Another Syrian mother is longing to reunite with her daughter, the PKK terrorist group's Syrian wing, the YPG, abducted last year in northeastern Syria.
The organization kidnapped Rim Abdo after she left school one day in December 2023 when she was only 13.
“The Shabiba Sevre wing of the PKK took her to make her fight for the group,” 50-year-old mother Selma Abdo told Anadolu Agency (AA).
Abdo, who was forced to be a single parent after her husband died from a stroke in 2020, is a schoolteacher in northeastern Syria’s Hassakeh region, but her children go to a different school.
The day of the incident, she recalled dropping Rim off at her school and then going to work. When she returned in the evening to find her son home but her daughter missing, Abdo ran out and looked everywhere for a week.
It was Rim’s classmates who said the PKK/YPG kidnapped her and Abdo confirmed it from neighbors and eyewitnesses.
After a long search, Abdo managed to discover where the PKK/YPG took her daughter: to a terrorist camp to be trained.
“How can a 13-year-old child be given military training?” Abdo lamented. “All my child thought of was playing. She wanted to be a doctor.”
“It upended my life,” she said. “How can this organization kidnap a small girl and put a gun in her hand? My daughter had dreams just like other children. The PKK/YPG killed the dreams of many children like my daughter, ripping dozens from their mothers’ arms. They hurt us and may God hurt them back.
“I want the PKK/YPG to be held to account and my daughter freed,” Abdo said.
The PKK – listed as a terrorist organization by Türkiye, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union – is responsible for over 40,000 civilian and security personnel deaths in Türkiye during an almost four-decadelong campaign of terror.
After losing significant territory and countless terrorists, the group ceded to its stronghold in the Qandil Mountains in northern Iraq near the Turkish border while its Syrian branch took advantage of a power vacuum created by the Syrian civil war since 2011 and invaded several resource-rich provinces with the help of the U.S.
The terrorists forced many locals to migrate, bringing their militants to change the regional demographic, seizing regional oil wells – Syria’s largest – to smuggle oil and generate revenue for its activities.
The terrorists have been forcibly recruiting the children of local tribal communities.
U.N. figures show that in 2022, the PKK/YPG abducted and coerced over 1,200 children into fighting in its ranks.
There were over 2,438 grave violations against 2,407 children in Syria. As many as 1,696 children in Syria were recruited and used mostly by PKK/YPG and other armed groups and non-state actors.
International law prohibits non-state armed groups from recruiting anyone under 18, and enlisting children under 15 is considered a war crime.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has expressed grave concern over the exploitation of children by the PKK, urging an end to their recruitment and the release of all children held by the terrorist group.
Though the PKK/YPG initially signed a pledge with Geneva Call – a Swiss humanitarian organization that works to "protect civilians in armed conflict" – to stop the use of child soldiers in 2014, its use of child soldiers has only increased since then.
