Dec 2, 2016

The Turkish army's greatest fear in Syria has come to pass. On Nov. 29, Islamic State (IS) militants who were attacking a Turkish special forces detachment near al-Dana village, about 3 kilometers (less than 2 miles) northwest of al-Bab, abducted two Turkish noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and their Turkmen translator. IS-affiliated news sites were the first to report the incident.

That evening, the official website of the Turkish General Staff acknowledged search operations were underway. By that time, special forces NCOs Muhammed Duran Keskin, Kivanc Kasikci and their translator had already been moved to the IS bastion of Raqqa.

Keskin and Kasikci are not the first Turkish soldiers that IS has abducted. On Jan. 1, 2015, NCO Ozgur Ors from a battalion on the border town of Kilis was taken hostage by IS when, officials said, he inadvertently crossed into Syria while tracking smugglers. Held hostage in Jarablus for about a week, Ors was rescued in a National Intelligence Organization operation and returned to Turkey. Strangely, Ors — who was welcomed back as a hero — was discharged from the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) the following month for allegedly not resisting capture and providing propaganda material to IS, thus damaging the TSK's reputation.

Pvt. Serter Tas, who was also captured in Kilis, has been held captive by IS for more than a year. Contacts with IS seeking to secure his release have not yielded any results. Tas, whose photograph and messages were published in the April issue of the IS online magazine Konstantiniyye, has been waiting to be rescued for 15 months.

When it became known that the two soldiers abducted Nov. 29 were ranking special forces NCOs who were in Syria as part of Operation Euphrates Shield, Turkish and foreign media showed more interest in the incident. Now everyone in Turkey is worried about the fate of these men in the hands of IS, whose inhumane treatment of its prisoners is well-known. People remember the photos of the Jordanian pilot burned alive in an iron cage and Syrian soldiers crushed under IS tanks.