ISIS's Turkish
Brothers
by Burak Bekdil
• April 11, 2015 at 5:00 am
The
Turkish ISIS is an ideological inspiration by an Islamist poet, who happens
to be President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's favorite.
"From
now on, life in Turkey will be difficult for the occupying seculars." —
Editorial, Taraf, August 1993
Is it
still too hard to understand why Erdogan's "fight" against radical
Islamists in Syria and Iran cannot be serious?
If a
"mere" 11.3% of Turks think so generously of ISIS, it means there
are nine million Turks sympathetic to jihadists. And if only 10% of those
decide to support ISIS's jihad, that comes to nearly 900,000 potential
Turkish jihadists (even 5% would mean an army of nearly 450,000).
Most Turks had not heard of the magazine Adimlar
["Steps"] until March 26, when a bomb blast ripped through its
Istanbul offices. A bomb left at its entrance exploded when the door opened,
killing a writer and wounding three, including its editor-in-chief, Ali Osman
Zor. The dead victim was his brother.
Last October, CNN interviewed Zor, who described himself as an
"Islamic revolutionary" and a member of the Great Eastern Islamic
Raiders' Front, or IBDA-C in its Turkish acronym. He spent time in prison on
charges of terrorist activity. In the interview, Zor said he supported the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), including its extreme violent
practices, and argued that the radical group's violence was a natural
response to what he claimed were decades of Western imperialism in the Middle
East.
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Saturday, April 11, 2015
ISIS's Turkish Brothers
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