The youth are victims and are manipulated by both sides.
On the government side, you have youth who are part of the official youth league of the ruling party. Those are the ones I talked about before. On the opposition side, there are many young men, as well as women, but particularly men, who joined the opposition. Initially, it was just part of that spontaneous public demonstration movement against a third term, and then some of those young people joined armed opposition groups as they began forming. There were already armed opposition groups, but new ones formed, and those people have also become increasingly radicalized, so you see it on both sides.
The cordon-and-search operations, and thank you for raising that, are one of the most worrying aspects, actually, but particularly toward the end of last year. The security forces mounted these operations in several neighbourhoods of the capital which were seen as opposition neighbourhoods, where there had been very intense protests against a third term.
The police would just seal off these neighbourhoods, go in, often accompanied by the youth from the ruling party. Often they would go house to house. They would say they were looking for weapons, but often what they would do, they would just go to these houses and say, “Show us the weapons.” They would arrest people with no arrest warrants or procedure of any kind.
There were numerous operations of this kind toward the end of last year, and one particularly deadly one on December 11. It followed an attack, presumably by the opposition, on four military installations. In response to that, the police and military came into two neighbourhoods of the capital and just went crazy. They arrested a huge number of people. They killed a large number of people. There were bodies buried in mass graves. It was one of the most gruesome episodes.