Speaking at a meeting with police chiefs in Ankara on Wednesday, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced that authorities thwarted seven terrorist attacks this year so far, while 2,063 people were arrested in counterterrorism operations.
Numbers show terrorism is still a main threat to the country that has lost thousands of people to the attacks in the past four decades.
Yerlikaya said all attacks targeted areas in police jurisdiction, while he did not give the figures regarding any likely terrorist plots targeting areas in the gendarmerie jurisdiction. Gendarmerie forces handle the security of rural areas or areas in the immediate vicinity of urban centers.
“We do not tolerate any kind of terrorism, be it terrorist groups abusing our sacred religion or those ambushing our unity,” he said. He was referring to Daesh, which claims to fight for “an Islamic state,” and the PKK, which is blamed for pitting Kurds against Turks, attempting to perpetuate ethnic strife.
The minister stated that security forces also continued search missions in rural areas against terrorist hideouts and were destroying terrorist shelters.
The last major terrorist attack in Türkiye was in Ankara. Two terrorists linked to the U.S.-backed YPG, the Syrian wing of the PKK, stormed Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) headquarters in the capital on Oct. 23, 2024. Seven people were killed, and 22 others were injured in the attack, while the perpetrators were killed in a shootout with security forces in the premises of Türkiye’s major defense contractors.
Daesh has been largely dormant in Türkiye, though authorities recently detained several suspects linked to the terrorist group after three police officers were killed in September when a gunman, allegedly a brainwashed teenager, attacked a police station in western Türkiye’s Izmir. In 2024, two Daesh suspects attacked an Istanbul church, killing one man. Türkiye has escalated operations against Daesh in recent years, especially after the 2015 bombings that targeted a rally in Ankara. Secret operations in Syria led to the killing of senior leaders of the group.
For the PKK, Türkiye pursues what authorities call the “terror-free Türkiye” initiative. Devlet Bahçeli, leader of government ally Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), was the first to suggest a new process to disarm the PKK, which has killed tens of thousands of people since the 1980s in terrorist attacks. Bahçeli last year urged the PKK to lay down arms and turned to the group’s jailed ringleader, Abdullah Öcalan, to facilitate this new process. Öcalan agreed and made a call to the group in February. The PKK announced last summer that it began abandoning arms in a landmark development.
Fearing it may collapse, authorities proceed with caution about the initiative. PKK terrorism is a sensitive issue for the country, which has suffered heavily from attacks, especially for the victims of terrorism. It also bears the potential of hurting the unity between Turks and Kurds. The PKK managed to manipulate some members of the Kurdish community to join its cause to carve out a so-called “Kurdistan” in southeastern Türkiye. Proponents of the initiative advocate that reinforcing Turkish-Kurdish unity may eliminate the PKK’s raison d’etre, something that has been difficult to achieve so far.
