AKP’s Deputy Parliamentary Speaker Ahmet Aydın spoke at an iftar dinner organized by the local AKP in Adıyaman’s Kahta district on June 11 and said “Violence and lynching are as ordinary as a drink of water,” but the public didn’t really see it, or it was mostly overlooked.

In Turkey, violent incidents are on the rise, people can’t tolerate each other, deaths dominate every news cycle. Of course, these are not separate from AKP’s policies of violence. To correctly understand the AKP, one has to understand the cycle of violence it has wrapped Turkish society in.

A youth shaped by street violence won’t hesitate to enact the same violence at every chance they get. Indeed, that is what we see every day. Society is reshaped with this newly created youth.

Maybe another thing to look at is the social media activity of these young people. These people have been ingrained with street violence, then they are taken as PÖH (special operations police) and JÖH (special operations gendarme) cadres, and this blood thirsty mob of murderers are stationed in Kurdistan and wherever else they are needed.

As everybody knows, the AKP government is waging an intense war in Kurdistan. Warring sides will have losses for sure -and they do, but what is important here is that the people who lost their lives are photographed and exposed to the public. Throughout history, in countless wars, warring sides have mostly respected each others’ dead. You don’t curse a body that is left without the soul. A government calling themselves “Muslim” disregarding the values of society this much shows how “Muslim” they are. These posts have zero moral value, and everybody knows that they are aimed at intimidating the people.

With these posts, we can understand why ISIS is this barbaric and vile, what they feed off of. The fundamental strategy of ISIS was to take control wherever they go through fear, and they did manage that. As they beheaded people or dragged them behind vehicles, they spread news of their atrocities before they arrived. We all watched people get burned alive on social media. And people were afraid, they left their homes and fled. People were made to surrender through these unethical and immoral practices. And the AKP is not above pushing people who believe violence to be sacred to kill and to die.

Recently we started to see JÖH and PÖH posts on social media as well. The AKP gangs that think the same as ISIS does burning people alive in Cizre basements and exposing the bodies of guerillas who lost their lives in operations in Northern Kurdistan are still fresh in our memories. It is known that they don’t mind going the extra mile and recording how they torture and execute people.

It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the goal of this method is to intimidate the people and hinder the Kurdish freedom movement. These posts are no different than ISIS posts. They both want to intimidate people into surrendering.

It is clear that this is a psychological war. Their goal is to grind down Kurdish society, guerrilla families in particular, and turn them away from the struggle. They are sending a message to all who want to defend their society’s values that they will end up like that. It is apparent that such an approach to government will not create any future for any part of society, least of all the Turks.