The DEM Party Youth is continuing the tradition of its predecessor party HDP and is organising a "football tournament against the special war".

According to a statement by the DEM Party Youth Council Spokesperson Edanur İbrahimoğlu and Oğuzhan Azbay in Ankara on Thursday, the football tournament is dedicated to Gülistan Doku, a female student who has been missing for four years, and young women are explicitly invited to take part.

The statement on the event, which was presented in Turkish and Kurdish, said: "The rulers, who are targeting the essence and truth of society, aim at young people first, especially young women, in order to achieve their goals. They know that women and young people are the pioneers of change and have a revolutionary attitude. That's why their biggest and dirtiest attacks are directed at us. Today they combine these attacks with dirty politics and carry them out using special methods of war. With drugs, prostitution, recruitment of agents, assimilation and forced migration, young people and especially young women are alienated from society, organised life and their country and directed towards an individual and false life."

Last August, the Youth Council launched a campaign with the slogan "Great Resistance against the Special War" to counteract all elements of the Turkish state's complex and multifaceted special warfare, from ethnocide, colonial policy and forced assimilation to military violence, ecocide and femicide. The announced football tournament also falls within this framework.

The statement pointed out the football industry is an established and profitable means of promoting chauvinistic and sexist ideas and anaesthetising society. The DEM Youth wants to offer an alternative to this and at the same time strengthen the democratic movement against the nation state. "We are calling on young women in particular to take part in order to set an example against misogyny and break down traditional gender roles in society," said the DEM Party's Youth Council.