Turkey imprisons student for sharing YPG pictures, insulting Erdogan

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region (Kurdistan24) - Turkish authorities sent a college student to prison on Thursday for sharing photographs of the US-allied Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) fighters and insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on social media.

Gizem Yerik (29), a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Uludag University in the northwestern Turkish city of Bursa, received a sentence last May of four years and eight months in jail for both "crimes."

A Bursa court condemned Yerik to three years and nine months of imprisonment for the pictures of the YPG fighters and separately gave her 11 months and 20 days for insulting the President.

Turkey labels the YPG who make up the leading US-backed force in the war against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria as "terrorists," for having ties with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) thus considers its fighters' pictures as "terrorist propaganda."

Her lawyer Umut Beyaz took the case to the Turkish Supreme Court of Appeals in Ankara in the hope of revoking the heavy sentence for his client's statements on Twitter.

Talking to Kurdistan24 over the phone on Friday, Beyaz said the court nonetheless approved the sentence despite an opinion to the contrary by the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office.

"They acted rather quickly in fact," Beyaz said, stating the high court would process similar cases at a slower pace, in two or three years.

After the upholding of her sentence, police detained Yerik once again and put her in a women's prison in Bursa where she initially spent 75 days.

Police first arrested her during a lecture at the campus in February 2016, Beyaz revealed.

During an interrogation afterward, police asked Yerik if she spoke Kurdish, where Kurdistan was and if she could provide information about "its borders" as well as demanding to know what the hashtag in Italian "Kobani Resiste" meant.

According to her lawyer, the interrogators also wanted to know why she signed a January 2016 petition by some two thousand academics in Turkey condemning human rights violations during Turkish army operations in urban centers against PKK affiliates.

A Twitter post in which she cursed Erdogan was among the charges she faced.

"I wrote a dictionary of curses for Tayyip. Five times a day I pray; oh God, damn tyrants," she wrote referring to Erdogan by his middle name.

The Bursa court did not consider the malediction as an insult, said Yerik's lawyer.

But the sentence for an insult was because of her calling the President "a dishonorable soul-sucker."

Per a December 2016 Reuters report, Erdogan's lawyers have so far filed more than 1,800 cases against people including cartoonists, a former Miss Turkey winner, and schoolchildren on accusations of insulting him.

In her defense, Yerik who described herself a feminist appealed to the court for her release on the grounds she had a sick mother and wanted to continue her college education in theater, said the lawyer.

Editing by Ava Homa