When the United Nations inscribed the Roman-era walls of this mainly Kurdish city on its World Heritage list last year, it crowned a decade of efforts to rehabilitate a war-torn region.
Within weeks, a ceasefire with Kurdish militants in southeastern Turkey shattered, unleashing some of the worst fighting in a three-decade conflict and laying waste to swathes of Diyarbakir's ancient district of Sur.
Sur's ruin casts a pall over this week's World Heritage Committee meeting in Istanbul, which lists sites for the UN Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Hundreds were killed and thousands displaced in security operations in Sur, the last of which ran for three straight months until March. Tanks battered its warren of medieval streets to root out rebels who dug trenches and laid explosives.
More than 800 buildings in the 7,000-year-old city were razed, said Soyukaya. The damage became irreversible when rubble was bulldozed and dumped at the nearby Tigris River, she said.
Diyarbakir is the best-known of cities across six provinces damaged during operations. The government says 6,000 destroyed buildings will cost 1 billion lira ($345 million) to replace.
President Tayyip Erdogan squarely blames the armed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) for the destruction and has vowed to revive the mainly Kurdish region with an urban renewal campaign. Critics warn construction firms may profit more than locals.
UNESCO recognition of the fortress and gardens ranked Diyarbakir with Taj Mahal in India and Egypt's Giza pyramids.
UNESCO is grappling with destroyed heritage in war zones from Syria to Congo and wants it treated as war crimes.
Activists who say UNESCO has been quiet on Sur's ruin are staging counter-forums around this week's meeting in Istanbul.
World Heritage Centre director Mechtild Rossler would not speak specifically on Sur but pointed to a report expressing concern and welcoming steps by the state to prevent more damage.
Big stretches of Sur are still off-limits, and police man checkpoints behind sandbags and Turkish flags.
Visitors who have been allowed entry say the former Armenian neighborhood where Ates' family lived looks as flat as a runway. St Giragos was seized with other properties, unnerving Turkey's tiny Armenian community which has sued for its return, said Vartkes Ergun Ayik, the church foundation's president.
A 500-year-old minaret pockmarked by gunfire is visible behind a police barricade. Lawyer Tahir Elci, an outspoken peace campaigner, was shot there by unidentified gunmen in November while protesting against damage to the Ottoman-era monument, spooking conservationists.
Parts of the black basalt fortifications that defended Diyarbakir's people and monuments for centuries during sieges by Persians, Arabs and Mongols "have been ravaged," said Meral Halifeoglu, professor of architecture at Dicle University.
Within the walls, structures "could not withstand today's weapons ... Never has the destruction, the loss been so great," she said, warning that barring returns violated UNESCO tenets.
Sur was once a haven for exiles. Fatma Ates fled here when war with the PKK roiled the countryside in the 1990s.
REUTERS