The extermination campaign of the Turkish army against the graves of fallen guerrilla fighters is growing more and more in Northern Kurdistan. After a serious increase of systematic destruction in April in the provinces of Van and Amed (Diyarbakir), the same acts have now spread to other regions. A large number of guerrilla graves have been destroyed in the cemeteries in the countryside of Bingöl province.

The grave of female guerrilla Sevda Serinyel is also affected by the extermination campaign. The fighter of the People's Liberation Army (Halkın Kurtuluş Ordusu, HKO), the armed arm of the Maoist Communist Party (MKP), died in August 2017 in the Ovacık district in the province of Dersim during clashes with Turkish operational units. Her remains are buried in the village cemetery of Karer in Adaklı district.

Serinyel’s family was called and summoned to military station on April 14. The outpost commander asked the family who had put up that tombstone and written the inscriptions on it. The family was then ordered to remove the tombstone. The family rejected the order, saying that there was no inscription on the tombstone that constituted a crime.

After this, Turkish soldiers desecrated Serinyel’s grave and removed the inscriptions “Mercan” and “We died so much to live”.

After the incident, soldiers repeatedly called the family, putting pressure on them to remove the photo on the tombstone. Family members of Serinyel then started to keep watch at the cemetery to prevent another attack.

On the other hand, Turkish soldiers desecrated some graves of HPG guerrillas in the villages of Gözeler (İbrahiman), Karer and 9 other villages inhabited by Alevi people. Soldiers then called families and told them to “remove the broken stones”.

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