Turkish police arrested approximately fifty people, including an AFP journalist, on Sunday in Istanbul during the Kurdish New Year celebrations, News.ro reported.

AFP video journalist Eilul Yashar was preparing to film the celebration of Nowruz, the Kurdish New Year, when she was stopped at a roadblock, AFP reports.

According to journalists and lawyers present, members of the Association of Lawyers for Freedom (ÖHD), the journalist objected to the personal search, which she considered “too insistent”, and was taken away in a police van. The non-governmental organization “Reporters Without Borders” (RSF) called for the “immediate release” of the woman.

According to Erol Onderoglu, RSF’s correspondent in Turkey, around fifty people who had come to celebrate Nowruz, which is usually accompanied by traditional dances and bonfires, were also detained at the site. The bonfire has been cancelled.

Kurds, who make up about a fifth of Turkey’s approximately 85 million people, face significant discrimination in the country. The former leader of the main pro-Kurdish party HDP (now DEM) Selahattin Demirtaş has been in prison since 2016 for “terrorist propaganda”, and in the last elections in 2019, more than a hundred mayors of Kurdish settlements had their elections annulled.