DIYARBAKIR, Turkey — It’s been a hundred years since so many Armenians were killed in this part of southeastern Turkey. But Sona Mnatsakanyan is still nervous about visiting.

“I am a bit scared. We know what happened here and that up until today it remains unresolved. That gives the narrow streets of this city something creepy,” she says, standing in the courtyard of an old renovated inn in the historical heart of Diyarbakir.

So apprehensive was Sona, a lecturer from the Armenian capital Yerevan who now lives in Istanbul, that she and her friend told her taxi driver on the way from the airport that they were from Georgia.

She came here, like many other Armenians, to commemorate the centenary of what some say was the first genocide of the 20th century — the mass killing and deportation of some 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire. It began in 1915 and continued throughout World War I.

The events still haunt Armenians today. And for many of them the pain is made worse by modern-day Turkey’s refusal to recognize the killings as a genocide.

But here in the Kurdish-dominated southeast, things are different. Many Armenians were killed at the hands of Kurds, but unlike the rest of Turkey, the Kurds — who have since faced severe repression themselves — are beginning to atone.

The killings

Exactly how many Armenians were living in southeastern cities like Diyarbakir, Van, Bitlis and Mus before the genocide is hard to tell, but they were no minority. The Armenians were just one of many groups who lived on these plains and in these mountains. They lived alongside the Assyrians, the Arabs, and the Kurds.

But these days Diyarbakir, the largest city in the southeast, has no Armenian community left. Those who survived the genocide migrated to Istanbul or abroad, and the families who remained mostly left the city in the 1950s and 60s. There are only the so-called “hidden Armenians”: the descendants of those who converted to Islam to save their lives, or of Armenian children who were saved from the massacres by Ottoman soldiers and Kurds and were brought up as Muslims.

The Armenian genocide officially began in April 1915, but massacres against Armenians were already taking place by the late 19th century. As World War I gathered pace, the Ottoman Empire tightened its grip on the regions under its control. Some Armenian groups sided with Russia, an enemy of the Ottomans. So all Armenians were targeted.

They were either massacred or marched toward the southern districts of the empire, like Aleppo in modern-day Syria. Many of them died of exhaustion and murders along the way.

These kinds of stories are part of everybody’s family history here. Nurcan Baysal, a researcher and writer in Diyarbakir, remembers the stories her grandmother told her.

“There was this young handsome Armenian man that many girls fancied. He was, along with other Armenian men, taken to a hill outside the village. The girls, including my grandmother, went to see what would happen to them. The men were murdered with shovels and axes.”

Baysal has no problem calling the events of 1915 genocide. “If you don’t call things by their name, the risk of it happening again increases,” she says.

The Turkish government, however, denies the conflict rose to the level of genocide. Turkish officials argue the number of people killed was far fewer than the 1.5 million commonly cited by scholars. And they say many of those killed were victims — like everyone else at the time — of the war and unrest that engulfed the whole region.

Now as more leaders recognize the genocide, Turkey is coming under increasing pressure to do the same.

Last Sunday the Pope marked the 100th anniversary by using the word genocide in a speech on the subject. Turkey immediately recalled its ambassador to the Vatican and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a strong rebuke: “I want to warn the Pope to not repeat this mistake and condemn him."

The Kurds see it differently

Baysal, who as part of her research talked to many Kurds in the region about the events a century ago, says their outlook on the killings have changed partly because of their own experience in Turkey.

“Soon after the Armenian genocide, the Kurds too became victims of state policies. There have been many massacres against Kurds, starting right after the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Although we Kurds are still here, we and the Armenians share a fate,” she says.

A woman cries as Armenian people gather around a chasm in the mountain during a commemoration ceremony at a site called 'Dudan' near Diyarbakir, and believed to be a mass grave of the Armenian Genocide, on April 22, 2015.

In the early 1980s, some Kurds organized themselves in an armed rebellion against the Turkish state, fighting under the banner of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The group has fought for three decades for greater autonomy for the Kurdish ethnic group in Turkey and an end to repressive government policies.

An all out war between the PKK and the Turkish state followed. In the 1990s, thousands of civilians were killed in the fighting. Government forces burned Kurdish villages. There were hundreds of disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

“In those years, elderly Kurds began to share their memories of the Armenian genocide with their children and grandchildren. There were Kurds who protected their Armenian neighbors. But many people assisted the perpetrators by rounding people up or by killing them,” Baysal said.

“Many Kurds felt ashamed of that. I feel ashamed of it. I travel a lot, and when I meet Armenians, I always apologize for what the Kurds have done.”

