The YPG/PKK terrorist group has been trying to forcibly recruit children who lost their parents in the Syrian civil war, Turkish security sources told Anadolu Agency (AA) on Monday.
Having suffered severe blows in recent years, the YPG/PKK has established teams to seek out and brainwash such children and teenagers, threatening them to join the terrorists' ranks if they did not cooperate.
According to reports by security forces, these teams have pursued Syrian orphans between the ages of 10 and 15, kidnapped them and taken them to terror camps to indoctrinate them with their ideology and train them for armed combat after turning 16.
The terror group has prevented such children from seeing their families, torturing and imprisoning those that insist on doing so.
Several members of the terror group who surrendered to security forces earlier this year confirmed these reports, confessing to judicial authorities how children were forcibly recruited.
In their testimonies, terrorists said at least 30-50 children were indoctrinated in four locations: Gare in Iraq and Derik, al-Hasakah and Qamishli in Syria.
In its Trafficking in Persons Report 2020 published on June 26, the U.S. Department of State also said the terrorist organization had forced children to fight.
The report said the YPG/PKK "continued to recruit, train and use boys and girls as young as 12 years old," adding that since 2017, international observers have reported that the terrorists "recruit, at times by force, children from displacement camps in northeast Syria."
The U.N. Human Rights Council published new findings in a report on Jan. 16 that YPG/PKK terrorists were using child soldiers in Syria.
Virginia Gamba, the U.N. secretary-general's special representative on children in armed conflicts, met with a YPG/PKK terrorist in June 2019 in Geneva and signed a deal to end the recruitment of child soldiers, another proof of the terror group's war crimes and crimes against humanity.
No other U.N. publications since then reported compliance with this deal, nor an end to the practice.
In its more than 40-year terror campaign against Turkey, the PKK, listed as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the U.S. and European Union, has been responsible for the deaths of 40,000 people, including women, children, and infants. The YPG is its Syrian offshoot.
