Turkey in crisis: The Kurdish teenagers fighting - and dying

[Anthea]

The Independent

The Kurdish teenagers fighting - and dying - in urban clashes with security forces

Mehmet Mutlu was not the brightest of boys – likeable enough, but with little interest in learning. There was a sense of inevitability for his teacher when he learnt, last month, that his 16-year-old pupil had been killed in clashes between Kurdish youths and Turkish security forces.

But it was still a shock. “He was lying on the ground, his face in a pool of blood,” he recalled with sadness. “He was my student.”

For 30 years the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has engaged in armed struggle against the Turkish state. Now the collapse of a ceasefire last summer has plunged the mainly Kurdish south-east of the country into the bloodiest bout of violence since the 1990s.

With a struggling economy, a population of more than two million Syrian refugees and a volatile border with Syria and Iraq, Turkey can ill afford a long-running internal conflict. Yet its litany of death shows no sign of ending; on Tuesday, three policemen were killed and four more were wounded in a suspected PKK attack in the province of Sirnak.

While previous flare-ups were characterised by tit-for-tat strikes on Turkish army posts and PKK training camps, much of the fighting is now taking place in cities. These urban clashes are being fought by teenagers and 20-somethings under the banner of the recently formed Patriotic Revolutionary Youth Movement.

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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 20201.html