Not all Kurds agree on the need to apologize to Armenians. Many Kurds argue that their ancestors who carried out the killings were merely bought by the state.

But Abdullah Demirbas, a Kurdish politician, says the Kurd’s own fight for freedom and national identity since the 1980s has helped them come to terms with their role in the Armenian genocide.

“I believe that if a person is conscious of his national identity, he feels no need to suppress another nation. The people who participated in the genocide … were not sufficiently aware of their Kurdish identity,” he said.

Now that the Kurds have become more aware, Demirbas said they have an obligation to grant others the right as well to live their identities fully. This includes Armenians and other groups like Assyrians, Arabs, and religious minorities like Alevis and Yezidis.

“Part of this vision is apologizing for our part in the genocide. The Kurds may have been used by the state […] but they should have resisted. Our silence makes us guilty.”

Demirbas has backed up his words with action. During his time as mayor of Diyarbakir’s old town, the municipality began disseminating information in Kurdish and Armenian, where before there was only Turkish. The Surp Giragos Armenian church was also restored and is to be the center point of this year’s commemorations.

People attend a concert by Armenian pianist Raffi Bedrosya at Surp Grigaros church in Diyarbakir on April 23, 2015, during a commemoration marking the 100th anniversary of the massacre of 1,5 million Armenians by Ottoman forces.

Some Armenians campaign for the right to return to the lands where they once lived. Demirbas says they should be welcomed.

“If we call these lands ‘Kurdistan’ as a land where only Kurds live, or ‘Armenia’ as a land where only Armenians live, what difference would there be between us and the Turkish state? We have to create a ground for living together on these lands, which belong to all of us. We should no longer rely on the nation-state concept, which created these massacres in the first place.”

As such, Diyarbakir continues to open its arms to Armenians.

American-Armenian musicians Onnik Dinkjian and his son Ara held a concert in the city’s theater recently. The Dinkjian family escaped from Diyarbakir during the genocide. It was an emotional performance. Kurds and Armenians filled every seat in the theater. People stood in the aisles and on the stairs. Many danced.

Sona and her friend Anna Davtyan, a poet who is also originally from Yerevan, were at the concert too.

“Diyarbakir is not an Armenian city anymore. But I have come to love it, wandering through the streets, looking at the black walls, the wooden doors,” she said after the concert.

“After spending a few days here, I no longer feel the need to say I am from Georgia. But who exactly are the Kurds apologizing to? There are no Armenians left here. Maybe the apologies are more important for the Kurds themselves than they are to us. They need to do it this way, so they can continue on their path.”

BAGHDAD — Rare twin suicide bombings struck a market Thursday in central Baghdad, killing at least 32 people and injuring 110 more, according to Iraq's health ministry.

The blasts came midmorning as people were shopping for secondhand clothes at a market in Tayaran Square. Video footage showed the second explosion ripping through the air as sirens blared and casualties were raced away in motorized rickshaws. Other images from the scene showed bodies strewn on the ground amid upturned tables and piles of unsold jackets.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Although security forces continue to fight ragtag bands of Islamic State militants in Iraq’s peripheral regions, major security incidents in the capital are rare. Thursday’s attack was the deadliest to strike the capital in years. The last mass-casualty attack, striking the same square, took place in January 2018 and killed 27 people.

Khalid al-Mahna, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said the suicide bomber detonated his explosives after attracting a crowd by feigning sickness in the middle of the market.

When shoppers came to help those injured by the first blast, he said, someone else detonated a second bomb.

Thursday’s attack shattered a sense of relative security in the capital, raising questions about the Iraqi security forces’ preparedness in the face of a militant threat that has been diminished but by no means erased. Army units and special forces continue to arrest alleged Islamic State members at their homes in urban centers and say that sleeper cells remain prepared to mount strikes.

In a statement, an Iraqi military spokesman, Yahya Rasool, said the bombers detonated their explosives as they were pursued by security forces. Rasool said that his unit had received information suggesting that an attack was coming. No uniformed security forces appeared to be visible in the surveillance video footage that showed the first blast.

Although a security breach in the heart of Baghdad is rare, experts cautioned that Thursday’s attack underscored the challenge of ending militant violence without far-reaching changes to how the country is governed.

“This is not to say that this is the beginning of extreme conflict in Iraq, or violence, but it is a reminder that there is yet to be a sustainable solution to govern the socio-economy and politics of Iraq,” said Renad Mansour, a senior research fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Program. “As long as there’s that incoherence, I think we expect, sadly, for these attacks to continue and increase in time because we’re just looking back as to what happened before under a similar context.”

