While the heat wave in the Eastern Mediterranean is also causing massive forest fires in Turkey, the Turkish state has cynically "poured oil on the fire", taking advantage of the circumstances of the heat to launch an attack on several villages in Dersim in its war against the people by means of fires.
After an armoured car was attacked at a police station in the Hozat district, the military bombed parts of the villages of Dereköy and Gedik. As a result, a forest fire developed and spread to the villages of Ormanli, Boydaş and Çakmaklı. Revolutionaries and members of democratic mass organisations in Dersim set out with the public to the villages to contain the spread of the fire. Groups that went to Hozat were stopped at the border of the district by police units and the way was blocked. Later, when only a ten-member delegation of journalists was allowed entry, soldiers appeared claiming that the fire site was a "private security zone" and banned the delegation from entering the area.
This obviously deliberate destruction confirms the reaction's approach to making some of the areas in Dersim where the revolutionaries are located uninhabitable to the point of razing them to the ground. Also some of the journalists claim that soldiers "deliberately set the fire". The affected villages had already been evacuated by the military once in the 90's and the entrances have been blocked for many from outside ever since.
