Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced Friday that 92 people were arrested over their suspected links to terrorist group Daesh. The minister said suspects were rounded up in simultaneous counterterrorism operations in 26 provinces across the country. It is one of the biggest nationwide sweeps against Daesh in recent memory.
"We will not let terrorist organizations and their collaborators breathe," Yerlikaya vowed in a social media post. "I want our beloved nation to know that: Our struggle will continue with determination and resolve until the last terrorist is neutralized," he added.
Turkish security forces have been quite busy with counterterrorism operations this week following Sunday's terror attack by PKK in the capital Ankara. Dozens have been detained in operations against PKK since Monday. Daesh remains the second biggest threat of terrorism for Türkiye which is embattled with security risks from multiple terrorist groups.
In 2013, Türkiye became one of the first countries to declare Daesh a terrorist group. 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 attacks. In response, Türkiye launched anti-terror operations at home and abroad to prevent further attacks.
Terrorists from Daesh and other groups such as the PKK and its Syrian wing, the YPG, rely on a network of members and supporters in Türkiye. In response, Ankara has been intensifying its crackdown on the terrorists and their links at home, conducting pinpoint operations and freezing assets to eliminate the terrorist groups by their roots.
Since its formal defeat in Iraq in 2017 and significant loss of territory in Syria since 2015, Daesh fighters have been leading their operations underground besides losing their leaders to military operations. The group’s last three leaders, all Iraqis, were killed in Syria in recent years outside areas it once purported to rule.
The last Daesh leader, Abu al-Hassan al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, the successor of Abu Ibrahim al-Hashemi al-Qurayshi who committed suicide during a U.S. raid earlier in 2022, was killed in mid-October last year by the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in southern Syria, as confirmed by the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM).
The group’s founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was hunted down by the Americans in a raid in Idlib in October 2019. Remaining Daesh militants, whose numbers reach thousands, mostly hide in remote territory across the region but still possess the ability to carry out significant insurgent-style attacks.
The Sabah newspaper has recently reported that Türkiye obtained a valued database of the terrorist group, containing names and information about 9,952 "lone wolf" terrorists after a successful operation carried out in the past months by police in Istanbul. The existence of the database, which contains biographical information about lone wolf terrorists, from their skills to their residence and ID information was known to most intelligence agencies from the CIA and MI6 to Mossad. Intelligence agencies assigned 40 agents in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Pakistan to track down the database known to be in possession of Daesh members in those countries.
The database was first in possession of Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi who was killed on Oct. 27, 2019. The U.S. agents scoured the area where al-Baghdadi was killed in Syria in an operation but discovered it was long gone and was now in possession of al-Baghdadi’s successor Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi.
The database was the central piece of an international hunt for a long time as it contained all the information about lone-wolf terrorists from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria and Spain who were members of Daesh sleeper cells across the world. Al-Qurashi, who was aware that foreign intelligence agencies were looking for it, decided to send it to another country. However, the courier he assigned with the delivery found out about the content of the database and decided to sell it. He disappeared but was located by Daesh members. He claimed he lost the database and did not confess, despite the terrorist group’s interrogators cutting off both his feet. The terrorist group’s leadership did not believe that the database was simply lost and pursued potential suspects they thought stole the database. Eventually, they executed a Daesh member in Uzbekistan and two others in Syria as they were suspected of theft. But they failed to locate the precious list of lone wolf terrorists.
Lone wolf attacks are the most sinister threat of Daesh, which lost territory it seized in Iraq and Syria as its clout waned amid counterterrorism operations in those two countries. Lone wolves of Daesh are responsible for the killing of 50 people on June 12, 2016, at a Florida nightclub and the killing of 84 people in France’s Nice when a truck plowed through a crowd. In Türkiye, Abdulkadir Masharipov, a lone wolf of Kyrgyz origin, slaughtered 39 people in a popular Istanbul nightclub as revelers gathered to welcome the New Year on Jan. 1, 2017.