Syrian opposition forces captured a member of the terrorist group PKK with the assistance of Türkiye’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT), security sources said on Wednesday.
The man, identified as Mehmet Kılıç, was attempting to infiltrate the region secured by Türkiye’s Operation Olive-Branch in northern Syria when he was captured by the Syrian National Army (SNA).
With MIT’s technical support, the SNA detected that the terrorist, codenamed “Rızgar Amed,” was plotting an attack in the said area and captured him alive before he could commit it, sources said.
Kılıç was also a part of the terrorist group’s infiltration of a Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) command station in the eastern Şırnak province in 2019, sources added.
The YPG is the PKK terror group’s Syrian offshoot that has occupied large swathes of northern Syria near the Turkish border since 2015.
Kılıç first joined the PKK in May 2015 through a relative residing in the countryside of eastern Muş province. After completing his militant and ideological training, he committed terrorist acts for the PKK in Iraq's Metina and Gara regions.
In 2018, he joined the so-called armed struggle, before he was injured in a Turkish airstrike in 2019. By 2020, he was operating in the PKK’s Rojava wing. He had been wanted for “being a member of an armed terrorist organization” by the Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office in Muş.
MIT has been quiet about its counterterrorism activities in the past but Türkiye’s top intelligence body is more open in publicizing its operations nowadays. This is largely due to the heightened success in the past two decades to find and eliminate terrorists, whether in Türkiye or abroad. Through the publicizing of operations, MIT also apparently hopes that the terrorist group would be daunted in its vicious campaign of violence for more than four decades that killed thousands.
Flanked by armed drones, MIT agents carried out 181 operations in 2023 and eliminated 201 terrorists. They also managed to destroy 45 energy facilities and parts of infrastructure the terrorist group built or operated, along with places used to store weapons and munitions by the PKK. Among the 38 terrorists eliminated by MIT were high-profile names.
The organization’s operations which eliminated terrorists who were behind attacks targeting Türkiye, as well as those who supplied weapons, recruits and cash to the terrorist group curbed PKK’s activities.
Precision operations are often carried out abroad, in Iraq’s north or Syria, two regions swarming with hideouts of the PKK. In Syria’s northeast, the PKK openly operates under the name of YPG, which claimed control of several towns under the guise of the fight against Daesh. Though it is recognized as a terrorist group elsewhere, including in the United States, the PKK also enjoys support from the U.S. in Syria thanks to this disguise.
Security sources say MIT is instrumental in contributing to Türkiye’s counterterrorism strategy focusing on “eliminating threats at its source,” namely, beyond Türkiye’s borders.
The PKK’s leaders are believed to be hiding in Iraq’s mountainous north and unconfirmed reports say some occasionally cross into Syria through porous parts of the border between the two Middle Eastern countries.
Unlike in Iraq, the terrorist group is more “urbanized” in Syria where they even set up their own "administrations" under the name of SDF. MIT’s operations in Syria’s north destroyed critical facilities of the YPG, including an oil refinery where the group reaps the benefits of oil extracted in the region.