The attack occurred at a time when life for ordinary Iraqis is becoming harder. The coronavirus pandemic has tanked global energy prices, plunging Iraq’s oil-dependent economy into crisis and forcing a devaluation of the currency. Unemployment has increased. The price of basic goods is rising, too.

While street cleaners swept blood from scene, families combed the site for relatives last seen there. Ahmed Qassim, 32, showed street vendors a photograph of his 20-year-old cousin, Abdullah, last seen peddling T-shirts. They said he had been taken away in an ambulance.

An elderly man with gray hair and spectacles wandered confused and distraught along a street leading to the marketplace. “Where is my son?” he shouted. “He’s just a kid who sells sunglasses and wants to live. Where is he?”

As he walked, young men were sifting through piles of clothes for body parts. For a moment, a teenager crouched to lay out candles for the dead. “We’re still looking for bodies, man,” a friend chided him. The teenager was stone-faced. “We got used to death,” he replied, as he lit the wicks one by one.

Compounding Iraq’s multiple crises, the country has also emerged again as a stage for geopolitical tensions, with Iran-backed Shiite militias launching rockets at U.S. diplomatic and military-linked targets and U.S. forces responding with airstrikes.

Three Americans and one Briton have been killed in those attacks. But for the most part, the dead and injured have been Iraqis caught in the crossfire.

After the Islamic State’s battlefield defeat here in 2017, the United States is reducing its troop presence to 2,500, with most of those performing advisory functions as the Iraqi military takes the lead in what remains of the fight.

“ISIS will be trying to make this part of a campaign to disrupt daily life and show it is still relevant and able to carry out extreme violence despite its territorial defeat, said Sajad Jiyad, an Iraq-based fellow at the Century Foundation.

“Attacks hark back to painful memories when attacks on civilians were common. The government needs to restore confidence quickly and show it will not allow ISIS bombings to become a regular occurrence again.”

As the winter sun set Thursday, the funerals began. In a narrow alleyway by Tayaran Square, shock and anger were palpable. Young men held coffins aloft. Among the dead was a 32-year-old named Maher al-Swerawi, who died in the first explosion. His friend Hani Sabri ran out to reach his body, friends said. Sabri, who was 30, was killed in the second blast.

As the crowd moved along, one voice rang out above the din. It was Hani’s mother.

“Hani, I told you not to go. Why did you go there?” she cried, her voice breaking.

“Why did you go?”

A combination of rising bloodshed and increased criminal activity at displaced-persons camps in northeastern Syria has gotten the attention of U.S. officials, who fear security forces are losing the battle to contain supporters of the Islamic State terror group.

U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of the intelligence, blame recent killings — including at least one beheading and multiple execution-style killings — on IS operatives and supporters, warning they are now rapidly turning camps like the densely populated al-Hol into a base for the terror group’s operations.

And they caution the brutal violence, long a hallmark of IS, is just part of the problem.

“Security services at al-Hol have struggled to address ISIS recruitment and fundraising,” one U.S. official told VOA, using an acronym for the terror group.

The camp’s perimeter is also proving to be increasingly porous.

“ISIS has moved ISIS families out of al-Hol using smuggling networks in Hasakah and Deir el-Zour provinces, and smuggled weapons into the camps in recent months,” the official added.

Financial network node

Other officials warn al-Hol, home to more than 60,000 mostly women and children, has already solidified its role as a key node for the terror group’s financial network, helping to move its estimated $100 million in cash reserves.

“The group often gathered and sent funds to intermediaries in Turkey who smuggle the cash into Syria or send the funds to hawalas [money transfer systems] operating in the camp,” the U.S. Treasury Department warned in a recent memo.

And where IS itself may lack capabilities, criminal networks have stepped in, seeing an opportunity to profit.

Intelligence from U.N. member states suggests just sneaking people out of the displaced-persons camps can be big business, with smugglers charging $2,500 to $3,000 per person for those at al-Hol, all the way up to $14,000 for those at the newer and more secure Roj facility.

“Bad things are happening in al-Hol,” Jasmine El-Gamal, a former Middle East adviser for the U.S. Defense Department, told a virtual forum Tuesday.

'Troubling trend'

“The rate of escape and smuggling out of al-Hol of women and the money that's coming in and out through various systems, it really shows that there is a real will on the part of ISIS and its supporters to really use al-Hol as a new hub and as a new base of operations,” El-Gamal, now with the Atlantic Council, said. “Whether that's women who are being radicalized or who are radicalizing the next generation, their children, it’s just a very troubling trend.”

