The Revolutionary Youth Movement and Syrian Democratic Forces continue to recruit minors in northeastern Syria, despite past commitments and an integration agreement with Damascus. The post Child recruitment persists despite SDF-Damascus integration agreement appeared first on Syria Direct.
The Revolutionary Youth Movement and Syrian Democratic Forces continue to recruit minors in northeastern Syria, despite past commitments and an integration agreement with Damascus.
17 June 2026
QAMISHLI — Sitting together in a classroom-turned-shelter in the northeastern Syrian border city of Qamishli, Ahmad Aref Abdalo, 54, and Najwa Qamiha, 43, told the story of the day their teenage daughter, Naziha Abdalo, went missing.
It was March 20, the start of the Eid al-Fitr holiday marking the end of Ramadan. Abdalo woke that morning to find Naziha missing from the room she shared with her parents and four sisters at the school where they lived since being displaced from the Afrin area of Aleppo.
Not an hour later, the family received a voice message on WhatsApp from a United States (US) phone number, and immediately recognized Naziha’s voice. Naziha said she left willingly to join the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and hoped to become a kadro, a committed member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), her parents told Syria Direct.
A kadro, or cadre, is an official member of the PKK who has received military and ideological training at its stronghold in the Qandil Mountains of northern Iraq. Cadres typically take on organizational and military roles within the militant Kurdish political organization or its associated institutions.
When she heard the recording, Qamiha broke down, crying inconsolably. Shocked, Abdalo’s lower lip began to droop and his hands went numb, he said. He was taken to the hospital.
Naziha’s choice was not without precedent, but notably came just under two months after an agreement was signed between the Syrian government and the SDF on January 30, stipulating the latter would integrate with state institutions. Such integration would imply the end of independent SDF recruitment, with any future enlistment under the Ministry of Defense, which bars recruits under the age of 18.
“Eid al-Fitr is a time for joy, but it became a dark day,” Qamiha said, through tears. Every day since has been spent in “a state of waiting,” waking each morning in the hope her daughter will have come back to her, and sleeping each night disappointed.
Three days after Naziha left, another teenager—Yasmine Abdo Ahmad, also 17—disappeared from her family’s home in a village outside Kobani (Ain al-Arab), a city on the Syrian-Turkish border in northeastern Aleppo.
That day, her mother, Mayada Bilal Ahmad, 50, left her children at home to visit a neighbor for the Eid holiday. When she returned at around 10 o’clock at night, she could not find Yasmine. Hours of fear and searching passed before she received a WhatsApp notification. In a video message, Yasmine announced she left to join the PKK of her own free will.
Children like Naziha and Yasmine who say they intend to join the PKK in messages to their parents typically either remain in Syria and join the SDF or cross the border for training in Qandil to become cadres.
Naziha Abdalo was born on April 1, 2009, making her 16 years and 11 months old when she joined. Yasmine was born April 30 of the same year, making her 16 years and 10 months old at the time. Official identification documents provided to Syria Direct by both girls’ families confirm they are under 18, the legal age of capacity in Syria.
Naziha Abdalo’s page in her family’s ledger—an official document recording births, deaths, marriages and other civil status information—confirms her date of birth, and that she is legally underage. (Courtesy of Abdalo family)
“The Revolutionary Youth [Movement (Ciwanên Şoreşger)] plays a pivotal role in recruiting,” said Abdulrahman Kurjo, the general coordinator of the civil society organization Kurdish Spring (Buhara Kurdî). His organization, founded in 2020, is based in Europe and maintains a field network inside Syria that documents human rights violations.
The recruitment of children, described as “voluntary,” is often “the result of psychological pressure, ideological influences and exploitation of children’s circumstances—factors that negate the existence of free will among minors,” Kurjo told Syria Direct.
Ahmad said Yasmine was influenced by members of the SDF’s Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) who had been staying in a nearby house. She knew Yasmine was visiting them, “but given our neighborliness and acquaintance, we didn’t worry about those visits,” the mother said. Then, “she joined them 10 days after they relocated from the village.”
International human rights law sets 18 as the minimum legal age for recruitment and participation in hostilities, while the recruitment of children under the age of 15 is considered a war crime. Parties to a conflict that recruit children are added to an annual “List of Shame” included in an annual United Nations (UN) report.
Yasmine and Naziha are only two names on a longer list of boys and girls who have joined the SDF since the start of the integration process with the Ministry of Defense this year.
In Qamishli on March 27, Ahmad Abdulbaqi, the father of Barwan Abdulbaqi, 16, appeared in a video appealing to the Syrian Ministry of Interior and the SDF-backed Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) to urgently intervene to return his son, who was recruited the day the video was posted online.
