Urban warfare raged across Turkey’s southeast in early 2016 as security forces recaptured city centers from the PKK’s youth wing. As the death toll mounted, it struck me as odd that foreign news reports about the conflict were still using the same estimate for the total death toll of the Turkish–Kurdish conflict – approximately 40,000 – that had appeared a decade earlier when I first started to follow the issue. I decided to write an article about where the estimate came from and why it seemed stuck at 40,000.