When the Turkish state needed help protecting Kurdish villages in its southeast region in the mid-1980s from insurgents belonging to the Kurdish-separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), then-president Turgut Özal began a “village guard" system. The controversial system, established in 1985, recruited villagers – mostly Kurdish themselves – to act as a paramilitary force both to protect their villages and to aid the Turkish military. The Turkish state has kept the system in place since then, despite opposition from both human rights groups and from within the Turkish parliament.
The number of village guards was around 90,000 in the 1990s. Even though recruitment slowed down during the 2000s – a relatively peaceful period – from the outbreak of new conflict in August 2015 recruitment began to gain speed once again. Unfortunately, there is no precise data on the number of recruits today. The most recent figures from the General Directorate of Provincial Administration are from February 2014. According to those numbers, in 2014 there were 47,800 temporary village guards in addition to 25,000 voluntary village guards in 22 provinces.