MESOP NEWS : 3 PKK militants surrender to security forces, 3 others found in house

 June 05, 2014,  TODAY’S ZAMAN / ANKARA – Three individuals who were abducted by the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) have left the armed group and surrendered to Turkish security forces, while three girls who were being held in a house in order to be handed over to the terrorist organization have been found by military units.

In Şırnak and Hakkari provinces in Turkey’s southeast, three members of the PKK, one of them the child of a family who took part in the sit-in protest in Diyarbakır, surrendered on Thursday to Turkish security forces, Turkish media have reported. The development comes at a time when the PKK is under pressure to release the children it has abducted, due to a widely reported sit-in protest staged by families whose children had been kidnapped.

According to a report on the Hürriyet daily’s website, M.E., 13, who was abducted by the PKK about two months ago, allegedly fled the terrorist organization and went to his family home in Beytüşşebab in Şırnak province. M.E.’s family took the boy to the security forces, and after giving a statement, the boy was released by the prosecutor. District Governor Mehmet Fevzi Dönmez also visited M.E. at his house and talked with him. M.E. played later with his friends before his house.

The other two PKK members in Hakkari, one of them being the child of a family who had participated in the protest in Diyarbakır, also claimed to have fled from the PKK to surrender to the security forces. The names of the other two persons remain unknown.

In a second operation conducted by gendarmerie forces in the Yeşildere neighborhood of Yüksekova in Hakkari province, three girls, together with two women who were allegedly preparing to take the girls to PKK camps in the mountains, were found in a house. Two of the girls in the house turned out to be below 18 years of age and to belong to families who had taken part in the sit-in protest. The two women in the house were taken into custody.

Soldier wounded by PKK when unblocking highway

Despite the ongoing settlement process aimed at resolving the country’s Kurdish issue, the PKK has been blocking highways for almost two weeks in the Turkey’s Kurdish-majority southeast. A specialized sergeant was wounded in the leg early on Thursday when PKK terrorists opened fire on security forces, which had launched an operation to open the highway between Diyarbakır and Bingöl.

Five soldiers were also wounded by members of the PKK’s youth wing, the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDGH), on Wednesday when security forces launched an operation to clear the highway.

The members of the YDGH, which blocked the highway to protest the building of a new gendarmerie outpost in the neighborhood, have dug a series of ditches between 2-5 meters deep and with a width of up to 50 meters. Each time security forces filled in the ditches on the highway, the PKK’s youth wing redig the ditches as soon as security forces leave the area, which has been blocked for the past 13 days.

At the end of 2012, the government launched a settlement process to resolve once and for all the country’s terrorism problem and Kurdish issue through talks with Abdullah Öcalan, jailed leader of the PKK. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has strongly criticized the PKK and deputies of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and the People’s Democratic Party (BDP) regarding the abduction of children and blocking of highways in the southeast.

“Those who keep talking about the settlement [of the Kurdish issue] while at the same time being involved in activities that might sabotage the settlement [process] actually harm themselves greatly,” Erdoğan said on Thursday during a ceremony in Kastamonu. “The political parties they [the PKK] support are no different from them in mentality,” the prime minister added.

Possibly encouraged by the ongoing settlement process, some Kurdish families whose children have been abducted in the past few months by the PKK as recruits launched a sit-in in Diyarbakır about two weeks ago, calling for the terrorist organization to return their children to their families.

Selahattin Demirtaş, leader of the BDP, the sister party of the HDP which was developed from it, recently claimed that some of the families who are involved in the sit-in protest had been paid by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) to be part of the protest.

Erdoğan also strongly criticized Demirtaş, describing the BDP leader’s claim as “dirty.”

The gendarmerie forces, which on Wednesday evening also removed a tent put up by the members of the YDHG in the Çağıl neigborhood near Lice, spent the night at the location to prevent the terrorists from blocking the highway again. After darkness had fallen, PKK terrorists fired at the security forces from a distance, wounding two gendarmes. A helicopter which arrived to take the wounded to hospital was also fired at by the terrorists. http://www.todayszaman.com/news-349685-3-pkk-militants-surrender-to-security-forces-3-others-found-in-house.html