A delegation from the Islamist Free Cause Party (Hüda-Par) visited Germany this week as part of an election campaign for Turkey’s 14 May polls, reported the daily Cumhuriyet.
The delegation included the deputy heads of the party, Mehmet Hüseyin Yılmaz and Abdurrahman Cevher, who joined Eid al-Fitr prayers on Friday, marking the end of Ramadan, in a mosque in the historical German city of Wiesbaden.
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) accepted Hüda-Par into the ruling People’s Alliance ahead of the country’s critical elections, a move that has been widely criticised.
The political party Hüda-Par was founded on the ashes of the Kurdish Hizbullah (distinct from the Lebanese Hezbollah).
The extremist Sunni Kurdish Hizbullah group emerged in southeast Turkey (north Kurdistan) in 1985, a year after the start of an insurgence led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and is known for the bloodshed and horror it caused in the country’s Kurdish-majority region in the 1990s.
The Vahdet mosque in Wiesbaden previously had hosted commemoration events organised for the Kurdish Hizbullah’s leader, Hüseyin Velioğlu, who was killed in 2000 in Istanbul during a police operation.