The Kurdish National Council (KNC) called upon the international community to exercise pressure on the militia of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) to stop the abduction and forced recruitment of people living in the areas under the militias’ control, including children who are being abducted and sent to training camps run by the PYD militia.
In a press release issued on Saturday, the KNC said that the PYD’s systematic, terrorist actions are part of the party’s strategy to stifle political life in the predominantly Kurdish areas in Syria.
The Council added that the PYD militia is arresting all men aged over 35 years old who are then sent to forced recruitment camps or kept hostages until their sons and daughters return from Iraq’s Kurdistan region.
The PYD militias have arrested dozens of members of the KNC-affiliated parties, including most recently Barazan Suleiman, member of the advisory body of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), Abdulqahar Aziz Abdulrahman, member of the KDP’s subcommittee, Jankin Alliko, and Juma’a Ahmed, member of the regional committee of the Kurdish Yekiti Party in Syria.
The KNC called upon the international community to take action to stop the PYD’s repressive acts, including most notably the suppression of public freedoms, forced recruitment, forced displacement, the imposition of ideologized curricula in schools, and the closure of the KNC offices.
The Council stressed that it strongly condemns and denounces these terrorist acts, calling on the international community, human rights organizations, and countries with leverage on the PYD to exert pressure on the militias to stop these practices. The Council pointed out that PYD militias are using the fight against the ISIS extremist group as a pretext to carry out these practices with the aim of stifling civil and political life in the predominantly Kurdish areas in Syria.
In a similar vein, Amnesty International last week accused the PYD militias of arbitrarily detaining senior members of the KNC in the Alaya Prison in the town of Qamishli in Hasaka province. (Source: Syrian Coalition’s Media Department)
