MESOP NEWS “HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH REPORT: AGAIN ! PKK/PYD (YPG) USING CHILD SOLDIERS FOR WAR

Kurdish Militias Using Child Soldiers: HRW

2016-12-23 (AFP) — Two Iraqi militias linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are recruiting child soldiers, Human Rights Watch said Thursday. The rights group said it had documented 29 cases of Kurdish and Yazidi children recruited by the People’s Defense Forces (HPG) — an armed wing of the PKK — and the Shingal Resistance Units (YBS).

The HPG has forces in Turkey, Syria and Iraq, and is fighting against Turkish forces and also against militias including ISIS.”In two cases the armed groups abducted or seriously abused children who tried to leave their forces,” HRW said in a statement. “The groups should urgently demobilize children, investigate abuses, pledge to end child recruitment, and appropriately penalize commanders who fail to do so.”The PKK is a Kurdish separatist group which Turkey considers to be a “terrorist” organisation.

The YBS is formed largely of fighters from the Yazidi religious minority, which has faced a campaign of extermination by ISIS.The militant group sees Yazidis as infidels and massacred Yazidi civilians in Sinjar in August 2014, executing men and abducting women as sex slaves.HRW said some of the children it interviewed had taken part in fighting, while others had manned checkpoints or cleaned and prepared arms. One, a young Yazidi at a refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, said he had joined the HPG in 2014 when he was 14 and fought in Syria until July 2016.

“Even if the armed groups do not send children into direct combat, they place them at risk by training them in areas that Turkey has attacked with airstrikes in its conflict with the PKK, such as Iraq’s Qandil mountain area,” HRW said.Under international law, the recruitment or use of children under 15 as fighters is a war crime.  www.mesop.de