Just how many IS family members and IS supporters have escaped from the camps is not clear.

According to Information compiled by the pro-Kurdish Rojava Information Center, an estimated 200 people sneaked out of al-Hol in 2020, though researchers told VOA it was possible that some escapes went unnoticed or were not reported.

So far this year, at least 20 people have tried to have smugglers get them out of the camps, though none of those efforts were successful, in part because of a ramped-up campaign by the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

That effort appears to be making some progress. The SDF, assisted by coalition intelligence and air support, arrested three human smugglers in January and another eight so far in February.

Additional SDF operations have targeted the IS-linked smuggling networks farther afield, resulting in a handful of arrests along the border with Iraq.

Too much to do

Still, there are concerns that the situation in northeastern Syria is not sustainable, with the SDF being asked to provide security for displaced-persons camps and for about a dozen makeshift prisons holding 10,000 IS fighters — while also battling the terror group’s remnants.

“The longer that tens of thousands of residents remain without the possibility of returning home, the more challenging it becomes to ensure their safety from criminal and terrorist elements who seek to exploit camp residents,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA.

“It is critically important that countries identify their nationals in the camp and repatriate them with haste,” the spokesperson added.

While a host of countries have taken back IS family members over the past several months, a recent report by the U.S. Defense Department inspector general warned “many [countries] remained reluctant to repatriate at all.”

And some analysts warn that it may be getting to the point at which the international community can't turn back the inroads IS is making.

“You look at how ISIS sort of grew in different iterations over time, drawing on previous camps, namely in Iraq during the height of the Iraq War, when the Americans were there, and was able to not only get guys out who could rejoin the fight but inculcate new members,” said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research group.

“You're seeing the same sort of dynamic here, where you can see the next generation or two of jihadi leaders could very well be in these camps right now,” he said.

BAGHDAD (AP) — Explosive-laden drones that targeted Saudi Arabia’s royal palace in the kingdom’s capital last month were launched from inside Iraq, a senior Iran-backed militia official in Baghdad and a U.S. official said.

Speaking to The Associated Press this week, the militia official said three drones were launched from Iraqi-Saudi border areas by a relatively unknown Iran-backed faction in Iraq and crashed into the royal complex in Riyadh on Jan. 23, exacerbating regional tensions.

Attacks on the Saudi capital have been sporadic amid the kingdom’s yearslong war against neighboring Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Earlier this month, the rebels targeted an airport in southwestern Saudi Arabia with bomb-laden drones, causing a civilian plane on the tarmac to catch fire.

The Iran-aligned Houthi rebels, however, denied carrying out the attack that targeted Saudi Arabia’s Yamama Palace on Jan. 23.

The comments by the senior Iraqi militia official mark the first time an Iran-backed group has acknowledged that Iraq was the origin of the attack, and points to the challenge Baghdad faces in halting attacks by Iranian-backed militia factions in Iraq.

It followed a claim of responsibility allegedly issued by a little-known group called Awliya Wa’ad al-Haq, or “The True Promise Brigades,” that circulated on social media, calling it retaliation for a suicide bombing claimed by the Islamic State group in a Baghdad shopping district on Jan. 21.

The militia official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the attack, said the drones came “in parts from Iran and were assembled in Iraq, and were launched from Iraq.” He did not disclose where along the border the drones were launched and did not provide more details about the group claiming the attack.

Iran-backed groups have splintered significantly since the Washington-directed strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis in Baghdad more than a year ago. Both were key in commanding and controlling a wide array of Iran-backed groups operating in Iraq.

Since their deaths, militias have become increasingly unruly and disparate. Some Washington-based analysts argue the militias have become splintered only to allow them to claim attacks under different names to mask their involvement.

A U.S. official said Washington believes the Jan. 23 attack on the Yamama Palace was launched from inside Iraq. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not elaborate or say how the U.S. came to this conclusion.

An Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said the U.S. intelligence was shared with Iraq’s government.

Launching a strike from Iraq would pose a challenge to Saudi air defenses, now focused on threats from Iran to the northeast and Yemen from the south. Such drones also are small enough and fly low enough to the ground to not be picked up on radar.

The attack comes as Iraq seeks to deepen economic ties with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies over a variety of investment projects. Last week, Iraq’s President Barham Salih visited the United Arab Emirates and Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein visited Saudi Arabia this week, apparently to discuss the attack.