The terrorist attack in Moscow at the end of last month made the danger clear to many people posed by IS. For the security authorities, the focus is also on where the cells of the terrorist groups are located. And here Turkey comes into focus. The country did not only respond to the terrorist attack in Russia with expressions of condolence. Turkish security authorities have since arrested more than 180 suspects in nationwide raids against the Islamic State. According to the Interior Ministry in Ankara, this brings the number of people taken into custody since June 2023 for ties to the terrorist organization to almost 2,900.
Russian media reported that at least two of the terrorists were in Turkey shortly before the attack and received instructions there. A representative of the Turkish security services confirmed to Reuters that the Tajik attackers had been there for a short time and that the radicalization had taken place elsewhere. This ultimately showed what danger IS poses to Turkey in terms of domestic politics. The attack on January 28 reminded us that this is real: During a church service, two armed attackers stormed into a Catholic church in Istanbul, killing one visitor and injuring another. IS later published a letter of responsibility. After seven quiet years, it was the first assassination attempt in the name of the terrorist organization on Turkish soil. “Wilayat Turkiya”, the Turkish arm of IS, took responsibility for the shooting. However, the perpetrators who were caught also came from Central Asia and the North Caucasus, which suggests close connections to IS-Khorasan (IS-K). This contributes to the perception in Turkey that this is an “imported problem”. By 2017, IS had killed more than 300 people in 20 separate attacks in Turkey. Because at the beginning of the civil war in Syria, fighters could get there relatively easily via Turkey to join jihadist rebel groups, Ankara initially had a reputation for not taking the threat of Islamist terrorism seriously or even indirectly promoting it.
The authorities always rejected this accusation. After the series of attacks in 2016/17, the security forces successfully took action against the organization, including by significantly curbing the uncontrolled immigration of radicalized Islamists from Syria; more than 9,000 people were expelled.
However, there has been increasing evidence of new IS activities in Turkey for some time now. This particularly applies to the Central Asian arm IS-K. They are probably also a consequence of the Afghan Taliban’s successful fight against the organization. The New York Times recently cited a UN study that described Turkey as IS’s logistical hub. This only has a certain plausibility for geographical and demographic reasons. In addition, large diaspora communities from both Afghanistan and the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia live here. This makes it easier to transfer funds, but also to infiltrate or recruit fighters.
Turkey is not only a hub, but also an area of operations for IS. According to Turkish security authorities, attacks against the Swedish and Dutch consulates in Istanbul, planned in retaliation for Quran burnings, as well as a nationwide series of attacks against churches and synagogues have been foiled in the past two years. The Turkish state itself is also an enemy of the terrorists. According to „Al-Monitor“, just a week before the church attack in Istanbul, two IS-K representatives spoke about how Turkey and Tajikistan were equally enemies of Islam.
Perpetrators from the post-Soviet region usually played a central role in the most serious IS attacks in Turkey, for example in the attack on an Istanbul discotheque on New Year’s Eve 2016 or in the bomb attack at the Ankara train station. The government in Ankara supports the Central Asian republic in the fight against terrorists, for example by having pro-Turkish groups in Syria apprehend Tajik jihadists and hand them over to Turkey, which then extradites them to Tajikistan. Not only the situation in Afghanistan, but also the Syrian situation influence Islamist terrorism in Central Asia.
All publishing rights and copyrights reserved to MENA Research Center.
