Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s concept of “unchilding” is particularly apt for settler colonial societies such as Israel. In this paper, I would like to extend the concept to a relatively understudied case, that of Kurdish children in Turkey. I argue that the experience of Kurdish children in Turkey’s Kurdistan structurally resembles in many ways that of the Palestinian children described by Shalhoub-Kevorkian. Relying on an oral history archive of interviews with Kurdish youth in the city of Diyarbakir, I discuss the experiences of children at the height of the war between the Turkish army and the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê or Kurdish Workers’ Party) in the 1990s. Exposed to violence and forced displacement, these children migrated from rural areas to the margins of the city with their families. Unchilding took many forms, including exposure to violence and war, the need to learn Turkish and work in order to provide for their parents and siblings, and strategic adjustment to exclusion in the city. Despite its negative consequences, unchilding also made it possible for these children to make their mark upon the city at a time when the Kurdish movement was strong in the public sphere, and to transform themselves from the excluded to the representatives of a new urban generation of young people.