“The report about anti-terror operations in the southeast is biased, based on false information and far from professional,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement late on Friday, hours after the UN rights office released its report.
Earlier in the day, the UN said that from July 2015 to December 2016, Turkish security forces had killed some 2,000 people in the southeast, where entire neighborhoods had also been razed by the Turkish military.
The report also revealed that as many as 500,000 people, mostly Kurds, had been displaced, while satellite images disclosed the “enormous scale of destruction of the housing stock by heavy weaponry.”
It also said that the UN investigators had documented an array of human rights violations, including killings, disappearances and torture, often during multiple curfews, some of which lasting for several days at a time.
The world body also called for launching an urgent probe into the violations, adding that the investigation could be international or Turkish but must be independent and impartial.