Security problem deepens with ambulance crisis in Turkey

U.S. Senator Hiram W. Johnson said in 1917 that the first casualty when war comes is truth. Johnson was an isolationist, against the U.S. entry to World War One. In the same year as he uttered those words, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson led his country into the Great War in the old continent.

When I read Cansu Çaml?bel's interview with Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch (HRW), I recalled Johnson's wise words.

After contacts with Turkish government officials, opposition parties - including the Kurdish problem-focused Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) - local human rights organizations, and civil society groups active in Turkey's east and southeast, Roth said the following: "It is very hard to get to the bottom of the facts. We were focusing particularly on getting medical access to injured people in a basement in Cizre. We were getting completely different stories from different people we spoke to about whether it was the government or the PKK that was not allowing in care. We don't know what's happening. But I can state the principle that both sides have a duty to commit to medical care to the injured. If there is an urgent military necessity it can be delayed for a short period. But in this case we are talking about hours. Some accommodation should be found to let injured people access medical care."

Roth was talking about what has become known as the "ambulance crisis" in Cizre, a town near Turkey's border with both Syria and Iraq. Cizre is the site of a rise in acts by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) in recent months, to which security forces have reciprocated with the heavy use of force.

The PKK claimed "self-rule" in three neighborhoods of Cizre, digging ditches, raising barricades and starting an armed campaign to...