Türkiye has arrested 357 people this Tuesday during a macro police operation throughout the country, all of them accused of belonging to the Islamic State (IS). This enormous number of arrests, made in 21 provinces simultaneously, comes just 24 hours after a deadly police raid in the city of yalovaa few kilometers south of Istanbul.
That raid, which began during the early hours of this Monday, turned into a siege on the house where the alleged jihadists were: in shootouts and combats that lasted more than seven hours, they died. three police officers and six alleged members of IS, as confirmed by the Turkish Interior Minister, Ali Yerlikaya.
“Just as we have never given a single chance to all those who have so far tried to break our country through terrorism, we will not allow it in the future either,” Yerlikaya declared on social media this Tuesday morning, who also shared a video of several of the arrests during the night from Monday to Tuesday.
In Istanbul alone, according to the prosecution, the Turkish police have carried out operations in 114 homes this Tuesday. Türkiye, thus, has entered during this Christmas campaign into a wave of police raids against IS.
This week’s operations are in addition to several in the previous week, in which the Turkish authorities detained 115 personas: Ankara assures that the jihadist group was preparing attacks on places run by tourists and the little one Christian minority of the country, especially during the night of end of year.
Memories of the past
Turkey, like Europe, has left behind the worst years of attacks and attacks by IS, which caused the Anatolian country to bleed enormously, especially during 2016: that year, the jihadist group carried out almost a monthly attack in Türkiye, a country where its members traveled from all over the world towards Syria to join the group and live under the orders of their then leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
The worst attacks occurred during a demonstration in Ankarathe Turkish capital, in October 2015, when an explosion in the middle of a crowd killed 109 personas; and two mass shootings in the Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, in June 2016, and in a nightclub during New Year’s Eve 2017. In these two attacks 48 and 39 people diedrespectively.
Since then, however, and also with the defeat of the caliphate in Syria and Irak In March 2019, the group has lost almost all operating capacity outside the two Arab countries, the northern Sahel y Afghanistanwhere IS still operates with sleeper cells that carry out more sporadic acts of extortion and ambushes against the population and local authorities.
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