Turkish police have nabbed nine suspects for sending funds to the Daesh terror group, the Turkish Interior Ministry said on Friday.
Gendarmerie forces in Istanbul carried out a simultaneous operation across nine districts against 14 suspects, the ministry said in a statement.
The suspects had collected money through social media platforms supposedly as aid for the families of terror group members that are in prisons and in the so-called conflict zones, and transferred it to Daesh, it added.
Dozens of digital material was seized for probing. An operation is underway to capture the remaining five suspects, the ministry said.
On Thursday, Ankara also froze the assets of 17 people and four legal entities linked to Daesh based on their financial aid to terrorist organizations.
The Daesh terrorist group emerged from the chaos of the civil war in neighboring Syria last decade and took over vast swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014. Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself "caliph" of all Muslims from a mosque in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul that year.
Daesh's brutal rule, during which it killed and executed thousands of people in the name of its perverted interpretation of religion, came to an end in Mosul when Iraqi and international forces defeated the group there in 2017.
Its remaining thousands of militants have in recent years mostly hidden out in remote territory but are still able to carry out significant insurgent-style attacks.
Türkiye was one of the first countries to declare Daesh a terrorist group in 2013.
The country has since been attacked by the terrorist group multiple times, with over 300 people killed and hundreds more injured in at least 10 suicide bombings, seven bomb attacks and four armed assaults. In response, Ankara launched counterterrorism operations at home and abroad to prevent further attacks, eliminating nearly 17,000 terrorists from both Daesh and the PKK/YPG over the course of six years.
