A massive ongoing purge conducted by Turkish government led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has now hit even Kurdish paramilitaries, recruited and paid by the Ankara government to fight along with the Turkish army against Kurdish militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
A press release by Turkish Interior Ministry on Thursday said it dismissed at least 559 of those paramilitaries legally defined as “village guards” on the grounds they were either members of or had ties with “terrorist groups and other organizations dangerous to national security” they were supposed to fight against.
The irregular militias usually operate in their local rural peripheries and help the Turkish army in Ankara’s war with the PKK as an additional local force familiar with the terrain and language.
Seventy-six other village guards were laid off temporarily because of involvement in “human and drug trafficking” until a final decision about them could be given after a wide-ranging investigation, according to a report by Kurdistan 24.
Turkish government began purging state ranks, mostly from the bureaucracy, army, and ministries, targeting over 160,000 people from their jobs after a controversial military coup attempt on July 15, 2016.
The Kurdish militias were founded in 1985 less than a year after the PKK launched its first deadly assault on a Turkish army base in the Siirt province. Since then, their numbers have increased to 72,000, according to 2016 figures. In the 1990s, the Turkish army forced thousands of villagers to take sides by either taking up arms against fellow Kurds or face the destruction of their local communities.
Acting under a state of emergency only applied in the Kurdish-majority provinces, thousands of villages which refused the offer were burnt with by government forces that led to an exodus of hundreds of thousands of people who in their millions today – along with their children – reside in major Turkish cities such as İstanbul, İzmir, Adana, and Mersin.
The post Turkish gov’t’s purge reaches Kurdish militia paid to fight for Turkish army appeared first on Stockholm Center for Freedom.
from Stockholm Center for Freedom https://stockholmcf.org/turkish-govts-purge-reaches-kurdish-militia-paid-to-fight-for-turkish-army/
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