In Amuda, a city west of Qamishli, Fatima Mamo Habib, a woman displaced from the Maabatli (Mabata) area of the Afrin countryside, appeared in a similar video at the start of April, documenting the recruitment of her daughter, Zainab Muhammad Nooreddin Manan, 16. Habib describes being thrown out of centers affiliated with the SDF while attempting to ask about her daughter, after they denied she was there, prompting her to launch a public appeal for help to return her daughter.
In Kobani, two videos circulated by activists in April reflect escalating tensions and violations surrounding parents’ efforts to recover their recruited children. The first, posted on April 14, shows members of a family outside a Revolutionary Youth center in the city demanding the return of Nadia Ibrahim, 13. In the second, Nadia’s father appears with bruises on his face.
The continued recruitment of children in northeastern Syria is not only a deep concern for their families, but raises questions about why such practices persist during a period of integration that is meant to lay the groundwork for stability, not reproduce the tools of conflict.
Kurjo said his organization has documented numerous cases of child recruitment. While “limited in scale, they are concerning and clearly reflect that this phenomenon continues, despite its relative decline” from past years, he said.
Kurdish Spring relies on direct testimonies from family members and field monitoring to document cases. Kurjo said many cases have likely gone unreported, due to “fear or pressure exerted on families, leading some to resign themselves to the situation,” meaning “the true scale of recruitment is greater than has been disclosed.”
Earlier this year, while the Syrian government and the SDF were nearing political and security agreements, a cohort of new SDF recruits began military training in Hasakah city. The training, which started before the January 30 agreement was signed, continued afterwards. Of the approximately 45 recruits who participated, most were under the age of 18, one participant told Syria Direct on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Central to child recruitment in northeastern Syria, the Revolutionary Youth Movement is a controversial youth organization that has been accused for years, by families and local human rights organizations, of drawing children into the military structures associated with the SDF. It has also been accused of burning and vandalizing the offices of political parties in northeastern Syria.
The organization, which is licensed by the AANES, is active through youth networks and local centers that target minor boys and girls in association with “revolution” or “community protection.” Some minors are recruited through cultural, sports or recreational activities, with psychological pressure and ideological indoctrination encouraging them to join its ranks.
Run by cadres from the PKK, the Revolutionary Youth Movement organizes intensive ideological training courses that Mustafa al-Khalil, a journalist from Raqqa city, described as “brainwashing” that mirrors methods used by the Syrian Baath Party’s Revolutionary Youth Union.
These programs promote individualism and rebellion against “family authority, while offering illusory employment opportunities and a false sense of social status, turning them into human material that is easily manipulated,” al-Khalil told Syria Direct.
Some minors who join the Revolutionary Youth are transferred to training camps in the Qandil Mountains on the Iraqi-Iranian border, where they undergo military and ideological training before being involved in combat activities. Others remain within northeastern Syria and join SDF military formations.
Parents struggle to contact their children or determine their whereabouts, due to extreme secrecy and recruits being moved to “secret camps, some in restricted areas or underground tunnels,” Kurjo said.
As part of the PKK or SDF, youth receive noms de guerre, which makes it difficult to track and precisely document individual recruits, posing a dilemma for justice and accountability processes, journalist al-Khalil noted.
These code names—given to children and adults alike—are used day to day within SDF or PKK centers and among recruits. Personal names are not used in any internal context. Even when deaths are announced, only noms de guerre are disclosed.
Documents provided to the relatives of dead recruits include each individual’s date and place of birth, but some omit the birth date. This could indicate efforts to avoid disclosing the true age of some members.
For a week after his daughter Naziha disappeared, Abdalo tried to contact the US number that sent the audio recording, but “the phone was always out of service,” he told Syria Direct. The family went looking for her, visiting the Revolutionary Youth center at Qamishli’s Haitham Kajo Stadium, the Internal Security Forces (Asayish) center, the Afrin Council and Revolutionary Youth centers in Hasakah city. All “denied she was there,” Abdalo said.
“Has my daughter evaporated?” he asked, holding back tears. “I know them. Even if she was just behind the door, they wouldn’t tell us about her.” Those he spoke to simply took down the family’s phone numbers and promised to be in touch if there was any information. “To this day, nobody has contacted us,” he said.
“I don’t know who persuaded her to take this step, or how her mind was manipulated, especially since she knows nothing of weapons or military life,” Abdalo added. Qamiha interjected: “She is still a child, she has seen nothing of life yet. How can an underage girl be recruited at this age?”
Yasmine’s family has also searched for her. At a Revolutionary Youth center, a YPJ center and other sites, “all denied knowing where she was,” her mother said. “We received news that she is in Hasakah, and there is someone who said she is in Kobani.”
On April 30, Yasmine’s birthday, Ahmad could not bring herself to get out of bed. Her blood pressure was high, and she could not eat or work “as a result of the severe psychological exhaustion, the pain of loss and waiting,” she said. “Every year on her birthday, we used to buy a cake and celebrate her with the family. This year, her birthday was hard.”
