Members of the Turkish police counterattack team responsible for guarding President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stand in front of a mosque as Erdogan departs, following Friday prayers in Istanbul, May 29, 2015. \u00a0(photo by REUTERS\/Murad Sezer)<\/p>\n
Estranged from his family and ravaged by a drug habit for most of his adult life, Murat reckoned he had nothing to lose the day he left his home in Ankara for\u00a0the self-proclaimed caliphate of the\u00a0Islamic State (IS).\u00a0As he crossed the Syrian border in full view of Turkish troops in February 2014, Murat concluded that his own government was equally nonchalant about his future.\u00a0When the 29-year-old returned home\u00a0late last month,\u00a0he discovered that the rules of engagement along Turkey’s border had changed. Apprehended by the Turkish military within minutes of his crossing, Murat was arrested and charged with membership in a terrorist organization.<\/p>\n
Released pending trial, Murat returned to his tumbledown home district of Haci\u00a0Bayram, in Ankara, to find police staking out the men who had helped funnel recruits like himself into Syria. \u201cIt was never like this before,\u201d said Murat, who asked that his real name be withheld for fear of retribution. \u201cNow there are police here. Now we are being followed.\u201d<\/p>\n
On July 10, Turkey launched its first major crackdown on IS’\u00a0domestic recruitment network, detaining 18 Turkish citizens and\u00a0three foreign nationals\u00a0and\u00a0confiscating a cache of assault weapons and military uniforms. Of the 21 people taken into custody in raids\u00a0around the country, including in Haci\u00a0Bayram, police detained at least 12 of the suspects and pressed charges against the other nine.<\/p>\n
While Turkey has markedly stepped up detention\u00a0of would-be foreign jihadists at airports and border crossings over the past year, it had avoided domestic\u00a0crackdowns and neglected censoring\u00a0Turkish-language jihadist websites and other media.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter launching 10 raids this past week, Ankara is showing it thinks the IS can no longer be managed by de facto nonaggression,\u201d said Aaron Stein of the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. \u201cTurkey is conceding to a more US-styled approach,\u201d he said, pointing to a meeting between US and Turkish officials just days before the arrests.\u00a0Turkish officials, however,\u00a0have downplayed the significance of the meeting. \u201cSerious operations take months to plan out and Turkey has long showed its resolve against the [IS],\u201d said a Turkish official who requested anonymity.<\/p>\n
In Haci\u00a0Bayram, the arrests represent a once unimaginable about-face. Last year, despite reports that the neighborhood\u00a0\u2014 long blighted by drug use and sweeping urban renewal\u00a0\u2014 had become a major IS recruitment hub,\u00a0President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced foreign news reports of jihadist recruitment in Haci\u00a0Bayram as a campaign of \u201cshamelessness, sordidness and vileness.\u201d Turkey’s pro-government press forcefully denied the reports and took aim at New York Times reporter Ceylan Yeginsu, who fled the country amid a flurry of death threats.<\/p>\n
Although Turkish police have acted in Haci\u00a0Bayram and other IS hot spots, it will be a struggle to manage the returning fighters who in the end walk free. The Turkish official estimates that\u00a0around 1,400 Turkish nationals have joined IS, the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra\u00a0and other rebel groups in\u00a0Syria since 2012.<\/p>\n
Many returnees will earn acquittal barring explicit evidence of violent acts committed in Syria, said Omer Behram Ozdemir, a researcher at Sakarya University who focuses on jihadist extremism in Turkey. \u201cUnlike the Turkish jihadists who fought in the Bosnian, Afghan and Chechen conflicts, those who fight with [IS] see their conflict extending beyond the borders of Syria,\u201d he warned.<\/p>\n
Near his new apartment on the streets of impoverished Haci\u00a0Bayram, Murat says he is slowly reconnecting with his family and does not see Turkey as enemy territory. That conviction is tied to his belief that Turkey won’t decisively crack down on IS while the jihadists battle Kurdish militants in northern Syria.<\/p>\n
When asked about the recent arrests, his view of Turkey quickly soured. \u201cWe will regard any punishment in [Turkey] as a reward,\u201d Murat declared.\u00a0Emotionally volatile and wracked by post-traumatic stress disorder, Murat vacillates between disbelief at the violence of his actions in Syria and longing to\u00a0return to combat. He expressed\u00a0bewilderment at his commander’s order to carry out a grisly execution of a peshmerga captive in Iraq earlier in the year. \u201cI couldn’t sleep for 10 days,\u201d he said. Staring ahead\u00a0blankly, Murat added unapologetically, \u201cThe laws are strict, but these are our commandments.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ankara has admitted to the security risk the\u00a0former jihadist fighters\u00a0pose, but\u00a0Turkish officials have declined to comment on how they\u00a0plan\u00a0to rehabilitate them. \u201cSo far, I haven’t heard of any plans for dealing with returnees from [IS],\u201d said Ozdemir. Turkish Interior Minister Sebahattin Ozturk conceded July 7 that \u201cnegligence\u201d had allowed Orhan Gonder, a 20-year-old returnee from IS, to elude Turkish intelligence and carry out\u00a0twin bombings at a June 5\u00a0election rally in Diyarbakir. Four people were killed in the attack.<\/p>\n
If Turkey sustains its crackdown on native-born jihadists, it will find more of them within\u00a0its borders than ever, Murat\u00a0warned. Wary of a 10-year prison term if he skips trial, he has no plans to return to Syria.\u00a0He also said IS recruits feel trapped in Turkey by the buildup of troops between the border towns of Kilis and Karkamis that\u00a0has squeezed IS’\u00a0last smuggling route into Turkey after it lost the border city of Tell Abyad to Kurdish forces in June.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe war is also getting harder in Syria,\u201d he said. Claiming to have been detained by fellow militants wary of escapees in Syria, he added, \u201cMore and more, fighters want to come home.\u201d<\/p>\n
It remains to be seen how serious Ankara’s crackdown will be. The New York Times reported July 10\u00a0that some suspects had been\u00a0freed just hours after their detention. Although\u00a0the crackdown has included key names, including IS proponent Murat Gezenler, the jihadist web editor Abdulkadir Polat\u00a0and pro-al Qaeda pundit Cumali Kurt, Ankara notoriously released the foremost pro-IS preacher,\u00a0Abu Hanzala, during the height of the\u00a0riots last October over Ankara’s response to the siege of Kobani.<\/p>\n
How Ankara deals with those it cannot hold in\u00a0jail cells is a no less critical issue, said Ozdemir.\u00a0\u201c[IS] will publish its Turkish propaganda magazine’s new issue soon. We will see if it mentions Turkey’s policy on Turkish pro-IS supporters,\u201d he said. \u201cRegardless, returning [IS] fighters will pose a serious threat to the Turkish state.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dogu Eroglu contributed to this article.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Members of the Turkish police counterattack team responsible for guarding President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stand in front of a mosque as Erdogan departs, following Friday prayers in Istanbul, May 29, 2015. \u00a0(photo by REUTERS\/Murad Sezer) Estranged from his family and ravaged by a drug habit for most of his adult life, Murat reckoned he had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":782196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[1018],"class_list":["post-73419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73419\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/782196"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}