A huge, five-storey ‘boot camp’ for ISIS trainees has been discovered in Istanbul, sheltering around 70 children born to ISIS-linked parents, fire-arms and Turkish currency. The revelations put pressure on Turkish authorities to explain how such a major terrorist operation could be occurring in the country’s largest city, particularly since some of the ISIS militants involved were already detained and then released due to their involvement in prior terror attacks on Turkish soil.
According to the Turkish press, the building was being used by a cell of 12 ISIS members with links to the ISIS-Khorasan branch, which made a name for itself following last month’s deadly massacre in Moscow, as well as a recent attack on a Catholic Church in Istanbul. When police raided the building last summer, they found it was being used as an illegal ‘madrasa’ or Islamic school, for nearly 70 children whose parents had died while fighting for the Islamic State; that members of the cell were practicing shooting in a nearby forest area, while evidence was also found of ISIS-linked women practicing with firearms; and that cell members had previously fought actively with ISIS in Syria, and engaged in activities linked to Istanbul’s 2017 nightclub shooting, which left 39 people dead. The authorities also confiscated automatic weapons, hand guns, and two million lira in Turkish currency.
Some of the men detained during the 2023 raid had already spent years in detention in Turkey owing to their links to the 2017 atrocity, raising further questions as to how they were able to operate with impunity in the heart of Istanbul.
Scharo Maroof, founder of the Kurdistan Monitor independent war crime monitoring project, was among those observers to raise questions around the discovery. “Whenever you read that Turkey has detained… ISIS fighters, Turkish newspapers make big headlines out of it,” he wrote on social media platform X, “But they never report those ISIS terrorists are being released shortly after.”
Turkey’s tacit support for ISIS has long been an open secret. During the fight against ISIS, Brett McGurk, the US special envoy for the fight against ISIS, complained on American news networks that the Turkish authorities did nothing to stop the transit of ISIS fighters through Turkey to Syria. Many observers went further, stating that Turkey was actively supporting ISIS fighters against the Kurds in North and East Syria.
Commanders in the US-allied, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have continued to raise the alarm over Turkey’s tacit facilitation of ISIS activity, which often aligns with Turkish policy objectives by targeting Kurdish-led secular and democratic regions in Syria. “Some major ruling powers support ISIS, give them orders and direct them,” SDF spokesperson Loqman Khalil said in a recent interview. “The attack on Sina’a prison shows that ISIS is organised, and has forces supporting it. Perhaps ISIS are waiting for an opportunity or order, and will take action when the time comes.”
A global failure to condemn or oppose Turkey’s destruction of vital humanitarian infrastructure in North and East Syria was a boon to ISIS and enabled the terror group to reorganise itself, he added.
