ISIS Draws a Steady Stream of Recruits From Turkey
ANKARA,
Turkey — Having spent most of his youth as a drug addict in one of the
poorest neighborhoods of Turkey’s capital, Can did not think he had
much to lose when he was smuggled into Syria with 10 of his childhood
friends to join the world’s most extreme jihadist group.
After
15 days at a training camp in the Syrian city of Raqqa, the de facto
headquarters of the group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the
27-year-old Can was assigned to a fighting unit. He said he shot two men
and participated in a public execution. It was only after he buried a
man alive that he was told he had become a full ISIS fighter.
“When
you fight over there, it’s like being in a trance,” said Can, who asked
to be referred to only by his middle name for fear of reprisal.
“Everyone shouts, ‘God is the greatest,’ which gives you divine strength
to kill the enemy without being fazed by blood or splattered guts,” he
said.
Hundreds
of foreign fighters, including some from Europe and the United States,
have joined the ranks of ISIS in its self-proclaimed caliphate that
sweeps over vast territories of Iraq and Syria. But one of the biggest
source of recruits is neighboring Turkey, a NATO member with an
undercurrent of Islamist discontent.
Graphic
How ISIS Works
With oil revenues, arms and organization, the jihadist
group controls vast stretches of Syria and Iraq and aspires to
statehood.
As
many as 1,000 Turks have joined ISIS, according to Turkish news media
reports and government officials here. Recruits cite the group’s
ideological appeal to disaffected youths as well as the money it pays
fighters from its flush coffers. The C.I.A. estimated last week that the
group had from 20,000 to 31,500 fighters in Iraq and Syria.
The
United States has put heavy pressure on Turkey’s president, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, to better police Turkey’s 560-mile-long border with
Syria. Washington wants Turkey to stanch the flow of foreign fighters
and to stop ISIS from exporting the oil it produces on territory it
holds in Syria and Iraq.
So
far, Mr. Erdogan has resisted pleas to take aggressive steps against
the group, citing the fate of 49 Turkish hostages ISIS has held since
militants took over Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, in June. Turkey
declined to sign a communiqué last Thursday that committed a number of
regional states to take “appropriate” new measures to counter ISIS,
frustrating American officials.
For
years, Turkey has striven to set an example of Islamic democracy in the
Middle East through its “zero problems with neighbors” prescription,
the guiding principle of Ahmet Davutoglu, who recently became Turkey’s
prime minister after serving for years as foreign minister. But
miscalculations have left the country isolated and vulnerable in a
region now plagued by war.
Turkey
has been criticized at home and abroad for an open border policy in the
early days of the Syrian uprising. Critics say that policy was crucial
to the rise of ISIS. Turkey had bet that rebel forces would quickly
topple the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, but as the war evolved,
the extremists have benefited from the chaos.
Turkish
fighters recruited by ISIS say they identify more with the extreme form
of Islamic governance practiced by ISIS than with the rule of the
Turkish governing party, which has its roots in a more moderate form of
Islam.
Stopping Home-Bound ISIS Fighters
A look at how governments around the world deal with their citizens who become jihadists.
Video Credit By Christian Roman on
Publish Date September 12, 2014.
Image CreditReuters
Hacibayram,
a ramshackle neighborhood in the heart of Ankara’s tourist district,
has morphed into an ISIS recruitment hub over the past year. Locals say
up to 100 residents have gone to fight for the group in Syria.
“It
began when a stranger with a long, coarse beard started showing up in
the neighborhood,” recalled Arif Akbas, the neighborhood’s elected
headman of 30 years, who oversees local affairs. “The next thing we
knew, all the drug addicts started going to the mosque.”
One
of the first men to join ISIS from the neighborhood was Ozguzhan
Gozlemcioglu, known to his ISIS counterparts as Muhammad Salef. In three
years, he has risen to the status of a regional commander in Raqqa, and
locals say he frequently travels in and out of Ankara, each time making
sure to take back new recruits with him.
