Charu Mazumdar was an influential leader of the 1968 generation and founder of the Communist Party of India who believed that a people's war would start in the countryside and proceed to the cities to usher in the revolution. The use of armed weapons in the revolutionary war, however, was strictly forbidden. Instead, participants could only resorts to sickles and scythes to which villagers had access. By the end of the 1960s, Charu Mazumdar's mystical people's war had a fan base in Turkey as well - at Robert College of all places. Albanian leader Enver Hoxha, too, once had a somewhat larger following in Turkey. The remnants of this group continue their efforts to understand the world through debates at the Albanian Party of Labor. Considering past examples, it would be hardly surprising for the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, whose leader declared his caliphate to wage jihad, to find sympathetic ears in the country.If you happen to know just enough about Turkey, you would not be surprised about the small number of people rooting for ISIS either. Historically, the strong influence of Sufi orders and communities has prevented Salafism from taking hold in the country. Turkey's chief religious authority, Diyanet, even made efforts to fight Salafi/Wahhabi ideas and oversaw the emergence of religious communities opposed to these traditions.It does not take an expert, then, to grasp that Turkey is not "one of the biggest sources of [ISIS] recruits" as a recent article in the New York Times suggested. A quick glance at a report by Peter Neumann, a professor at King's College London, whose results the same article featured in an info graphic, would also be enough to refute the claims. The study concludes that Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, not Turkey, are the biggest sources of ISIS recruits. (To be fair, it is hard to report such news over there, but you can write all about it in Turkey, which has a worse track record than Kuwait in the area freedom of the press according to Freedom House.) The same report also reveals that Turkey is not even one of the top sources of recruits among NATO allies - France, the United Kingdom and Germany contribute more foreign fighters to ISIS than Turkey. It would take a significant amount of bias to identify Turkey as "one of the biggest sources of recruits" despite mounting evidence to the contrary. This is, after all, a country where Salafism has a smaller base than in the United States, and even the most radical groups keep a safe distance from what ISIS militants are doing in Syria.According to the same New York Times article, what attracts teenagers from Hacıbayram is that the local elementary school was demolished as part of a broader urban renewal project. The story also featured the comments of a local resident ("There are now seven mosques in the vicinity, but not one school") quite possibly to appeal to the hungry-fororientalist- explanations-of-phenomena part of the publication's readership. Finding out that the local kids rushed to ISIS as soon as the local school was knocked down - never mind that there are multiple alternatives in the vicinity - no doubt restore one's faith in quality education. Who cares, after all, that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi holds a PhD from the Islamic University of Baghdad or that his organization attracts recruits from diverse backgrounds, such as wealthy doctors, former Royal Netherlands Army troops, soccer players and hip-hop artists? Apparently, the reader also need not be bothered with insignificant details like the irrelevance of the ruling AK Party's policies to the too-many-mosques-toofew- schools situation in Hacıbayram, a historic part of the Turkish capital that features not only mosques and madrasas dating back seven centuries but also the Monumentum Ancyranum, the Temple of Augustus that was built between 25-20 B.C. The same goes for the fact that the school was demolished as part of a municipal effort to restore the neighborhood's traditional architecture. But, of course, there would be no way to claim that Hacıbayram was Turkey's answer to Peshawar had the New York Times provided the above information to its readers.A quick note: The New York Times missed a great opportunity to misleadingly attribute the conversion of the Temple of Augustus into the White Madrasa, or Ak Medrese, in the 1300s to the activities of ISIS, which in fact constitutes the military wing of the ruling AK Party. (Hint: Sarcasm.) Such background information would have no doubt perfectly matched the background music to New York Times reporter Ceylan Yeginsu's story. Considering that the same journalist once famously accused Turkey of promoting ISIS based on one statement from a Turkish truck driver and made it to the front page of the New York Times, it is safe to assume that the company does not overthink the political ambitions of its employees, which is why parts of the article pertaining to "miscalculations [that] have left the country isolated and vulnerable in a region now plagued by war" could easily pass as an official statement from the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) about President Erdoğan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. But add a picture of the two politicians leaving the Hacıbayram Mosque and note that the facility is "just over 100 yards away from an underground mosque used by a radical Salafi sect known to oversee ISIS recruits," and the reader would get the idea even if the story were translated into Swahili.This, to be fair, is a fair example of quality journalism. (P.S. Considering the size of the crowd, the picture was probably taken after the Friday prayers, which for the record do not take place in the afternoon.) The New York Times has since issued a correction to accept that it was wrong to use the aforementioned picture with the story. The problem, however, was not the American editor who simply read the story and, understandably enough, went for the one picture that he thought would complement the words.But in all fairness, the correspondent did engage in an objective comparison between ISIS and the AK