International condemnation and sanctions fall on deaf ears. At home, critics face jailOct 15th 2019AKCAKALEA GROUP OF children greet a convoy of Turkish army vehicles returning from the Syrian side of the border by saluting the soldiers and raising their fingers in a victory sign. Behind them, a group of men gather by the side of a house partially destroyed by a rocket. Closer to the centre of town, Ahmet Toremen, a construction worker, walks past the broken window-frames, burnt mattresses and bloodstains covering the bottom floor of his ramshackle house. Mr Toremen had been renting the place to a Syrian refugee family. A mortar round launched from Syria, almost certainly by Kurdish fighters in response to airstrikes from Turkey, landed in the corner of the living room. The explosion blinded one woman, wounded another and killed the family’s baby. “They escaped war,” says Mr Toremen, “and war found them here.”Since the start of Turkey’s offensive in north-east Syria on October 9th, at least 20 civilians have died in the seemingly indiscriminate shelling in Akcakale and other Turkish towns near the border, according to officials in Ankara. Support for the invasion in Turkey was high from the outset. For many Turks, and for their president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the deaths will offer a chance to show that the invasion, seen here as another chapter in the endless war against the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a separatist Kurdish group in Turkey, was a matter of necessity, not choice. Turkey says it is acting in self-defence. Such claims ring hollow, however. Until the start of the fighting, the country had not suffered any cross-border attacks from the YPG, as the Kurdish armed groups in Syria are called.Choose us for news analysis that respects your time and intelligenceSubscribe to The EconomistWe filter out the noise of the daily news cycle and analyse the trends that matterWe give you rigorous, deeply researched and fact-checked journalism. That’s why Americans named us their most trusted news source in 2017Available wherever you are—in print, digital and, uniquely, in audio, fully narrated by professional broadcastersThis website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard‘s standards of credibility and transparency.ORContinue reading this articleRegister with an email address