Whistleblower exposes how NATO’s leading ally is arming and funding ISIS

“I am the police chief who was asked to guard ISIS terrorists”

By Nafeez Ahmed

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for the global commons. Support us to keep digging where others fear to tread

+ Turkey’s intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, named as member of terror group linked to al-Qaeda and ISIS

+ Turkish intelligence directly supplied military aid to ISIS for years

+ Turkish government siphoned military supplies to ISIS through humanitarian relief agency

+ ISIS fighters, including al-Baghadi’s deputy, received free medical treatment in Turkey and “protection” from Turkish police

+ Head of ISIS in Turkey received “24/7 protection” under the personal order of President Erdogan

+ Turkish police investigations into ISIS are being systematically quashed

+ ISIS oil is sold with complicity of authorities in Turkey and Kurdish region of northern Iraq

+ NATO affirms Turkey’s role as ally in war on ISIS

A former senior counter-terrorism official in Turkey has blown the whistle on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s deliberate sponsorship of the Islamic State (ISIS) as a geopolitical tool to expand Turkey’s regional influence and sideline his political opponents at home.

Ahmet Sait Yayla was Chief of the Counter-Terrorism and Operations Division of Turkish National Police between 2010 and 2012, before becoming Chief of the Public Order and Crime Prevention Division until 2014. Previously, he had worked in the Counter-Terrorism and Operations Division as a mid-level manager for his entire 20-year police tenure, before becoming Chief of Police in Ankara and Sanliurfa.

In interviews with INSURGE intelligence, Yayla exclusively revealed that he had personally witnessed evidence of high-level Turkish state sponsorship of ISIS during his police career, which eventually led him to resign. He decided to become a whistleblower after Erdogan’s authoritarian crackdown following the failed military coup in July. This is the first time that the former counter-terrorism chief has spoken on the record to reveal what he knows about Turkish government aid to Islamist terror groups.

Ahmet Sait Yayla

The former Turkish National Police counter-terrorism chief is speaking out at considerable risk to his own family. As part of Erdogan’s crackdown after the failed military coup in July, Yayla’s 19 year old son was prevented from leaving the country, and eventually arrested on terrorism charges.

When I first spoke to Yayla, he had just launched his new book in Washington DC, ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories of the Terrorist Caliphate, co-authored with Professor Anne Speckhard, a NATO and Pentagon consultant specialising in the psychology of radicalisation.

“Turkey is supporting Islamic State and other jihadist groups,” said Yayla.

“I know this firstly as a former chief of Turkish national police and what I experienced there, which is the reason I ended up leaving the police. And secondly, due to former ISIS terrorists whom I have interviewed as part of my research into the jihadist phenomenon — many of whom say that ISIS enjoys official Turkish support.”

Targeted by Erdogan’s counter-coup

Yayla is the first Turkish counter-terrorism official to claim firsthand knowledge of Erdogan’s secret support for Islamist terrorist groups. He has intimate knowledge of the government’s relationship with ISIS, having worked closely with senior government officials in Ankara — including Erdogan himself — to discuss operations.

After my initial interview with Yayla, I had countless further questions about his specific experiences of Turkey’s sponsorship of ISIS. But I was having difficulties reaching him.

Eventually, I received an email on 30 July clarifying the reason for the silence.

“I am sorry I could not get back to you,” wrote Yayla: “I was trying to get my son out of Turkey and he was held at the border without any reasons. He is a college student, 19 year old boy. They do not explain anything and just hold him at the border police. Of course, the reason is me, what I am writing and my stand against Erdogan. We are so stressed up with him being detained. As you know torture and other atrocities that I would not want to think of have become ordinary for the last two weeks in Turkey. Let me handle this crisis and speak to you later if you don’t mind.”

Yayla’s son is Yavuz Yayla, a student of international relations at Cukurova University. I could not imagine what Yayla was going through. Then, within days, the situation escalated:

“Unfortunately, they arrested my son,” Yayla wrote in a further email.

“The charge is having a one dollar bill in his backpack, a sign he is accused of being among the coup supporters. He is 19, first year college student, does not have anything to do with anyone or with any coupists, but it is only to get revenge on me because I am screaming the facts and Erdogan does not like it.”

