In a special note to the Iranian Kurdistan Human Rights Watch, a former PJAK member investigates the forced disappearance and death of Iranian Kurdish teenagers in the PJAK / PKK, and provides the watchdog with specific information about “Fatemeh Mehbakhsh.”
In these notes, this former member of PJAK introduces the person in question and her background and how she was killed. The reason for the importance of this information is that it comes from a first witness.
Name: Fatemeh Mahbakhsh
Nom de guerre: Sherwin Deldar
City: Mako
Date of birth: –
Registry date: –
Date of death: 2016- Hakkari, Turkey
The PKK and PJAK have always used false promises to deceive and abduct Iranian Kurdish children and adolescents in Iranian Kurdistan. In this way, the poor and rural children of families that live in border villages are easily tricked into joining the group. The majority of families that live in border villages are poor, uneducated or have only studied to grade 3 or 4 in elementary school. They provide for themselves through herding sheep and goats, kolberi, and the smuggling of gasoline and cigarettes. The only thing PJAK forces have to do is promise their children a means to provide for their families or release their families’ burden. After all, most of them are illiterate, and have even not seen a larger city in their lives.
After joining, PJAK prevents the teenagers from escaping both by scaring them for legal consequences upon return and sending them to unknown territory, preferably the west of Iraqi Kurdistan, Syria or Turkey. Being stationed in a foreign country prevents them from running away. This recruitment tactic is well practiced by PJAK and the PKK in border and poor areas. In this regard, the government is also to blame as it does not do enough to improve the situation in border villages. In fact, PJAK is using the vicious cycle of poverty and child abduction to get fresh meat for its structure.
Read more: LOST in PJAK; Reza Kamali (part 13)
Fatemeh, a village girl who had studied until elementary school, was simply deceived by PJAK. PJAK promised her a better life, full of lessons and eventually university. Fatemeh was so eager to learn to read and write, I remember her speeding to the front row when the training courses first started. She tried really hard to learn to read and write. But instead of pen and school, it gave her weapons and taught her violence.
Fatemeh, like many Iranian Kurds in the PKK-based structure of the PKK and PJAK, was ultimately sentenced to death. In 2016, at the height of the conflict between Turkey and PKK, she was send to a certain death in Shirnakh… It was like a meat grinder then, PKK had lost all of its camps inside this region of Turkey, and everyone that was assembled to go there never returned. The end of Fatemeh’s stay in in Shirnakh and Hakkari was death, and a body that was never returned to her family.
