The forbidden works include books on the historic Iraqi Kurdish leader Mustafa Barzani or on the Iraqi sociologist Ismail Besikci. Jihat Rojhulat, a member of the Association of Kurdish Editors Yewkurd, criticized the bans in the statements to the Kurdish media Rudaw and said that “in the 1990s too many books were not banned at once, which belongs to the scope of the Guinness Book of Records”.

According to Rojhulat, these prohibitions are not legal, since Article 3 of the Turkish Press Act provides that books or magazines cannot be prohibited without evidence. The editorial Avesta has been one of the most influential, as in a short time fourteen of its books have been banned.

Songul Keskin, the representative of Avesta, has thus spoken about bans: “One of the books, for example, refers to Kurdish mythology, but the Kurdish does not even mention them, and the first edition was not banned, but the third one. Now, editors have six months to adapt their books to new technologies. They see the books in the raids they have made in the houses, and then the bans come.”

In early December, the Turkish police kidnapped several books in a Diyarbakir market, including Dildarog Serkeftinog (African Resistance Journal), which narrates the incidents of civil war in the Syrian province of Afrin.