Despite his own direct knowledge of the corruption of Turkey’s national security system, Yayla was taken aback by the development:

“I have never thought they would go that low. You just cannot do anything. Literally, in the indictment the prosecutor submitted two evidences to his being a terrorist, trying to leave the country through legal means from a border gate where he was stopped due to the fact that he had officer’s passport (green passport as he can only go to EU without visa with this passport and I got it from the University) and having a one dollar bill in his backpack which he had taken from me years ago when I came back from a conference in the US. We are at a point that words cannot describe the frustration we are having individually or as the victims of this coup attempt.”

I first spoke to Yayla at length on 4 August by telephone. His voice was noticeably subdued compared to our initial conversation. The first thing he told me was that he had not been able to stop crying, due to fear of what would happen to his son.

The situation was intractable. To get his son released, Yayla needed to find a good and brave lawyer. But lawyers were already being purged by Erdogan — especially lawyers that agreed to take cases of people arrested by authorities for being linked to the coup.

“So I can’t find a lawyer,” said Yayla. “The lawyers are afraid. All they are saying is ‘We have family too, they will arrest us too.’”

Teams of counter-terrorism officers had been sent to the home of Yayla’s father in Ankara. They had searched the house, and asked repeated questions about Ahmet himself. Since then, Yavuz Yayla remains in indefinite detention on terrorism charges, and appeal proceedings have been unsuccessful.

For Yayla, the real target of these actions is obvious.

“They want to silence me,” he said regarding the Erdogan administration:

“I know several internal understandings. How they were helping ISIS directly.”

In the two months during his son’s detention, Yayla has been unable to communicate with his son by phone, although inmates have the right to a ten minute phone call every week.

By early September, the Turkish authorities temporarily released Yavuz with all his personal belongings, only to detain him again at the door of the prison. This time he was re-arrested on the grounds that his passport had been canceled by the government. The lawyer whom Ahmet had eventually found for his son pulled out of the case under pressure from Turkish intelligence.

In reality, the cancellation of Yavuz’s passport was linked to his father. Turkish authorities had cancelled the passports of Ahmet Yayla and his family members in July 2016, after Yayla wrote an article in the World Policy Journal highlighting evidence of Erdogan’s support for terrorism.

But that article barely scratched the surface of what Ahmet Yayla knows firsthand about the Turkish government’s incestuous relationship with ISIS.

Humanitarian terror

Yayla said that controversial allegations in the Turkish press concerning support to militant groups in Syria through a Turkish charitable NGO, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), are entirely accurate reflections of a murky relationship between the Turkish government and jihadist groups.

On 3 January 2014, the centrist Turkish daily Hurriyet reported that a significant quantity of ammunition and weapons were found by Turkish police in trucks transporting aid on behalf of the IHH to Islamist rebels in Syria.

It soon emerged from prosecutor and witness testimony of the police officers in court proceedings that the trucks were alleged to have been accompanied by officials from the Turkish state National Intelligence Organisation (MIT).

The testimony in court documents claimed that rocket parts, ammunition and mortar shells had been found in trucks delivering supplies to areas of Syria under the control of jihadist groups in late 2013 and early 2014.

However, Erdogan’s government banned all Turkish media from further reporting on the court proceedings. The allegations, claimed the government, were part of a conspiracy to undermine Erdogan’s presidency — organised by the exiled Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who is resident in the United States.

According to Ahmet Yayla, however, the allegations against Erdogan and IHH are accurate, and have nothing to do with a Gulenist conspiracy.

“I was indirectly involved early on in the counter-terrorism investigations into IHH,” said Yayla.

“The leader of the IHH was arrested as a result of these investigations at the time, due to the evidence we had obtained that the group is behind much of the support to ISIS. IHH have provided weapons and ammunition to many jihadist groups in Syria, not just ISIS.”

Yayla notes that the 2010 Gaza flotilla, where an IHH operated vessel was prevented from carrying humanitarian supplies into Gaza by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF), had been arranged with Erdogan’s approval:

“Erdogan wanted people to think he was supporting Jerusalem and Palestine, by forcing this ship to Gaza. He expected to become a hero. Instead, people were killed. But Erdogan used the incident to radicalise people in Turkey around himself.”

Even before the flotilla incident, IHH had become the primary partner of the Turkish International Cooperation Agency (TIKA) — the Turkish government’s official aid agency — to distribute humanitarian aid all over the world.

“Except, it wasn’t only humanitarian goods IHH was distributing. Amongst the goods, were weapons,” said Yayla.

Militant roots

IHH’s chief benefactor in the Turkish government was Hakan Fidan, who headed up TIKA from 2003 to 2007. A former Turkish military officer, he became deputy undersecretary to the Prime Minister in 2007. Since 2010, he has been head of the Turkish state intelligence agency, MIT.

