Turkish security forces detained 26 foreign nationals as part of operations against the Daesh terrorist group in the capital Ankara early Monday.
The Ankara police intelligence unit discovered that 30 suspects, including 28 Iraqi and two Syrian nationals, had been communicating with Daesh terrorists in their respective countries.
The police detained 26 suspects in raids and transferred them to the local migration authority for deportation procedures.
Police are still seeking the remaining four suspects.
In May, Ankara arrested a Daesh terrorist identified as the right-hand man of former terrorist leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Al-Baghdadi was killed in a U.S. military operation in Syria in 2019. Reports said that Turkish intelligence played a key role in the death of al-Baghdadi by detaining and extraditing one of his aides to Iraq, who provided U.S. authorities with critical information to help locate the vicious man.
Turkish security forces have nabbed at least 850 suspects with links to Daesh in the first three months of 2021, dealing a heavy blow to the terrorist group's presence in the country and its activities in the region.
As one of the first countries that recognized Daesh as a terrorist group in 2013, Turkey has been frequently conducting domestic and cross-border operations against the group for years in order to eliminate a major global terrorism threat. In 2021's domestic operations, 145 of the 850 – which includes several senior figures – have been imprisoned while some others have been repatriated. In addition, documents and ammunition belonging to the terrorist group were seized during these operations.
