The U.S.-backed YPG, the Syrian offshoot of the PKK terrorist group, continues actively using child soldiers in Syria in systematic violation of human rights, a Turkish researcher has said.
Since its foundation, the PKK/YPG has indoctrinated children with its ideology and abducted scores of them to the mountains in Türkiye, northern Syria and Iraq, Kutluhan Görücü, a foreign policy researcher at the Turkish think-tank Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA), said.
International institutions categorize those under the age of 18 who enter active combat as "child warriors.”
The PKK/YPG tries to benefit from children as young as 9 years old and recruiting them is child abuse, Görücü argued in an interview with Anadolu Agency (AA).
“The terrorist group has the highest number of ‘child fighters’ in its ranks,” Görücü pointed out, referring to some 1,200 children forced into PKK ranks in 2022 alone. “We don’t see such numbers even in Daesh terrorist group.”
The U.N.'s Children and Armed Conflict Report 2023 revealed that the PKK/YPG terrorist group and its affiliated structures, operating under the name SDF in Syria, forcibly recruited 231 children into their armed forces.
The report said the terror organization and other affiliated structures also killed or maimed eight children in 2023, and converted 31 schools and hospitals for their armed activities.
The PKK, designated as a terrorist group by Türkiye and its Western allies, launched its terror campaign against the state in 1984 to achieve a so-called Kurdish self-rule in southeastern regions. More than 40,000 people have been killed in the violence.
Kurdish residents in southeastern provinces suffered the brunt of PKK violence, losing children and loved ones to forced recruitment, their homes to bombing strikes and regional peace to the PKK’s brutality and harsh state measures to contain it.
After losing significant territory and countless terrorists, the PKK ceded to its stronghold in the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq near the Turkish border while its Syrian branch took advantage of a power vacuum created by the Syrian civil war in 2011 and invaded several resource-rich provinces with the help of the U.S.
The YPG, which sought to fill its “human resources gap” with children, especially in the early days of the civil war, admitted to using child warriors, Görücü said.
In 2019, YPG leader Ferhat Abdi Şahin signed a plan with the U.N. to end and prevent the recruitment and use of children, which makes it a fact the PKK has accepted, according to Görücü.
“But the history of his issue goes back much further,” he said.
“The terrorist organization has been forcibly taking children to the mountains since the 1990s. They are kidnapped for the expansion and future of the organization and made to fight on the front lines,” the expert said.
He listed two key reasons for the terrorist group’s forced integration of children into its system, “molded militarily or politically according to their own world of thought.”
“First, to meet the need for personnel. Second, you cannot easily integrate young people over a certain age into Leninist, Marxist radical leftist ideas, but the clean minds of children are suitable for this,” Görücü said.
The terrorist group has usually abducted the children of Kurdish families with conservative lifestyles to tear these families apart and make the children a part of its radical leftist ideas at an early age, Görücü said.
In Syria, the PKK/YPG kidnaps Arab children, whom they even use as hostages in areas they occupy so that their families do not rebel against the organization, he added.
Görücü also pointed out the rampant abuse in PKK/YPG camps across Syria, citing field reports and confessions from people who fled the region.
In its 2023 report, the U.N. verified 992 grave violations against children committed by the SDF and 896 by the YPG.
Görücü said the PKK/YPG’s university and youth branches too carry out serious propaganda in order to recruit children it could not otherwise get to when they were younger.
Forced recruitment and use of child soldiers is a direct war crime by international law, he said.
“Depriving a child of their liberty and separating them from their families is considered a crime against humanity,” he said.
Independent organizations have clearly reported on the PKK/YPG’s active use of children, Görücü said.
“Unfortunately, the U.S. and Western media in particular continue to ignore this, especially in Syria, because they support the PKK.”
Washington calls the YPG its ally under the pretext of driving out Daesh, which is also a source of strain with its NATO ally Ankara, who says it’s “senseless” to use one terrorist group to fight another.
Türkiye has repeatedly condemned the PKK/YPG’s use of child soldiers, as well as human shields, in active combat.
The YPG has been cornered in Syria’s northeastern regions by the former opposition’s Syrian National Army (SNA) since a coalition of anti-regime forces ousted the Bashar Assad regime on Dec. 8.
The new administration of Syria recently negotiated the status of the group in a new era, though talks did not achieve much. The YPG rejects integration into the new army of the country and insists on remaining a separate armed group even if it joins the army.
"The PKK/YPG was giving assurances before the Syrian revolution that they would not use 'child warriors,' but these were propaganda produced entirely in rhetoric,” Görücü said.
“They continue to actively use children. So, frankly, I don't think that the U.N. or international law has any enforcement power in this sense. Yes, they have legal provisions, but in the battlefield, power speaks. It seems that these war crimes will continue to be committed until the PKK's existence is eliminated."