Hakan Fidan, head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation (MIT)

But according to Ahmet Yayla, Fidan was a prime suspect in a series of terrorism attacks in the 1990s — when Yayla worked as a police officer in Ankara. The attacks involved targeted assassinations of leftwing Turkish intellectuals affiliated with the newspaper Cumhuriyet, in the form of car bombings and exploding parcels. The victims included journalist Ugur Mumtu, women’s rights activist Bahriye Ucok, and intellectual Ahmet Taner Kislali.

Police operations traced the perpetrators of the attacks to a terrorist cell run by the Turkish Hizbollah (TH). Two key individuals now close to Erdogan were identified by police as members of the cell: Hakan Fidan and Faruk Koca, a founding member of the ruling AKP.

Turkish Hizbollah is a Sunni Islamist terrorist organisation that emerged in the 1980s, originally run by a Kurdish faction. It is particularly active against the Kurdistan Workers Party (the PKK), and openly endorses violence as a means to establish an Islamic state in Turkey.

The group has no ties with the Lebanese group of the same name. But according to Yayla, Turkish police operations revealed that TH had ties to senior elements of Turkey’s security apparatus, as well as strong relationships to post-revolutionary Iranian intelligence officials.

A Human Rights Watch background briefing published in 2000 documented an alarming pattern of links between Turkish security forces and TH, including testimony from senior Turkish government officials — such as cabinet minister Fikri Saglar, who claimed that the Turkish Hizbullah was from inception controlled by “the Armed Forces” and “expanded and strengthened on the basis of a decision at the National Security Council in 1985.”

In April 1995, an official Turkish Parliamentary report concluded that Turkish “military units” were providing “assistance” to a secret Turkish Hizbullah camp “in the region of Seku, Gönüllü and Çiçekli villages, in the Gercüs district of Batman.”

TH has since been designated as a terrorist organisation by the State Department.

Over the last decade, while TH has not renounced its commitment to violence, it has focused on political activities.

Yet its violent legacy lives on. There is a direct line of descent between TH, al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Halis Bayancuk, whose nom de guerre is Abu Hanzala, is the emir of ISIS in Turkey. Previously, Turkey’s state-run national public broadcaster, TRT, identified Bayancuk as the head of al-Qaeda’s Turkey branch. But Bayancuk is also the son of Haci Bayancuk, one of the founding members of TH.

Halis Bayancuk (right), the emir of ISIS in Turkey and son of Haci Bayancuk, a founding member of the Turkish Hizbullah is pictured here during an arrest by Turkish police. He is not handcuffed. Ahmet Yayla explains that under Erdogan, ISIS operatives have such free reign they are never handcuffed by Turkish police if they are arrested

Police operations in 2007 in Bingol and Koceeli, and in 2008 in Istanbul, Ankara and Diyarbakir, revealed high level cooperation between TH leaders and al-Qaeda. One al-Qaeda network in Turkey led by Muhammed Yasar was found to have operated on behalf of TH.

Emrullah Uslu, a former policy analyst in the Turkish National Police Counter-Terrorism Unit, says that most of the members of al-Qaeda’s network in Turkey “have had contact” with TH.

Today, a splinter faction of TH that has recruited new Salafi-jihadists to its fold is now “fighting alongside ISIS and other extremist factions in Syria,” reports Turkish journalist Sibel Hurtas.

“Hundreds of pages of documentation about the Turkish Hizbullah were uncovered in the Ankara police raids that occurred at the time,” said Yayla regarding the wave of murders in the 1990s:

“The files proved direct ties between Iranian intelligence, and two figures who are now extremely close to Erdogan: Hakan Fidan and Faruk Koca. And they showed that both Fidan and Koca were part of the Turkish Hizbullah terrorist cell behind those bombings.”

Due to the police investigation, Fidan fled Turkey to Germany, then moved to the US where he continued to live in exile. When the AKP took power under Erdogan, however, Fidan returned to Turkey and reprised his role as head of the Turkish aid agency, his ‘wanted’ status inexplicably disappearing.

Daesh: bastard spawn of the Turkish deep state

Due to its humanitarian credentials, the IHH, now partnered with the Turkish government under Fidan’s leadership of TIKA, provided the “perfect cover” for Erdogan to escalate his covert Syria strategy.

The covert strategy continued as Fidan went on to become head of Turkish state intelligence.

