HRW: YPG/PKK continues recruiting children in Syria

By Nilay Kar Onum

ISTANBUL

The YPG/PKK terror group continued recruiting children, including girls, despite pledges to stop the practice, an international rights group said on Friday.

Citing the recent data from the United Nations, the Human Rights Watch (HRW) said there was a “disturbingly high increase in child recruitment” by the terror group last year.

The HRW called on the terror group to “immediately demobilize children in its ranks and stop recruiting children, including from families in displacement camps under their control.”

It also called on the U.S. to urge the terror group to end its use of child soldiers.

“International law prohibits non-state armed groups from recruiting anyone under 18, and enlisting children under 15 is a war crime,” it added.

“The YPG, despite pledges to stop using child soldiers, is still recruiting children for military training in territory it controls,” said Priyanka Motaparthy, acting emergencies director at HRW.

“It’s especially horrendous that the group is recruiting children from the vulnerable families in displacement camps without their parents’ knowledge or even telling them where their children are,” Motaparthy added.

The rights group spoke to eight families at three camps in northeast Syria. The families reported that six girls and two boys aged between 13 and 17 were recruited.

According to the HRW, most families “had no contact with their children since they were recruited and only knew from authorities that the children were in training.”

“But one mother said that her son, 16 when he enlisted, had a combat role and died as the group fought to retake the city of Raqqa,” the group said.

The families told the human rights group that their children enlisted "voluntarily."

“We are poor, so they told my daughter they would give her money and clothes,” the mother of a 13-year-old girl said, according to the HRW.

The human rights group also cited a mother of a 17-year-old girl as saying: “I haven’t had any call, any way to talk with [my daughter]. We just want to know if she’s alive or dead. I want to leave camp, I have a house in Damascus. I want to go there. But I want to know about my daughter.”

According to the annual UN report on children in armed conflict, there have been 224 cases of child recruitment by the YPG and its women’s unit in 2017, “an almost fivefold increase from the previous year.”