Nusaybin mayor Ayşe Gökkan has turned her protest against the building of the wall between Nusaybin and Qamişlo into a deathfast.

The mayor took this dramatic decision after she had gone to the "wall of shame" and started a hunger strike. She sat at the border supported by many citizens and work colleagues. Gökkan said she has not been informed at all by the central government about the decision to build such a wall. The council, she said, was simply ignored. The reaction of the people was immediate and steadily against the building of such "wall of shame".

Gökkan decided to turn her hunger strike into a deathfast. Colleagues of the mayor and workers at the council stopped working and walked to the border to express their support to the mayor.

Gökkan said that; “Kurds have cleared the border region of mines with their own bodies. Not accepting the borders put between each other, people have been crossing these borders for nearly half century today. This is an inhuman situation that the Kurdish people never accept”.

Gökkan underlined that the wall being built between Nusaybin and Qamişlo was directly related with the Turkish state's Rojava policy. The mayor said the Turkish state considered Rojava to be a threat against itself and tried to break the revolution people are achieving there. “The wall of shame aims to isolate the people of Rojava and to prevent Kurds from coming together with each other”, she said.

The mayor stressed that “the Turkish state and AKP government's Rojava policy bears hostility against Kurds with whom they are on the other hand having a democratic resolution process for making peace inside Turkey”. She said this made the Kurdish people lose their confidence in the resolution process and the AKP government's sincerity about answering Kurds' demands for their democratic rights.

A heavy police presence is reported at the border.