The number of Kurdish villages depopulated by Turkey is estimated at around 3,000. Since 1984, the Turkish military has embarked on a campaign to eradicate the Kurdistan Workers Party; by the year 2000, some 30,000 people had died and two million Kurdish refugees had been driven out of their homes into cities.

Background

Until the 1970s, about 70% of the Kurdish population of Turkish Kurdistan inhabited one of the approximately 20,000 Kurdish villages. But by 1985, only 58% of the population were still living in the rural areas and much of the countryside in Kurdish populated regions had been depopulated by the Turkish government, with Kurdish civilians moving to local centers such as Diyarbakır, Van, and Şırnak, as well as to the cities of western Turkey and even to western Europe. The causes of the depopulation were in most cases the Turkish state's military operations and to a lesser extent attacks by the PKK on villages it deemed defended by collaborators of the Turkish Government. Often Kurds had to decide whether to become a member of the state-sponsored Village Guards, be deported or else they could face attacks by the PKK. Human Rights Watch has documented many instances where the Turkish military forcibly evacuated villages, destroying houses and equipment to prevent the return of the inhabitants. An estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Southeast Anatolia were virtually wiped from the map, representing the displacement of more than 378,000 people. During the 1990s, the Turkish military reportedly deployed the US manufactured helicopters Sikorsky and Cobra to drive out the Kurdish population from the villages.

Depopulated and demolished towns and villages

According to the Humanitarian Law Project, 2,400 Kurdish villages have been destroyed and 18,000 Kurds have been executed by the Turkish government. Other estimates have put the number of destroyed Kurdish villages at over 4,000. In total, up to 3,000,000 people (mainly Kurds) have been displaced. The Kurdish Human Rights Project divides the depopulation (evacuation) of villages in 5 phases. An estimated 1,000,000 people are still internally displaced.

Timeline

1992

Government compensation

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre stated in 2009 that the Turkish government has taken "notable" steps to address the internal displacement situation. These include commissioning a national survey on the number and conditions of IDPs, drafting a national IDP strategy, adopting law on compensation, and putting together a comprehensive pilot action plan in Van Province and 13 other south-eastern provinces addressing rural and urban situations of displacement.

Depopulated villages (as of 2023)

List of villages which have been depopulated as of 2023:

Villages repopulated after 2007

List of villages that have been repopulated after 2007: