A young woman is lying on the asphalt. His right arm pushes its way through the broken window of the door of an upturned car on its roof. She tries to grab something inside. “Is the car yours?” asks a passer-by. “Yes, otherwise I wouldn’t allow myself,” says the young woman who finally ends up, and without cutting herself, by recovering her insurance certificate.
A document that will be invaluable to him in the hours to come when he will have to declare the claim to his insurance. And what a disaster… Like several other cars and scooters parked in front of the Cirque d’Hiver (11th century), his vehicle was overturned and ransacked. A car and several two-wheelers were even set on fire and are still smoking.
Suddenly transformed into a battlefield
A few minutes earlier, this square located on the boulevard du Temple between République and Bastille, was the epicenter of the outbursts on the sidelines of the rally in tribute to the Kurdish victims killed on Friday in the 10th arrondissement of Paris. It is here, at the gates of the Marais, when many Parisians were doing their last Christmas shopping that the boulevard suddenly turned into a battlefield. Not much resisted. Almost all the bus shelters in the area were pulverized and dozens of trash cans and glass containers were set on fire.
Many storefronts didn’t hold up either. There are also hundreds of pieces of bitumen which litter the boulevard and the adjacent streets and which a few moments earlier rained down on the CRS and the mobile gendarmes. As is also the custom now, construction equipment is at hand in Paris and palisades, poles and others have also served as projectiles.
VIDEO. Attack on the rue d’Enghien: violence near République on the sidelines of the tribute to the Kurdish victims
“They did not support the presence of the police”
On the boulevard, which has become strangely calm again, many Kurdish militants are coming up in small groups. From time to time a song or a slogan breaks out, glorifying the PKK. Some carry the PKK flag on their shoulders, or the red flag adorned with the hammer and sickle, others hold sticks in their hands or flags of which they only have the handle. They were part of these groups a few minutes earlier who suddenly attacked the police when the rally had started rather calmly on the Place de la République.
“They did not support the presence of the police, loose a witness. As soon as they saw a CRS cordon or a screen-printed car, they were enraged”. In any case, there were several dozen of them, very determined, and it took several minutes before the police managed to regain control of the situation. Difficult to say at this time if other groups of thugs have infiltrated the ranks of Kurdish demonstrators to stir up trouble. Visually in any case there were sympathizers and members of the PKK among the rioters who fought against the police.
Shortly after 3 p.m., residents were already beginning to try to erase some traces on the sidewalks by sweeping. A group of teenagers were picking up pieces of bitumen and the remains of tear gas canisters “to make memories” and a few Parisians, gift packages in their hands, were returning to the very chic Marais district to finish their shopping.