QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – According to Turkish media, Turkey’s security forces arrested an ISIS leader in Istanbul in early February. The man, known only as ‘Abu Huzaifah’, was a judge in Syria’s Raqqa, Manbij and Tel Abyad during the height of the caliphate, Turkish police say.
Yet arrests – and, more importantly, prosecutions – against ISIS members in Turkey, especially of foreigners, is increasingly rare, says a new report by Crisis Group, a conflict research group. Crisis Group estimates that around 9.000 ISIS members from 102 countries have been deported by Turkish authorities since 2011. Another 660 adults and 189 children are currently awaiting repatriation. But thousands more remain at large, or are serving prison sentences of ten years or less.
Turkey has reason to be on alert about non-Turkish ISIS members. Six out of sixteen ISIS attacks between 2014 and 2017 were perpetrated by foreigners. Many factors prevent the arrest, prosecution, and deportation of ISIS suspects.
Part of the problem is the immense flow of Syrians and Iraqis, as well as third-country nationals, seeking shelter in Turkey. Authorities have a hard time keeping tabs on suspects. Though Turkey has better access to witnesses than European countries, reconstructing and providing evidence of crimes committed in the theater of war sometimes proves impossible. Prosecutors and especially judges are also not well-versed in the complexities of ISIS and their crimes.
But prosecutors also allege that Turkey’s judiciary, which was populated by government loyalists following the attempted 2016 coup, seem to be more lenient towards ISIS members than homegrown opposition groups. Out of 33.697 terrorist suspects arrested in 2021, only 2.869 were “ISIS/HTS” suspects. The Immense majority were either partisans of Fetullah Gulen, an outlawed cleric, or of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish guerrilla group.
The Turkish executive does not fare much better. Western intelligence officials accuse the government and internal security forces of negligence in acting on information they share with them. Crisis Group says that “some suspect that Türkiye may be deliberately dragging its feet as payback for what it views as non-cooperation” over extradition requests of alleged PKK or Gulen movement members. Currently, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is holding the NATO accessions of Sweden and Finland hostage over such demands.
Additionally, former ISIS members in Turkey also serve as a pool from which to populate Syrian opposition groups financed and outfitted by Ankara, or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly al-Nusra Front), a jihadist outfit in Syria’s Idlib region with close ties to Turkey. “I have Syrian clients who tell me that once they are released [from prison in Turkey] they want to join rebel groups still active in Syria, including those backed by Türkiye,” a lawyer tells Crisis Group.
Turkey continues to look the other way as ISIS members are smuggled out of camps in northeast Syria and into Turkish-occupied territory. Many carry on into Turkey proper. Some ISIS escapees from the jailbreak in Hasakah in January 2022 even made it to Turkey, local sources say.
On November 13, 2022, a bomb attack in Istanbul killed six people and injured 81. Reports by the SDF alleged that the Syrian Arab woman seen planting the explosive had brothers fighting for ISIS and Turkish-backed opposition groups, and that she resided in Turkish-occupied Afrin. The Turkish government against all evidence suggested the bomb attack had been a plan of the Kurdish forces in Syria and prepared to invade the region. To this day, the exact motivation of the attackers is undetermined. Turkish security forces have yet to conduct a proper investigation into the matter – the government’s war on Kurds at home and abroad seemed to trump the security concerns posed by ISIS-linked individuals. The ISIS threat to Turkey is real, but it is being amplified by Turkish inaction.