ISIL militant bombed election rally in Turkey despite warnings, reports

ISTANBUL

Ferhat Avcı, from the southeastern Turkish province of Adıyaman, went to Syria in 2013. He joined the main al-Qaeda-affiliate group al-Nusra and married in Syria. Avcı visited his family in Turkey last year, but was killed in an anti-ISIL coalition airstrike in Syria last month.

The chronology of how a youngster in southeastern Turkey was recruited by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to bomb a Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) rally in Diyarbakır earlier this month either exposes a huge security vulnerability within Turkish law enforcement or “malice,” Radikal news website warned on June 16.

The twin blasts at the HDP’s huge June 5 rally in Diyarbakır left at least four people dead and more than 100 injured two days before Turkey’s general election. 

The father of the suspect, an Alevi-Kurdish man identified only as Orhan G., said he had contacted the police when his son disappeared on Oct. 13, 2014, soon after Turkey’s Kurds staged mass demonstrations to protest the Turkish government’s perceived inaction toward the jihadists’ siege of the Syrian Kurdish border town of Ayn al-Arab, or Kobane.

The father added that he then met Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to find his son, but officials later told him that the young man had joined ISIL three months before.

Radikal news website’s correspondent İdris Emen, who interviewed the father after Orhan G. was detained as the suspect over the HDP bombing, reported in an award-winning piece in September 2013 that four young men from the southeastern province of Adıyaman had joined ISIL. One of the would-be militants was Mahmut G.D., who then returned to Turkey and recruited Orhan G.

Radikal editor-in-chief Ezgi Başaran wrote in her column on June 16 that Turkish law enforcement officials had not even launched an investigation into Mahmut G.D.’s activities in Turkey in 2014 after he returned from Syria. Furthermore, Turkish police had released Orhan G. in October 2014 after taking his testimony.

“Young men from Adıyaman go to Syria to become jihadists. We report it constantly. We even have their names as a list. Doesn’t the state know what we know?” Başaran asked on June 16, questioning how Turkish law enforcement officials failed to pursue ISIL recruiters like Mahmut G.D. and the would-be bomber Orhan G.

“For a state, this is a huge security vulnerability and enormous clumsiness. If you say our state is not clumsy and everything is another control then, considering the chronology I have described, I’d have no option but to consider possible malicious intent,” she added.

Meanwhile, ISIL recruiters in Adıyaman are still active, according to a new report by Radikal’s İdris Emen that appeared on June 16. Families in the city center said at least eight young men had joined ISIL over the past month and some had even married in Syria.

“Those who deceive these children and take them to Syria must be caught,” one parent said.