Turkish Kurd teenagers turn to the PKK after enduring years of brutality, by Ian Traynor in Diyarbakir, Turkey:

Sevder is seething. Growing up in poverty and squalor, he has seen schoolmates shot dead by Turkish security forces and had to put up with the vulgar taunts of Turkish policemen towards his mother and sisters. His grudges have been nourished by endless tales of family and friends burnt out of their villages in the hills and decanted into the slums of Diyarbakir.

“We’ve had enough,” says the 17-year-old Kurd, wearing a Ronaldinho Brazil T-shirt and crouching in the heat and dirt of the teeming city, a couple of hours from the Iraqi and Syrian borders.

Sevder and his friends are part of a new wave of militancy among young Turkish Kurds. “There is a different generation now in Diyarbakir,” says Sezgin Tanrikulu, a lawyer. “These youths are aged 14 to 20. They’ve grown up in this place feeling they don’t belong. We can’t communicate with them.”

Hisyar Ozsoy, an anthropologist and expert on Kurdish politics, says: “There is something new here. These are the children of serhildan [the Kurdish word for intifada or uprising].”

Turkey’s long war with its repressed minority of Kurds, who comprise up to 20% of the population of 73 million, runs in cycles. After dying down seven years ago, it is now spiralling into a new and threatening phase.

Rest of the article here. I don’t agree with what these kids are getting themselves into, but I don’t blame them for it. Change is on its way for Turkey, and as the article suggests, it’s not the good kind. This situation could be compared to the kids involved in Albanian and Kosovan terrorist organizations. These are all people who have been exposed to torture in one way or another, and consider this to be their last resort, or their only way of fighting the enemy who violently subjugated them for years. Remember the number of Irish youngsters who joined the IRA after incidents like the Bloody Sunday of 1971? It’s very difficult to convince or teach these kids otherwise. They have a large appetite for revenge.