Party: "Turkish fighters recruited by ISIS say they identify more with the extreme form of Islamic governance practiced by ISIS than the rule of the Turkish governing party, which has its roots in a more moderate form of Islam." I mean, listen: The AK Party has been in power for 12 years, and it is so much more moderate than, I don't know, ISIS that our heads are still attached to our bodies.Of course, the New York Times article was not the first piece to suggest that ISIS was recruiting people in Hacıbayram, which was formerly called İsmetpaşa after the second president of Turkey. This is exactly where the problem gets bigger than the happy marriage of a secular-minded Turkish correspondent and a newspaper where everything anti-Erdoğan seems fit to print. The above-quoted article closely resembles a story by Emily Feldman that appeared in Mashable a month ago - with bolder language, of course: "Another lifelong Hacıbayram resident, who has witnessed the radicalization of his neighbors, points an accusatory finger at the country's Islamistleaning prime minister, now President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. If he doesn't want [the Islamic State], then he has to stop the teaching of Sharia law here," he says. The prime minister is guilty."A month before Mashable, the Turkish daily Milliyet published a comprehensive story about Taylan, a 14-year-old resident of Hacıbayram who was left wounded at the border, with comments from the neighborhood headman who stated that "30 teenagers from the area had left for Syria to join ISIS." Mashable and the New York Times, however, put the figure at 100 according to local sources - either the neighborhood headman was no good at math or 70 others left since the Milliyet story was published. A brief Google search later and the original Hacıbayram-ISIS story appears on the website of Taha Haber dated May 11, 2014, with extensive details, documents and pictures of ISIS recruits.Let us take a step back and take a look at the following quote from an article by Taha Haber's proprietor to get a better idea about the outlet: "[The people of] Syria fought a war of independence to side with [Bashar] al-Assad. And will the people of Turkey carry Tayyip Erdoğan, a disoriented, sectarian and low-quality man, to the presidency? There is no doubt that Assad will carry Syria to the light, but Turkey will remain on its way to be a country of darkness under Erdoğan where the sun does not rise." So yes, Taha Haber is a pro-Iran and, by extension, pro-Assad website. It was also the first outlet to identify Oğuzhan Gözlemecioğlu as the ISIS recruiter in Hacıbayram and disclosed his code name, Muhammed Selef. The same goes for the claim that teenagers from the area looked at the pictures of armed men that he shared on the Internet. All of this information appears in the New York Times article, but the newspaper argues that the tip came from local sources as opposed to Taha Haber. And where did Taha Haber get the information, you ask? The original story provides personal details about ISIS recruits, including code names and pictures from the battlefield.The text itself, though, resembles an intelligence report rather than a news update from the ground: "The organization, which uses Şanlıurfa and Gaziantep as its hinterland, ships the militants off across the border to Raqqa. The İsmetpaşa neighborhood in Altındağ, Ankara near the city center. Having used the area to organize for some time, ISIS sends militants from Ankara to fight in Syria. It is known that those who have travelled from Ankara to Raqqa, Syria, have been there for a year and have visited Ankara at regular intervals." According to Taha News, the total number of recruits from the neighborhood had reached six at the time.Let us check some other sources: Takva Haber, for instance, which does not go to great lengths to conceal its sympathy with ISIS operations, published a story about the "jihad trap on social media," dealing with "allegations that an organization had been discovered whose members pretended to be mujahids on social media and called on people to join ISIS were actually recruiting militants to the PKK, the Free Syrian Army and the al-Nusra Front." The following is even more interesting: "An IS fighter by the name of Muhammed Selef who contacted Takva Haber stated that he did not have a Facebook account, but others have opened accounts under his name." If the name does not ring a bell, please go back a few paragraphs. Yes, Muhammed Selef is the code name of Oğuzhan Gözlemecioğlu, the alleged mastermind of the Hacıbayram recruiting activities according to Taha Haber and the New York Times. "Noting that he was worried about Muslims being scammed with his name, the fighter provided information about the fake accounts," Takva Haber continued and directed readers to two Facebook profiles. And yes, this was the man whose picture appeared on Taha Haber, whose Facebook account, according to the New York Times and Taha Haber, was quite popular among neighborhood kids.Yet the man denies any involvement with the said account. Did the teenagers, then, volunteer for a fake organization? No worries. The evil children from the New York Times' fantasy world putting a toy gun to a by passer's head and complaining about their boredom will no doubt find a way into the real ISIS sooner or later.This is not to say that Turkey, France, the United States, Germany, the UK and others should not question why young people would want to join an organization like ISIS in the first place. The authorities should obviously take the necessary measures. And the same, of course, goes for journalists, who cannot afford to look for places François Hollande or Angela Merkel visited that happen to be 100 yards away from somewhere else just to get their names into an article about ISIS. Correspondents should work hard to practice fair journalism, not turn reporting into an ill-intentioned act of political activism. May we remember Hacı Bayram Veli, a 14thcentury Sufi whose name keeps appearing in news stories about the same kind of sectarianism, violence and bigotry that he fought all his life. * Columnist at daily Türkiye