Kızıltepe (Turkish pronunciation: [kɯˈzɯɫtepe]; Kurdish: Qoser; Ottoman Turkish: Tell-Ermen or Tell Armen, lit. 'Armenian hill' ) is a municipality and district of Mardin Province, Turkey. Its area is 1,236 km, and its population is 267,151 (2022). It is mainly populated by Kurds of the Kîkan tribe.

Government

In the local elections of March 2019 Nilüfer Elik Yılmaz was elected as Mayor. But on 15 November 2019 she was dismissed and a trustee was appointed. The current District Governor is Huseyn Cam, who was also appointed as the state appointed trustee.

History

The town has a historic 13th century great Friday mosque built by the Artuqids.

On 1 July 1915, during the 1915 genocide in Diyarbekir, there was a massacre in the village where its Christian population, the Assyrians were murdered by militia and Kurds. About seventy women were raped in the church, then put to death. Men, women, and children were killed indiscriminately and many victims were decapitated. After the massacre, Kurdish women stabbed any survivors to death. Rafael de Nogales visited weeks later and found "corpses barely covered with heaps of stone from which emerged here and there a bloody tress or an arm or leg gnawed on by hyenas".

In the late 1980s there existed a refugee camp for Kurds who fled persecution by Saddam Hussein.

It was also the scene of clashes between protesting Kurds and Turkish riot police in 2006. In Kiziltepe have been imposed curfews in the past.

Kızıltepe, with +48.8 °C (119.84 °F) on August 14, 1993, holds the record for the highest temperature ever recorded in Turkey.

Composition

There are 183 neighbourhoods in Kızıltepe District. 10 of these (Atatürk, Bahçelievler, Cumhuriyet, Ersoylu, İpek, Koçhisar, Sanayi, Tepebaşı, Turgut Özal and Yeni Mahalle) formed the pre-2013 municipality of Kızıltepe.

Notable People

• Selma Irmak (1971–), Kurdish politician
• Mem Ararat, Kurdish singer