Syria Direct contacted five other families—in Afrin and the Jazira region of northeastern Syria—whose children joined the SDF between 2015 and 2016 at the ages of 13 or 14. All said their fates remain unknown.
In one video circulating on social media pages belonging to the Revolutionary Youth, a PKK cadre speaks about a girl who joined the SDF, saying she first saw her as a child of around 10 or 11. She recalled telling the girl’s mother: “This is our daughter…she must join the revolution.”
Her words reflect a pattern of identifying children at an early age, monitoring them and considering them future recruitment projects, as part of an ideological approach that goes beyond individual choice and sometimes extends to direct social pressure on families, such as demanding they provide one of their sons or daughters for the organization’s cause.
Journalist al-Khalil said the continuation of child recruitment, following the SDF-Damascus integration agreement, stems from “fundamental contradictions within the SDF decision-making structure.” Its persistence, in his view, indicates the existence of “influential factions within the party that have no real intentions for the successful integration of Kurds into the new Syrian state,” but rather aim to “perpetuate instability and keep using the Kurdish presence in Syria as a geopolitical bargaining chip.”
The goal behind that, he suggested, would be to “maintain the party’s influence in Syria as a regional negotiating tool, especially in light of the notable decline of its popular base among Syrian Kurds, and it losing the moral standing it once enjoyed.”
Human rights lawyer Armanaj Muhammad Amin, who is from Kobani and currently lives in Germany, said the recruitment of children at this stage, given the absence of open warfare, does not appear “linked to urgent military needs, but may be tied to other factors, such as ideological indoctrination and the exploitation of vulnerable segments of society in support of political projects, or to fill organizational gaps.”
SDF commander-in-chief Mazloum Abdi signed a joint “action plan” with the United Nations in June 2019 to end the recruitment and use of children under the age of 18 in military activities, a step welcomed at the time as “the beginning of a process.” However, the recruitment of children and teenagers—and the involvement of some in military activities and operations—has continued to be reported and documented over the following years.
“The absence of genuine accountability, coupled with the continued management of this issue by certain parties outside any real oversight” enables child recruitment to persist, Kurjo of Kurdish Spring said.
The continuation of these practices also highlights a “deep gap between political rhetoric and reality,” he added, raising questions over the “seriousness of adherence to international standards, as there can be no talk of restructuring or unifying institutions as serious violations against children continue.”
As the Syrian state seeks to reassert sovereignty over its entire territory, Damascus has a “pivotal and multifaceted” role to play in stopping the recruitment of children, journalist al-Khalil added. This includes ensuring any integration agreement with the SDF explicitly mandates the dissolution of structures responsible for this recruitment, as well as turning over the issue to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Labor and treating recruits as “child victims,” he said.
Al-Khalil called for Syrian Penal Code, Juvenile Delinquents Law and international obligations to be applied across all of Syria, and for a national monitoring and reintegration mechanism to be established, alongside “a national fund to support victims of forced recruitment” in cooperation with civil society organizations and religious institutions to secure safe reporting channels, psychological and educational support and reintegration.
Kurdish figures with social, tribal or religious influence also have a role to play in “curbing this dangerous phenomenon,” he added, by applying “moral and social pressure on the controlling forces and reinforcing a culture that rejects minor recruitment as a moral crime before it is a legal one.”
Armanaj stressed the need to “ban the Revolutionary Youth, activate strict laws, establish independent monitoring mechanisms and hold those responsible to account, while strengthening the community’s role and providing educational and social alternatives for children.”
Commenting on that, Bassam al-Ahmad, the executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice (STJ), said the legal remedies available to the families of recruited children “remained limited even during the previous years.”
While some mechanisms exist, such as the AANES-affiliated Child Protection Office and partial attempts at demobilization, these tools have declined at present, “leaving families to rely mainly on media advocacy and communication with international human rights organizations to document cases,” he said.
Documentation and monitoring by rights organizations of all cases of child recruitment—regardless of the party responsible—is essential for any subsequent legal or human rights track, al-Ahmad emphasized, warning that weak follow-up or lack of political will limits opportunities for accountability.
“The number of recruited children may be lower than during the war years, but the continuation of any case requires urgent action to put a definitive end to this phenomenon and prevent it from recurring,” he added.
For now, Naziha Abdalo’s family can do little but worry and wait. Other families displaced from Afrin register for convoys to return from the northeast, but her parents refuse to do the same. They are holding on to the hope their daughter will come back to them—that they will all go home together.
Kurdish Spring (Buhara Kurdî) contributed to this reporting by coordinating interviews with the families of recruited children.
This report was originally published in Arabic and translated into English by Mateo Nelson.
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