Turkish police detained eight suspects as part of a counterterrorism operation against the Daesh terrorist group in Istanbul, reports said Thursday.
Counterterrorism squads carried out raids on 12 addresses in seven districts, Demirören News Agency (DHA) reported.
Digital materials and organizational documents were confiscated in the raids.
The suspects were transferred to police headquarters for questioning, Ihlas News Agency (IHA) reported.
Earlier this month, 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 military operation by the United States 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 for locating 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.
Being 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 those 850 – which includes several senior figures – have been imprisoned and some of them have also been repatriated. In addition, documents and ammunition belonging to the terrorist group were seized during these operations.
