ISIL ‘sleeping cell’ in Kayseri unmasked

KAYSERİ – Demirören News Agency

Anti-terror police detained an Iraqi national and his son in Turkey’s Central Anatolian province of Kayseri on Sept. 18.

Abdülhalık Kurdi, 47, was identified by police as the former military chief of ISIL, or Daesh in Arabic, in the Sinjar region in northern Iraq. He was also known as a heavy weapon expert.

His 18-year-old son, Mehdi Kurdi, was also detained on charges of joining armed clashes on the ranks of ISIL in the Iraqi Turkmen town of Tal Afar between Sinjar and Mosul.

The two suspects, who collected scrap and lived in a shanty house, are believed to have entered the country from Iraq illegally about a year ago.

Police officers have started an investigation over charges of operating a sleeper cell in Kayseri.

The mountainous Sinjar region, also known as Shingal, is home to the Yazidi people who were brutally massacred and enslaved by ISIL militants following the defeat of the Kurdish peshmerga forces in 2014.