The evidence shows that the government of Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has aided and abetted to radical jihadist groups including al-Qaeda and Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL) in Syria, arming, funding and providing logistical supports, said journalist Abdullah Bozkurt in an event held in the Dutch Parliament in the Hague.
“Based on hundreds of wiretap records that were authorized by Turkish courts, we know for a fact that the government has facilitated foreign jihadists to move to Syria and allowed them to return for medical treatments as well”, he said in an event held on April 25, 2019 and attended staff members of the Parliament.
“The evidence that has been collected so far is quite compelling” he underlined, detailing how the Turkish intelligence organization MIT transported jihadists from Syria to Turkey and injected them into another battleground theatre in other parts of Syria using Turkish territory. All of these clandestine operations were illegal under the Turkish laws as well as international laws, Bozkurt, director of the Stockholm-based Nordic Research and Monitoring Network, emphasized.
Erdoğan has been tapping on various jihadist groups to use them as proxies and leverage them to bargain with others in negotiations, he warned, stressing that this poses a major challenge for Turkey’s allies and partners. “If you look at major ISIL attacks in Europe and Asia, most of the attackers and suicide bombers had spent some time in Turkey where they were linked to jihadist networks and smugglers”, he said, noting that “this was not a random”.
“The major challenge we face in Turkey now is that Erdoğan’s interests do not overlap with those of Turkey and that he is ready to sacrifice everything to cling to power,” he added.
Speaking at the event, Levent Kenez, the executive director of Stockholm Center for Freedom, explained that the Erdoğan government has specifically targeted journalists who had investigated Turkey’s links to jihadist groups and exposed the clandestine businesses of the intelligence agency. He recounted how the Turkish Meydan newspaper, a daily he run as editor-in-chief before the government closed it down, broke a story on April 9, 2015 about how a secret operation to provide Turkish passports to Uyghurs was run from a building in Istanbul’s Zeytinburnu district, apparently a covert operation of Turkish intelligence.
He said the expose irritated the Erdoğan government. The police raided the offices of the newspaper in July 2016, and the newspaper was later unlawfully shut down by the Erdoğan regime. Kenez was detained only to be released pending charges the next day. He fled Turkey before the government issued a fresh warrant for his arrest. The entire archive of the Meydan daily was removed by the government to get rid of any record and evidence of this nasty business with Uyghur jihadists.
He said investigative journalists Bayram Kaya and Emre Soncan who exposed the government’s dirty laundry are still locked up in Turkish prisons, bringing the total number of the jailed journalists in Turkey to 191, a world record.
Johannes de Jong, the managing director of think tank organization called Sallux, also confirmed that the evidence collected in Syria points out that the Erdoğan government has been involved in supporting the jihadist groups. He said the engagement with Turkey is not working and it is time to acknowledge that the Erdoğan’s Turkey is posing threat to European security.nordicmonitor