police and the prosecutor sent us to Iran and said, “We do not take blood samples.”
“Then they called us and asked us to go to Sirnak,” he added. I told them I could not go because I was not feeling well and my son was leaving instead. They called my son and said, “You come and give a blood sample.” My son went and gave the sample. I prayed every day that the blood would match. “But after about three months, they called and said I should go and get a DNA sample.”
Shoret traveled to Sirnak again on October 6, but this time police told her, “You have donated blood once. “We can not pay for your tests over and over again.”
Ms. Nourizadeh insisted on giving a sample, and finally a blood sample was taken from her.
“It was an 11-hour trip,” she said. Do they not have a conscience? I came here to receive my son’s body despite all these problems.”
Shoret is a mother and wants to take her son’s body to Iran, but she is not allowed to. Apparently, the Iranian government does not allow it, or that’s what Turkish services told her. They told her that hundreds like her son have died, but the bodies have never been released to the families for them to try and cross the border.
“Even if I can’t take the body with me, I want to bury him in Van, the town closest to our house. At least I know he has a grave. I can not go to his grave every day, but I can go to the border once a month and sit by his grave.”
Thousands of Iranian members of the PKK and PJAK (the Iranian branch of the armed group) have been killed in the war with Turkey; But their bodies have not yet been returned to their families. Many of these bodies have been left by the PKK in the mountains, and some have been buried in Turkey without names or insignia.
