Forest burning as a counterinsurgency strategy in Eastern Turkey. Paper presented at the World Congress of Kurdish Studies, organized by the Kurdish Institute of Paris and Salahaddin University, Arbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, September 6 to September 9, 2006

Beginning in the early 1990s, the Turkish Army was reported to use the burning of forests, fields and villages as a strategy in the conflict against the insurgent PKK. A case study of armed conflict in Tunceli, Eastern Turkey was done to evaluate this claim using satellite images for the verification of eye-witness reports collected by human rights groups. This paper establishes that substantial forest burnings took place between 1991 and 1994 in the study area. Turkey follows an international trend of resource destruction as an intentional goal of its counterinsurgency strateg