‘Parallel state’ incites violence in Turkey’s southeast, chief police officer says

ŞANLIURFA – Doğan News Agency

DHA photo

A chief police officer has said that a purported terrorist organization, which President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government have long called “Pro-Fetullah Terror Organization,” commits violent acts in Turkey’s east and southeast, with its members working as insiders in the police and other state organizations.

“Several parties, which benefit from bloodshed but endorse a rhetoric of peace and solidarity, have betrayed our country hand-in-hand with a [terrorist] organization, with its members managing to work at state organizations as insiders,” the Şanlıurfa Police Department Head Eyüp Pınarbaşı said on July 23 during the funeral ceremony of the two police officers who were shot dead in an apartment in the border town of Ceylanpınar on July 22.

Pınarbaşı, by his most recent remarks at the funeral ceremony held in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa, implied cooperation between the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) and the purported Pro-Fetullah Terror Organization.

Okan Acar and Feyyaz Yumuşak, two police officers deployed in the border town of Ceylanpınar, were shot dead on July 22 while the two were in a shared apartment.

The military wing of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) claimed responsibility for the killings on July 22, as a reprisal for a suicide bombing blamed on ISIL jihadists that killed 32 and injured more than 100 others.

“A punitive action was carried out... in revenge for the massacre in Suruç,” the People’s Protection Units (YPG) said in a statement on its website, accusing the officers of cooperating with jihadists.

Two police officers in the southeastern province of Şanlıurfa’s Ceylanpınar district near Syria were found dead with gunshot wounds to the head in their shared home, according to the provincial governor.

Before the PKK statement, Gov. İzzettin Küçük said the police officers, who were working as riot police, were found dead. Küçük said they were not aware of any terrorist involvement in the incident, adding that an investigation had been opened into the unidentified men’s deaths. 

Ceylanpınar has been severely affected by fighting between rival factions across the border in Syria. The incident came two days after the previously mentioned Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) suicide bombing in Şanlıurfa’s Suruç district.