Police on Tuesday launched operations in Istanbul, Bursa and another city against the terrorist group Daesh.
A total of 110 suspects were captured in operations that followed similar raids in the past few weeks against the group, which is named as the culprit behind a recent attack against police officers outside the Israeli Consulate in Istanbul.
Counterterrorism and intelligence units launched raids in several locations to capture the suspects, including those who ran “classes” for potential Daesh recruits in illegal associations, those training minors on the ideology of the terrorist groups, as well as suspects collecting funds for Daesh convicts in prisons.
Authorities said the suspects were also involved in propaganda activities and sold books and magazines promoting Daesh. In operations, police teams also discovered four rifles, 90 cartridges and a trove of banned publications promoting Daesh.
The Chief Prosecutor’s Office in Istanbul said an investigation revealed that two suspects, identified as Ishak Baysal and Tekin Ireç, assumed “leadership” of the network of suspects and organized “classes” in illegally founded associations and so-called “masjids” in Istanbul’s Sultanbeyli, Kartal and Sancaktepe districts. It is unclear if it is the same Tekin Ireç who offers audio recordings on a YouTube channel about religion. Prosecutors said the “masjids” were used to train children. The statement by the Chief Prosecutor’s Office also said that suspects collected cash from donors under the name of fitr and zakat (Islamic terms associated with charity) to aid families of imprisoned Daesh suspects.
“The suspects were involved in radical discourse calling for so-called jihad and declared any faction other than Daesh as infidels and insulted the state and the government for carrying out counterterrorism operations,” The Office stated.
Last week, police arrested another 324 people in raids targeting Daesh suspects across 47 provinces, the Interior Ministry said.
On April 7, a gunman was killed, and two others were wounded in a shootout outside the Israeli consulate in Istanbul.
Interior Minister Mustafa Çiftçi said one of them was linked to an "organization that exploits religion," which Turkish media reported was Daesh.
At the end of December, Daesh terrorists opened fire on police in the northwestern town of Yalova, killing three officers and wounding nine others.
Six Daesh members were also killed in the hours-long gun battle that followed, with Türkiye rounding up more than 600 suspected members of the group in the following weeks.
Türkiye considers the Daesh terrorist group one of the biggest threats to the country’s security and peace and was one of the first countries to declare it a terrorist group in 2013. It has suffered from several Daesh attacks since then, including a suicide bombing in an Ankara train station that killed 100 people in 2015 and a deadly Istanbul nightclub shooting on New Year’s in 2017.
At its peak in 2015, Daesh controlled a swath of territory across Iraq and Syria, half the size of the United Kingdom. It was notorious for its brutality against religious minorities, as well as Muslims who do not follow the terrorists’ ideology.
After years of fighting, the U.S.-led coalition broke the group’s last hold on territory in late 2019, but Daesh cells in multiple countries continue to carry out periodic attacks.