Mehmet
Arabaci, a Hacibayram resident who assists with distributing government
aid to the poor, said younger members of the local community found
online pictures of Mr. Gozlemcioglu with weapons on the field and
immediately took interest. Children have started to spend more time
online since the municipality knocked down the only school in the area
last year as part of an aggressive urban renewal project.
“There
are now seven mosques in the vicinity, but not one school,” Mr. Arabaci
said. “The lives of children here are so vacant that they find any
excuse to be sucked into action.”
Playing in the rubble of a demolished building on a recent hot day here, two young boys staged a fight with toy guns.
Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq
According to Peter Neumann, a professor at King’s College
London, at least 12,000 foreign militants are fighting in Syria and Iraq
— many of them with ISIS. Where the fighters originate from:
Syria
Iraq
KEY
50
100
500
1,500 fighters
Dotted lines represent the low end of a range.
When
a young Syrian girl walked past them, they pounced on her, knocking her
to the floor and pushing their toy rifles against her head. “I’m going
to kill you, whore,” one of the boys shouted before launching into sound
effects that imitated a machine gun.
The other boy quickly lost interest and walked away. “Toys are so boring,” he said. “I have real guns upstairs.”
The
boy’s father, who owns a nearby market, said he fully supported ISIS’s
vision for Islamic governance and hoped to send the boy and his other
sons to Raqqa when they are older.
“The
diluted form of Islam practiced in Turkey is an insult to the
religion,” he said giving only his initials, T.C., to protect his
identity. “In the Islamic State you lead a life of discipline as
dictated by God, and then you are rewarded. Children there have parks
and swimming pools. Here, my children play in the dirt.”
But when Can returned from Raqqa after three months with two of the original 10 friends he had left with, he was full of regret.
“ISIS is brutal,” he said. “They interpret the Quran for their own gains. God never ordered Muslims to kill Muslims.”
Graphic: The Iraq-ISIS Conflict in Maps, Photos and Video
Still,
he said many were drawn to the group for financial reasons, as it
appealed to disadvantaged youth in less prosperous parts of Turkey.
“When you fight, they offer $150 a day. Then everything else is free,”
he said. “Even the shopkeepers give you free products out of fear.”
ISIS
recruitment in Hacibayram caught the news media’s attention in June
when a local 14-year-old recruit came back to the neighborhood after he
was wounded in a shelling attack in Raqqa. The boy’s father, Yusuf, said
that the government had made no formal inquiry into the episode and
that members of the local community had started to condemn what they saw
as inaction by the authorities.
“There
are clearly recruitment centers being set up in Ankara and elsewhere in
Turkey, but the government doesn’t seem to care,” said Aaron Stein, a
fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think
tank. “It seems their hatred for Bashar al-Assad and their overly
nuanced view of what radical Islam is has led to a very short- and
narrow-sighted policy that has serious implications.”
The Interior Ministry and National Police Department did not respond to requests for comment.
On
a recent afternoon in Ankara, Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Davutoglu came to
pray at the historic Haci Bayram Veli Mosque, just over 100 yards away
from an underground mosque used by a radical Salafi sect known to
oversee ISIS recruits.
When
news of their visit reached the neighborhood, several residents
scurried down the steep hill hoping to catch an opportunity to raise the
issue.
At
the same time, a 10-year-old boy lingered in his family’s shop,
laughing at the crowd rushing to get a glimpse of the two leaders. He
had just listened to a long lecture from his father celebrating ISIS’
recent beheading of James Foley, an American journalist. “He was an
agent and deserved to die,” the man told his son, half-smirking through
his thick beard.
To which the boy replied, “Journalists, infidels of this country; we’ll kill them all.”
Correction: September 17, 2014
A picture with an earlier version of this article, which showed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu leaving a mosque in August, was published in error. Neither that mosque nor the president’s visit were related to the recruiting of ISIS fighters described in the article.
A picture with an earlier version of this article, which showed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu leaving a mosque in August, was published in error. Neither that mosque nor the president’s visit were related to the recruiting of ISIS fighters described in the article.
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