A married Belgian couple, along with their 4-year-old child, was caught while trying to cross into Turkey at the Syrian border on Saturday.
A border patrol spotted the family in the Karkamis district in Turkey's southern Gaziantep province.
They had reportedly arrived in Iraq six months ago to cross into Syria's Raqqa in order to join Daesh, the Arabic acronym of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The family will be deported, officials said.
Meanwhile, Moroccan-Belgian Faouzi El Boukabouti, whose wife Fatima Bazarouj traveled from Belgium to Syria via Turkey in an attempt to join ISIS with her two children, found traces left behind by his wife in Istanbul's Fatih district. After Boukabouti applied Turkish officials with Belgian Deputy Ahmed El Khannouss, police raided the house in Fatih, but Bazarouj and her two children were not found there. The woman reportedly flew from Amsterdam to Istanbul in order to join ISIS with her two children, Enes and Hamza, on Feb. 13.
According to Turkish Interior Minister Efkan Ala, 10,000 people from 91 countries have been banned from entering Turkey on the grounds of having links to ISIS, adding that 1,085 people from 74 countries were deported for similar reasons.
The country stepped up measures along its 911 kilometer-long border with Syria against infiltration from the war-torn country and vice versa. However, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu acknowledged that the country will never be able to make the border completely secure. Since ISIS captured the city of Mosul in Iraq last summer, Turkish leaders have called for broader cooperation to fight ISIS in the region and prevent militants from joining the group, which also threatens the West.
On every possible occasion, including the NATO summit in Wales and the G20 summit in Australia, Turkish leaders have said international cooperation and intelligence sharing is vital to combat the influx of foreign fighters into ISIS-held regions of Syria and Iraq. Highly criticized after its failure to prevent the terror attacks in Paris, France also apprehended and interrogated its citizens who were deported from Turkey. In some cases, deported French citizens arrived back in Turkey to join ISIS, but were sent back to France again.
