Latest Uk News's video: With security high Turkey s Kurds say they are voting for peace

Leaning against an armoured truck, masked Turkish policemen with rifles slung over their shoulders scan the crowds queueing to vote in a neighbourhood of the main Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. Security is high in the Kurdish majority southeast for Sunday's vote following a new flare-up in the conflict between Kurdish rebels and the Turkish state and a wave of jihadist attacks which have left several hundred people dead since July. The wall surrounding Suleyman Nazif school in Diyarbakir's Sur district, which has been turned into a polling station for the vote, is pockmarked with bullet holes. But that did not stop people from lining up as soon as polls opened at 0400 GMT for Turkey's second parliamentary election in five months. "All I want is peace and brotherhood, we have suffered too much lately," 43-year-old voter Mahmut Kiziltoprak told AFP. The Sur neighbourhood, a stronghold of young Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) supporters, bears numerous scars of warfare: a charred building here, shattered windows and hastily-dug trenches there. Since the breakdown of a 2013 ceasefire between the Turkish army and the outlawed PKK in August, the Kurdish southeast has been caught in the grip of a spiral of violence. - 'AKP has no hope' - "The police entered every house in the neighbourhood, treated everyone as a criminal," said Huseyin Oturmak, 65, an observer for the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP). "The AKP has no hope here," he said. Many residents of Diyarbakir accuse Turkey's strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of reigniting the flames of war after a wave of deadly tit-for-tat violence. Ironically it was under Erdogan's watch as prime minister that Ankara introduced a raft of reforms for the Kurdish minority, estimated to number between 15 and 20 million, and launched secret negotiations with jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. Kurds at one stage were a bedrock of support for the AKP, but voters turned to the HDP in large numbers in June, delivering it a stunning election success to become the first pro-Kurdish party to sit in parliament.