Will Turkey export home-grown 'Islamic State' extremists?

 

A breaking news story on the morning of December 29 last year caused nationwide horror in Turkey: An eight-hour gunfight ensued in the city of Yalova during a raid on a house where operatives from "Islamic State's" Khorasan Province, or ISKP, group were hiding. ISKP is an offshoot of the extremist "Islamic State" group.

Three police officers were killed while eight others and a security guard were injured, some critically. According to the Turkish Interior Ministry, the officers had been following up on concrete leads that the extremist group was planning to carry out attacks on large New Year's Eve celebrations across the country.

In view of the acute threat, the German Foreign Office also tightened its travel advice for Turkey and urged particular caution.

The fact that the six suspected terrorists killed were not foreigners but Turkish citizens came as a surprise to the public.

For a long time, the prevailing narrative in Turkey has been that these kinds of groups primarily used the country as a transit point for operations in central Asia or the Middle East. But in Yalova it turned out that the head of the cell and all the members were Turkish, with a large arsenal of weapons at their disposal.

As local media outlets later reported, two of the men who were killed had previously been imprisoned after being found guilty of being members of a terrorist organization and attempted murder. They had been released on parole after only seven months earlier, despite their radicalization being known to the authorities.

According to the case files, the men reportedly considered their own family members "sinners and enemies" for not wanting to follow their extremist religious ideology. The authorities say one of the men even tried to take his own mother by force to "IS" territories in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to get her onto "the only correct path."

Turkish authorities also knew that the group had declared police officers legitimate targets.

The incident has since sparked a heated debate about whether the Turkish government is underestimating the threat posed by radical Islamist extremists.

Thousands of Turkish citizens have joined 'IS'

The presence of "IS" on Turkish territory is not new. Since 2012, between 5,000 and 8,000 Turkish citizens are thought to have joined the group in Syria and Iraq. Many returned after training and carried out terrorist attacks between 2015 and 2017, killing almost 300 people.

In recent years, ISPK, founded in 2015 to first act in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has gained a foothold in Turkey and professionalized its networks.

Turkish security expert Burak Yildirim confirmed Turkey was no longer merely a transit country for the group but had become a hub for recruitment and financing. He said that ISPK specifically sought supporters in the more low-income suburbs of Turkey's major cities.

"Radical recruiters zoom in on those, and particularly locals who consider the official line of the religious authorities to be too liberal," he said.

ISPK increasingly professional

Many "IS" members fled to Turkey after the group was defeated in Syria in 2019 and the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021. According to Turkish intelligence services, ISPK became increasingly professional with support from central Asia. In its monthly English-language magazine, "Voice of Khorasan," ISPK describes Turkey as the country where it undertakes the most logistical activities and attacks.

For a while, it seemed as if the Turkish government was willing to tolerate such groups on its territory so long as their targets were Syrian Kurds or Bashar Assad's dictatorship in Syria. Huseyin Cicek, a political scientist at the University of Vienna, said the group was tolerated for geopolitical reasons but now, with a different leader in power in Syria who Turkey supports, the situation has changed. The immediate threat of terrorism within Turkey has grown massively since 2024, he added, and the government's top priority was now domestic security.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that local security forces carried out nearly 1,400 raids against "IS" structures in 2024 alone. The raids continued in 2025. At the end of last year, more than 500 suspected "IS" members had been arrested. The Turkish secret service also captured leading ISPK figures in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and transferred them to Turkey.

"The ISPK has learned from its mistakes and territorial defeats in the Middle East," Yildirim said, explaining that in recent years the group had established strategic contacts with armed militias in Africa to gain access to new sources of weapons and combat strategies. He said this made the group "even more dangerous."

The long-term strategic goal, he said, was still exploiting any power vacuum with a view to establishing "a caliphate."

According to the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, there were a total of 23 IS groups around the world in 2024 but the ISPK is classified as the most dangerous. Since 2024, the group has carried out attacks in Iran, Russia and Australia.

Cicek and other experts warn that further attacks could happen any time. "Turkey and Europe have been living with this latent threat for years now," Cicek said.

This article was originally published in German.

- Deutsche Welle