Turkey’s inaction on ISIS comes back to haunt nation
It allowed radicals passage to join group, backed its attacks on Kurds
PARIS — When the bodies of Islamic State fighters are recovered on the Syrian battlefield, the passports found on them have often been stamped in Turkey, which thousands of recruits pass through on their way to join the terror group.
Fighters who call relatives abroad often do so using Turkish cellphone numbers, and when they need cash, they head to Western Union offices in southern Turkey, according to court and intelligence documents.
From the start of the Islamic State’s rise through the chaos of the Syrian war, Turkey has played a central, if complicated, role in the group’s story. For years, it served as a rear base, transit hub and
shopping bazaar for the Islamic State, and at first, that may have protected Turkey from the violence the group has inflicted elsewhere.
Now, the Turkish government and Western officials say the suicide bombings at Istanbul’s main airport on Tuesday bore the hallmarks of an Islamic State attack, and they have added them to a growing roll call of assaults attributed to the group in Turkey in recent months. Retribution by ISIS
Analysts said Turkey was paying the price for intensifying its action against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh. Under mounting international pressure, the country began sealing its border last year, as well as arresting and deporting suspected militants. And last summer, Turkey allowed the United States to use Incirlik Air Base to fly sorties over the group’s territory in Syria and Iraq.
“Turkey has been cracking down on some of the transit of foreign fighters who are flowing into as well as out of Turkey, and they are part of the coalition providing support, allowing their territory to be used by coalition aircraft,” CIA director John Brennan said in an interview this week with Yahoo News.
“So there are a lot of reasons why Daesh would want to strike back.”
The group’s long honeymoon with Turkey started with the country’s aid to rebel groups that were fighting the government of Bashar Assad of Syria, often with the blessing of Western intelligence agencies, according to analysts. At the start, the Islamic State fit into that category, though it then began focusing more on eliminating competitors than fighting Assad.
Among the competitors the group was killing were Turkey’s avowed enemies: Kurdish separatists sheltering in Syria and Iraq. Turkey’s Western allies began accusing it of clinging to ambivalence toward the Islamic State. Even when it began strikes against the group last summer, its actions against the Kurds were more numerous and intense.
The centrality of Turkey for foreign volunteers flocking to the Islamic State is evident in court documents and intelligence records.
Dozens of young men and women were arrested by the FBI in the United States and by officials in Western Europe after they booked flights to Istanbul.
Because so many of the group’s foreign fighters passed through Istanbul’s Ataturk Airport, the destination itself became synonymous with intent to join Islamic State.
When Islamic State fighters communicated with worried family members, it was often with Turkish SIM cards. And investigation records reviewed by the Times show that two fighters who were arrested in Austria late last year, and who the police believed were supposed to take part in the Paris attacks on Nov. 13, had been sent money from their Islamic State handler through a Western Union office in Turkey.
In his fortified office in northern Syria, Redur Khalil — the spokesman for the YPG, the main Syrian Kurdish group fighting the Islamic State — keeps a stack of passports found on the bodies of the fighters his group has killed. He brings them out for reporters and turns the pages to show the Turkish entry stamps they all bear: proof, he said in an interview last summer, that the terrorist group’s foot soldiers are passing through Turkey.
Islamic State prisoners being held by the Kurds, whom the Times interviewed in the presence of a YPG minder, all said that they had moved freely across the Turkish border into Syria. Slow to react
Bulent Aliriza, director of the Turkey Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Turkey and its Western allies had not been quick enough to recognize the threat the Islamic State would pose.
He said that when the rebel groups in Syria began to gain strength, Turkey had nods of approval from the CIA and MI6, the British intelligence agency, to allow arms and volunteers across its border and into rebel camps.
“Where Turkey can be accused of negligence is failing to understand, just as Pakistan did with the Taliban, that these radicals who crossed Turkey to get into Syria would morph into an organization that not only threatened the West, but ultimately itself,” Aliriza said.
“The threat assessment simply did not happen fast enough.”