94 ISIL suspects rounded up in August in Turkey

MALATYA - Anadolu Agency

Turkish security forces detained at least 94 ISIL suspects across Turkey in August, including foreign nationals. 

In Istanbul and the northwestern province of Kocaeli, 52 ISIL suspects, including 38 foreign nationals, were rounded up during counter-terror operations. 

The courts ruled for the arrests of 23 suspects. 

One of the suspects remanded into custody in the Kocaeli province is Ibrahim Fadli, the brother of Nabil Fadli, a suicide bomber who blew himself up in 2016 at Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet district, killing 10 people – mostly German tourists – and wounding 15 others. 

In the southeastern Gaziantep province, one suspected militant was remanded into custody for abetting and aiding the jihadist group, and three were remanded into custody in the central Nevşehir province. 

Additionally, on Aug. 3 a Turkish court sentenced nine convicts to 101 aggravated life terms in connection with 2015 twin bombings in Ankara.

To date, at least 319 people have lost their lives in ISIL terror attacks in Turkey, where the group has targeted civilians in suicide bombings as well as rocket and gun attacks. 

The attacks included twin suicide bombings of October 2015 that saw 107 killed outside Ankara’s main train station, a suicide bombing that killed 32 in the southeastern Şanliurfa province’s Suruç district, the Reina nightclub massacre in 2017 in Istanbul on New Year’s Eve that killed 39, the targeting of a wedding in the southeastern province of Gaziantep in August 2016 by a child suicide bomber who killed 57 - many of them children - and a bomb-and-gun attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport in June 2016 that killed 47 people.