HDP demands answers over strip-search of Kurdish kids by Turkey police
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) - Two lawmakers from Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) demanded answers from the Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu on Monday regarding a recently-circulated video purportedly showing a strip-search of kids by Turkish forces in the city of Diyarbakir.
Opposition MPs Feleknas Uca and Sibel Yigitalp lodged two separate written parliamentary questionnaire to be replied by the Minister, according to the HDP website.
The MPs asked about the fate of the strip-searched.
A voice from a loudspeaker orders them in Turkish to hold up their hands, take off their clothes and show their bellies and backs.
Uca and Yigitalp, both representing Diyarbakir, accused the security forces, presumably Turkish special operations police, of harassing five kids, all of them seemingly younger than ten years old, and three women, one of them with a toddler.
In the background, at least one person can be heard insulting and using sexual slurs at the women, calling one of them "terrorist."
The 12-minutes-long video much shared on social media and some Kurdish news outlets was first uploaded to Youtube by the account "cCc Dogan" whose first set of letters represent three crescents used by far-right Turkish supremacist groups.
The account has since removed the video, but it went viral on others.
Kurdish lawmakers asked Soylu if there has been any investigation into the incident which they said supposedly happened in either March or April of 2016 as a months-long urban conflict between Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) affiliates and Turkish forces raged on in Sur.
Previously there have been cases of special operations police (POH) and special gendarmerie units (JOH) drawing racist graffitis on the walls of schools and homes in several Kurdish cities of Nusaybin, Cizre, Diyarbakir, and Sirnak under curfew.
In November 2015, Interior Ministry gave orders of an investigation into a widely-reported case in Silvan district of Diyarbakir where police wrote slogans on walls "if you are a Turk, be proud; if you are not, obey."
A group of police calling themselves "Team Lions of Allah," also wrote, "Armenian bastards," and the officially-used motto "how happy is the one who says I am a Turk," in Silvan and "Allah's army is one, and it is Turkish" in Idil district of Sirnak.
In January 2016, pro-government Islamist news websites Yenisafak, and Star published a video in which police kill three alleged PKK fighters after reciting verses from Quran's al-Anfal chapter, also the name of the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's genocidal campaign against the people of the Kurdistan Region in the late 1980s.
Pro-government, as well as the opposition media, reported in the following summer that special police officers fighting PKK were wearing arm badges with Anfal verses.
Editing by Ava Homa