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| Volume XIV, Spring 2007, Number 1 |
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ABSTRACT
From Local Hizbollah to Global Terror: Militant Islam in Turkey
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| Emrullah Uslu |
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Mr. Uslu is a Turkish terrorism expert and currently a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Middle East Center at the University of Utah. The author wishes to express his profound thanks to Ferdinand Smith, whose broad experience and editorial skills were of inestimable value in the drafting of this article. Ferdinand Smith is the pseudonym of an American specialist in international relations who has worked and studied in Turkey periodically for nearly five decades. He recently visited Turkey’s Kurdish-majority provinces and met with Kurdish activists and intellectuals.
On November 20 and 25, 2003, Istanbul was rocked by four suicide bombing attacks in which trucks heavily loaded with explosives killed over 60 people. The November bombers first attacked two Jewish synagogues; five days later, the British Consulate General and the Istanbul headquarters of the HSBC bank were the targets. These dramatic, deadly assaults were unexpected and without precedent. They revealed that radical Islamic terrorist groups in Turkey pose a new and serious threat. Their goals and targets have become global rather than local, and their doctrine now sanctions the indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians. In support of their new modus operandi, their members are undergoing a thorough process of radicalization and training. As all of this suggests, these new terrorists generally share the aims, values and ideological orientation of al-Qaeda but are not directly subordinated to the organization.
Indeed, the group that carried out the bombings was typical of the many largely independent local al-Qaeda “franchises” identified in the Middle East today. Credible reports indicate that group leaders received some general funding from al-Qaeda sources. However, they recruited their subordinates, selected their targets, performed their operational planning, and acquired their vehicles and explosives on their own. They assembled their group on the basis of past organizational affiliations, kinship, tribal ties (to a limited extent) and, primarily, close personal and hometown relationships. Of course, these factors often overlapped. For example, several of the terrorists both had common roots in the radical Kurdish Hizbollah organization (see below) and were natives of the southeastern town of Bingol,1 traditionally a major center of radical right-wing Islamism in Turkey.
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