PKK Youth Fight for Autonomy in Turkey

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 p