Turkey reaping the harvest of serving as a rear base for IS: NYT

PanARMENIAN.Net - From the start of the Islamic State’s rise through the chaos of the Syrian war, Turkey has played a central role in the group’s story, The New York Times said in an article Wednesday, June 29.

“When the bodies of Islamic State fighters are recovered on the Syrian battlefield, the passports found on them have often been stamped in Turkey, which thousands of recruits pass through on their way to join the terror group.

Fighters who call relatives abroad often do so using Turkish cellphone numbers, and when they need cash, they head to Western Union offices in southern Turkey, according to court and intelligence documents,” it said.

“For years, it served as a rear base, transit hub and shopping bazaar for the Islamic State, and at first, that may have protected Turkey from the violence the group has inflicted elsewhere.”

Authored by journalist and poet Rukmini Callimachi, the feature says that Turkey is now paying the price for intensifying its action against the Islamic State.

According to the article, the Islamic State was blamed for a plethora of attacks in Turkey, yet none of them were claimed by the group, despite its habit of reveling in its violence elsewhere in the world.

The centrality of Turkey for foreign volunteers flocking to the Islamic State is evident in court documents and intelligence records, the paper says.

Thousands of pages of investigative documents from the agency, recently obtained by The New York Times, show that nearly all of the recruits arrested by officials in Europe had passed through Turkey on their way to join the Islamic State, as well as on their way back.

A gun and bomb attack rocked Istanbul’s Ataturk international airport on Tuesday,killing dozens of people and injuring hundreds more.Three attackers opened fire near an entry point to the terminal and blew themselves up after police fired at them.