Families mourn children caught in crossfire in Turkey's southeast 

The body of Rozerin Cukur, a 17-year old Kurdish student, is believed to be lying on a street in the Diyarbakir district of Sur 

Photographs of missing children are shown on the walls of the offices of the Diyarbakir branch of the Turkish Human Rights Association (MEE/Murat Bayram)

Mustafa Chukur and his wife holding a picture of their daughter (MEE/Murat Bayram) 

Alex MacDonald-Tuesday 26 January 2016

Rozerin Cukur was a 17-year-old Kurdish journalism student from the city of Diyarbakir in Turkey's southeast.

In the 1990s, before Rozerin was born, her family were one of the many hundreds of thousands of Kurds who fled their villages when the guerrilla war between the Kurdish separatist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Turkish state broke out.

In recent years, as a ceasefire came into effect between the government and the PKK, the Cukurs were trying rebuild their village, destroyed during the fighting - and Rozerin had started to write a book about their efforts and the village that had never been her home.

"She had never seen our village, but was always asking questions about it to learn what happened," her father, Mustafa, told Middle East Eye this week.

But in late December, the teenager left to go to a friend's home to study and she never returned home.

More than a week later, her family received a call: their daughter had been killed and her body was lying in a street in the nearby district of Sur where, caught in the middle of ongoing clashes between Kurdish militants and Turkish security services, it has remained ever since. 

The 17-year-old is one of 198 civilians that have been killed as a result of fighting in the southeast since August, according to the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey. Many of those killed are young people and are, like Rozerin, from a new generation of Kurds who were born in the cities to former refugee families.

Though many of the youth killed in the southeast are protesters or armed militants, others are simply bystanders.

With continuing sieges, curfews and militant violence, many of their bodies have been left in the streets, with relatives unable to collect them.

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