September 24, 2019
The Turkey-ISIS Research Project identifies material published by leading organizations, researchers and investigative journalists who have examined connections between the Turkish government, led by an Islamist president, and jihadists groups including Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
ISIS and other jihadist groups have used Turkey which has a long porous border with Syria as a conduit to bring fighters all over the world, procure supplies including arms, transfer wounded jihadists for a treatment and raise funds by well-orchestrated schemes including the smuggling of artefacts and Syrian oil. The evidence show that Erdoğan government’s notorious intelligence agency MIT has secretly worked with ISIS and other armed jihadist groups in Syria.
Therefore, the NRMN has taken an interest in exposing the reasons for ISIS’s ability to function in the region and has identified the support provided to ISIS by Erdoğan’s Turkey as significant and under reported. For example, senior ISIS figure Ilhami Bali, aka Abu Bakr, who is the mastermind behind a string of deadly attacks in 2015 which killed nearly 200 people including foreign nationals in Turkey had been hosted in a five-star hotel in Turkish capital courtesy of Turkish intelligence agency MIT.
The Project focuses on evidence from, inter alia, wiretaps of ISIS communications, testimony of former ISIS members, leaked Turkish government documents, secret intelligence communique, CCTV footages and still-shots that confirm how Erdoğan’s Turkey supports these groups in Turkey and abroad.
The project hopes to contribute to the debate on ISIS and other jihadist groups that still continue to pose a threat to national security of many countries in the world.
About Nordic Research Monitoring Network
Nordic Research Monitoring Network is a non-profit organization that aims to raise awareness on radical and violent extremist trends, with a specific focus on patterns that may very well disturb and disrupt social peace, harmony and community integration. It hopes to contribute to the debate on how nations should prevent and combat radicalization with close cooperation and collaboration between all relevant stakeholders at all levels of governance including the NGO community and civil society.
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