VICE News
PKK Youth Fight for Autonomy in Turkey
2015 • E24 Feb 13, 2015 11m
On January 6, a 14-year-old Kurdish boy named Ümit Kurt was shot dead by Turkish special forces in the Syrian border town of Cizre in southeast Turkey. Ümit Kurt was killed as he walked home through an area controlled by the Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement (YDG-H), the militant youth wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The YDG-H has been acting as a paramilitary force in Cizre for the past few months and has closed off several Kurdish neighborhoods with their armed checkpoints and patrols. VICE News gained exclusive access to members of the YDG-H, mostly in their teens and early twenties, who give their story on why gun battles broke out between them and the Turkish security forces, leading to some of the worst fighting in Cizre since the 1990s.