Simultaneous raids in 23 Turkish provinces nabbed 74 suspects affiliated with the Daesh terrorist group Friday.
The Chief Prosecutor’s Office in the southeastern Turkish province of Diyarbakır issued arrest warrants for 92 suspects as part of an operation. Security forces raided 123 locations to capture the suspects. A manhunt is underway for the arrest of suspects at large. The operations were conducted in cooperation with the National Intelligence Organization (MIT).
Security forces confiscated a large cache of pistols and rifles, as well as documents and other materials containing Daesh propaganda during the raids.
Operations spanned from Diyarbakır to Yalova in northwestern Türkiye. They targeted a network seeking new recruits for the terrorist group harboring dwindling power after it emerged as a formidable threat in Iraq and Syria in the past decade.
The investigation focused on "Ahlak and Sünnet" magazine suspected of having links to the terrorist group and the magazine’s offices in several provinces were among the locations raided. The magazine was part of a network active in Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Mali, Sudan, Algeria and Libya, security sources told the Turkish media outlets.
The network in Türkiye is accused of forming a terrorist group that trained new recruits in Georgia and sent them to conflict zones. They are also accused of financing Daesh members in Syria and Georgia.
In 2013, Türkiye became one of the first countries to declare Daesh a terrorist group. However, the country has since been attacked by Daesh multiple times, with over 300 people killed and hundreds more injured in at least 10 suicide bombings, seven bomb attacks and four armed assaults. As a result, Türkiye launched operations at home and abroad to prevent further attacks, including several counterterrorism operations in Syria.
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 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.
Earlier this week, Türkiye has announced that it eliminated the successor of al-Qurayshi.