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| Europe |
| Turkish Hezbollah resurfaces |
| 2005-03-23 |
| On January 12, Turkish police arrested Mehmet Semih Arikan, a member of Hizballah in Turkey, a group not necessarily part and parcel with Lebanese Hizballah, while he was carrying out a reconnaissance mission near the governor's office of Konya province, ten minutes ahead of a scheduled visit by Gen. Fevzi Turkeri, commander of the Turkish gendarmerie. Hizballah is alive in Turkey, despite a 2000 crackdown in which security forces arrested 3,366 of its members and killed its leader and founder Huseyin Velioglu. What is more, according to recent intelligence this group might have established links with al-Qaeda. Why has the organization been able to recover from the 2000 crackdown? Given its suspected al-Qaeda connection, what kind of threat does it pose to Turkey and the West? Hizballah emerged in Turkey's predominantly Sunni Kurdish southeast in the 1980s. Unlike Alevi Kurds and Turks, whose faith encompasses a liberal version of Islam, and Sunni Turks, who belong to the relaxed Hanefi school, Sunni Kurds adhere to the strict Shafi'i school and are among Turkey's most conservative constituencies. Thus, after its emergence, Hizballah found a receptive audience in southeastern Turkey, becoming a Kurdish group. Like other Kurdish terror groups in Turkey, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Kurdish Hizballah (KH) under its leader Velioglu developed a strictly hierarchical structure. Iran played a crucial role at this stage: Velioglu was inspired by the Iranian revolution, received funding from Tehran, and members of the organization went to Iran in the 1980s for training. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |