Kurds Joining Islamic State? ISIS Finds Unlikely Supporters Among Turkey's Disgruntled Kurds
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In recent years, hundreds of Kurds from Turkey, Iraq and Syria have joined the Islamic States' ranks, according to experts and government officials. In one highly publicized incident, a high-ranking Kurdish leader of ISIS from the city of Erbil in Iraq, Ziad Salim Mohammad Ali al-Kurdi, was killed earlier this year in a U.S.-led coalition airstrike.
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Alagoz, whose July 20 bombing targeted left-wing youth volunteering to help rebuild the Kurdish city of Kobani, spent six months in training camps in Syria, and was placed on a wanted-list late last year after his father filed a complaint with the police about both him and his brother joining ISIS. A total of 17 other families in Adiyaman have also reported their children missing to ISIS in recent months, and police have said they consider them at high risk of carrying out further terrorist attacks.
Alagoz was the second suicide bomber to come from Adiyaman in the last two months. Another young Kurdish man, Orhan Gondar, was suspected of carrying out a suicide bomb attack at a left-wing Kurdish political rally in the further east city of Diyarbakir in June.
Kurd Vs. Kurd
The poorest areas in Turkey's southeast have been the most fertile recruiting grounds for ISIS, experts said. Unemployment in Turkey's Kurdish region is about six times higher than elsewhere across the country, the Christian Science Monitor has reported. The region is also considerably less developed than elsewhere in Turkey, with poor housing and governmental infrastructure.
But the lure of ISIS goes beyond class divisions. As the war in Syria has re-energized Kurdish political movements operating in southeast Turkey, a wide division has also resurfaced among left-wing and conservative Kurds. The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a guerilla movement which was founded to carve out a secular autonomous state, has been the loudest voice in Kurdish politics for decades and their policies have prompted some Kurdish youth to look toward religious extremist groups for alternatives.
"Kurdish society is a religious society, and many have a problem with the PKK's secular language, so many are changing their [views] about them," Mehmet Kurt, an assistant professor of sociology at Bingol University and Newton Advanced Fellow in School of Law at Queen Mary University of London, who has written a book on Kurdish Islamist groups, said.
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back to the political scene. Two decades ago, the left-wing PKK and the most prominent Islamist Kurdish group, Hezbollah, vied violently for influence in the country's southeast. Hezbollah, not to be confused with the Shiite militia in Lebanon which shares its name, sought to counter the PKK's secular and liberal mission, and was instead part of a movement to promote Islamist politics in Turkey.
"Many people have this misunderstanding that they do [support ISIS], but their members are more tolerant toward ISIS because of their opposition to the PKK," Kurt said.
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In cities like Adiyaman, on the frays of Turkey's Kurdish territory, the absence of local Islamist groups has actually created a vacuum of alternatives to ISIS, allowing radicals from Syria to exploit the rising internal Kurdish political divisions and win over impressionable recruits, Jenkins, the Istanbul-based Turkey analyst, said.
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After Suruc, Turkey Cracks Down
Over the last few months, Turkey has been gradually stepping up its restrictions on ISIS, detaining hundreds of alleged supporters. After last week's bombing, at least 1,000 individuals were detained across the country. A vast majority of those individuals detained, however, were affiliated with outlawed left-wing Kurdish organizations, and it was unclear how many were actually charged with crimes after being detained.