Convicted mob boss Sedat Peker claimed on Sunday that a Turkish company named SADAT “has been sending arms to the Al-Nusra Front” using his own name.
Sedat Peker confessed that he was a part of the arms transfer from Turkey to Syria, proudly announcing that he sponsored the Turkmen group – whom he defined as the brothers of the Turks – fighting in Syria. But after a while he claims to have learned that some arms were delivered to the Al-Nusra Front.
Sedat Peker says he was not happy with the fact that the arms to be sent to Turkmen factions were actually delivered in the hands of “Arabs” and in the hands of “Al-Nusra”. Peker then revealed the name of a company who conducted this transfer: SADAT, he claimed, was in charge of delivering arms support to Al-Nusra.
SADAT has been the subject of discussion before in Turkey due to its role in training various military factions which were backed by Turkey to fight in cross-border missions, mainly in Syria and in Libya, and its close ties with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP).
SADAT was founded on 28 February 2012 by retired Brigadier General Adnan Tanrıverdi.
Tanrıverdi served in top military positions for 30 years, including as the head of the Cyprus Defence Organisation and the head of the General Staff Special Warfare Office.
In 2016, he was appointed to Erdoğan’s chief-advisory board.
When Turkey’s offensive in Afrin was launched in 2018, he was also known to have attended the Security Summit, chaired by Erdoğan.
In the advisory board of of the SADAT company, there are many names who specialised in psychological war and special war techniques.
SADAT has been allegedly using various camps located in Turkey’s border with Syria and Kırşehir, a central Anatolian province, in order to provide military training to certain jihadist factions’ members.
It was also previously claimed that SADAT was sponsoring and aiding the Sultan Murad Division, which he has been directly involved in Operation Euphrates Shield, Operation Olive Branch, and the Libyan Civil War and has been accused of multiple war crimes, such as the torturing of Kurdish soldiers and indiscriminate shelling of civilians.
Ir was previously given voice by critics in Turkey that SADAT was giving special war trainings to Al-Nusra Front and sending these trained factions to Syria to fight alongside with the ISIS.
Another allegation regarding SADAT was that the arms and war equipment used by the company in its training were supplied from the “off-the-record inventory” of the Turkish army.
Numerous civilians, who have been allegedly trained by SADAT, distributed a large number of heavy weapons during the 17 July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey and the whereabouts of these weapons remain unknown.
