Peace in Kurdistan Campaign issued a statement to condemn the murder of a Kurdish family in Konya.

The statement said: "The escalating violence committed against the Kurdish people claimed a family of seven in Konya, central Anatolia. The family was killed in their home, shot through the head. This is the latest in a series of racist attacks and murders of Kurds in Turkey. It conforms with a pattern of escalating violence directed and encouraged by the Turkish state. This sequence includes Operation Claw Lightning, when the Turkish Army invaded northern Iraq/South Kurdistan on 23 April 2021, the anniversary of the start in 1915 of the Armenian genocide committed by Ottoman Empire, when 1.5 million people were killed, followed by the murder of Deniz Poyraz in the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) offices in Izmir on 17 June."

The statement added: "Turkish authorities have dismissed the mass murder in Konya as if it were the result of an intra-family dispute. Turkish police have attacked people protesting against the rising number of murders of Kurds in Turkey. The AKP/MHP government is encouraging racism and violent attacks. It does so with rhetoric and actions in the context of a mounting political crisis for the government. The outcome of the course the Turkish government is taking could be socially and politically explosive." 

The statement continued: "The British, European and US governments have failed to condemn President Erdogan and his government’s criminalisation of all expressions of Kurdish cultural and political aspirations. They have failed to condemn Turkey for its illegal treatment of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurds, isolated in a Turkish gaol. They have failed to condemn the intended banning of the HDP, Turkey’s third largest parliamentary party. They have refused to stop arming a Turkish state that is killing Kurds in Turkey, Iraq and Syria and wherever else it can find them. This is encouraging the decent into barbarism and the British, European and US governments are culpable. All democratic and civilised people must make their voices heard in protest and begin to act. Stop the murderous Turkish state."