How 'Sometimes NATO Ally' 'Islamist' Turkey's gov’t helped al-Qaeda and ISIL.

How 'Sometimes NATO Ally' 'Islamist' Turkey's gov’t helped al-Qaeda and ISIL. (TZ).

More evidence is emerging that implicates senior officials in Turkey's political Islamist government of aiding and abetting radical groups, including al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), presenting the risk of the NATO-ally country earning a reputation of being a state that sponsors terrorism.

The testimony of the former head of the police counterterrorism unit in Van province, Serdar Bayraktutan, includes chilling revelations of how senior officials in the Turkish government protected senior al-Qaeda figures operating in Turkey who were running a network of militants to fight in Syria. 

Bayraktutan was the lead investigator in the sweeping operations that nabbed al-Qaeda suspects in six provinces on Jan. 14, 2014, in compliance with the Van Chief Public Prosecutor's Office and court-ordered arrest warrants. The political Islamist government stepped in to remove him from his post, placed him in jail on trumped up charges to hush him up and derailed the critical investigation.

According to the account provided by former Prosecutor Gültekin Avcı, who interviewed Bayraktutan in jail, one cannot help but wonder why then-Prime Minister and now President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his associates provided a safe haven to terrorists in the name of what is propagated as a holy war.

The government has been completely silent since Avcı published Bayraktutan's statements in several of his op-ed pieces in the independent Bugün daily last month.

Prosecutors gave the operation the green light in January 2014 when vital intelligence information was obtained that indicated there were clear and imminent threats from al-Qaeda militants.

The dawn raids by police and gendarmerie units resulted in the detention of 25 people, including alleged senior members of al-Qaeda. 

Two senior al-Qaeda operatives -- İbrahim Şen (listed as Ibrahim Shafir Shen in the US Department of Defense file), allegedly a top al-Qaeda leader in the Middle East and a former prisoner in Guantanamo Bay prison, and Halis Bayancuk (also known as Abu Hanzala), who is said to be in charge of the al-Qaeda network in Turkey -- were among those detained in the operation.

Most detainees, including Bayancuk, were released last year and no indictment has ever been filed against these suspects since then. Hmmmm........Obama's BFF and 'protegee' Erdogan. Read the full story here.

 "Terrorist-R-US"

Mystery cash inflows to Turkey (net errors & omissions in cenbank data) were $4.28 billion in Feb., largest since '98 pic.twitter.com/xSZ7sHkuj5
— Benjamin Harvey (@BenjaminHarvey) April 10, 2015