Eight ISIL suspects detained in southern Turkey

KİLİS – Doğan News Agency

DHA photo

Turkey has detained eight Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants along with a child in a southern Turkish city bordering Syria, one week after a deadly suicide bombing at a tourist spot in Istanbul which was carried out by a Syrian-origin ISIL militant.

“A total of nine people [whom] figured to infiltrate [Turkey] from conflict zones [in Syria], among whom were a child and eight adults having suspected links to Daesh [ISIL] in an operation conducted by [Kilis] Police Department Counterterrorism Unit officers on Jan. 18,” the governor’s office in the southern province of Kilis said in a written statement. 

Legal and administrative investigations were launched against the detained individuals, it added.

In the Central Anatolian province of Konya, meanwhile, Konya Police Department Counterterrorism Unit officers arrested an ISIL member identified as Mücahit Ö., who was among a total of 10 suspects detained in a police raid on 15 separate homes in the central Turkish city that targeted ISIL on Jan. 16, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported.

The move came a week after a Syrian-origin ISIL militant detonated himself at a tourist spot in Istanbul early Jan. 12, killing 10 foreign nationals and wounding several others. Nabil Fadli, a 28-year-old ISIL militant of Syrian origin who was born in Saudi Arabia in 1988, blew himself up after blending into a tourist group of 33 German citizens on a visit to the Obelisk of Theodosius in Sultanahmet Square near the Blue Mosque in the morning hours of Jan. 12 when the popular square was relatively less crowded compared to the rest of the day. 

The Sultanahmet bombing was the latest in a series of terrorist attacks carried out by ISIL militants which began in the second half of 2015.

ISIL was blamed for a bomb that killed four people at a Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) rally in the southeastern province of Diyarbakır on June 5, 2015. An ISIL militant also killed 33 socialist activists on July 20, 2015, at the Amara Cultural Center in the southeastern district of Suruç. Two ISIL militants then killed at least 100 people attending a peace rally in Ankara on Oct. 10, 2015, in the deadliest attack in the country’s history.