If Yayla’s claims are correct, then the current head of Turkey’s powerful MIT under Erdogan is a member of the al-Qaeda affiliated Turkish Hizbullah, responsible for terrorist murders of leftwing dissidents in the 1990s.

From around 2012 onwards, Yayla explained, several hundred trucks of supplies were being sent by IHH to Syria.

Describing several active police operations against IHH due to the agency’s relationships with al-Qaeda, Yayla confirmed that one major operation involving anti-terror raids in Gazientep, Van, Kilis, Istanbul, Adana and Kayseri had uncovered IHH’s close working relationship with senior al-Qaeda and ISIS operatives, by supplying arms to jihadist groups across the border.

While Erdogan and his ministers condemned the police operation, Yayla, who has briefed Erdogan as Chief of Police in Ankara, confirmed that the operation was the result of an ongoing police investigation into jihadist support within Turkey — not a Gulenist conspiracy.

But IHH was only one conduit for these operations in support of Syrian jihadists.

“The rest of the operations were carried out directly by the MIT,” said Yayla. “The MIT openly carried weapons and explosives to Syria by truck as well as by actual fighters being transported by busses, several times. Some of them were caught by Turkish police.”

Thousands of foreign fighters have swarmed into Turkey over the last few years to join groups fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

For the first time, Ahmet Yayla’s interviews with INSURGE intelligence provide direct insider confirmation not only that Erdogan’s government had turned a blind eye to the movement of these fighters across the border into Syria — but that Turkish police had detected the role of Turkey’s state intelligence agency in the foreign fighter funnel, which had involved direct assistance to ISIS:

“The MIT agency transported ISIS terrorists from Hatay to Sanliurfa in buses in 2014 and 2015. Sometimes they would be dropped off at the border, other times they would be transported across the border. When the terrorists would return to Turkey, they were often stopped for routine drug control. In the buses, Turkish border guards found Kalashnikovs and ammunition. The occupants were arrested and questioned, and the drivers openly admitted that MIT had hired them to transport those terrorists and foreign fighters.”

Yayla was not directly involved in these operations, but became aware of their damning findings during his senior police role, as he had unrestricted access to the relevant records.

Bombs for charity

IHH has long been suspected of terrorism ties by Western intelligence agencies.

A confidential State Department cable from the US embassy in Istanbul obtained by Wikileaks, dated 21 July 2006, confirms that the IHH is “suspected by some of international terrorism financing… In 1997 local officers at IHH’s Istanbul headquarters were arrested after a raid by security forces uncovered firearms, explosives and bomb-making instructions.”

The cable describes a funeral memorial for the death of al-Qaeda affiliated Chechen military commander Shamil Basayev, co-organised by IHH, and personally attended by IHH’s president, Bulent Yildirim.

Basayev was designated by the State Department as a terrorist individual in 2003 due to his admitted involvement in several massacres of civilian hostages and suicide bombings, as well as his “links to al-Qaeda.”

In that context, the rest of the secret cable is worth noting:

“Mourners continued chanting Arabic slogans interspersed with the following phrases in Turkish: ‘Killer Russians — out of Chechnya,’ ‘Killer Israelis — Out of Palestine,’ ‘Killer Americans — Out of the Middle East,’ ‘Shamil Basayev — Your way is our way,’ and ‘Hamas — Go on Resisting.’ As a possible reference to the upcoming election season, Yildirim also had a message for the Turkish Government, ‘Don’t support these infidels — if you go straight, we’re ready to follow you.’ Mid-way through the ceremony, participants burned a flag — which we could not see — to the crowd’s great delight. As for Basayev, Yildirim praised the fact that he didn’t compromise, claiming that he aimed for independence and died for God and the cause.”

Yayla confirmed that the IHH police raid in 1997 had identified direct ties between the charity and al-Qaeda. IHH personnel, he said, were being prepared for combat operations in Chechnya, Bosnia and Afghanistan.

Documents found during the raid revealed that weapons were being secretly supplied to groups connected to Osama bin Laden.

ISIS supporters also regularly transport parts to engineer make-shift explosive devices across the Turkish-Syria border with impunity.

Photographs provided exclusively to INSURGE by Yayla, which he obtained directly from former ISIS members, depict ISIS members handling so-called “hell fireball bombs” made from liquid petroleum gas tanks, the parts for which are manufactured in Konya, an inner city in Turkey where hundreds of ISIS supporters reside.

“The former ISIS member said that these supplies are coming from sources protected by Turkish security forces,” said Yayla.