Tag: DHKP/C

  • What’s Behind the Turkey Bombing? A Look at the DHKP-C

    What’s Behind the Turkey Bombing? A Look at the DHKP-C

    Feb 2, 2013 4:45 AM EST

    Turkish officials named a long dormant terror group as responsible for Friday’s suicide attack at the U.S. embassy in Ankara. Why would the far-left group strike now?

    When a suicide bomber at the U.S. embassy in Ankara detonated his charge on Friday, killing himself and a Turkish security guard, authorities looked beyond the usual terror suspects—al Qaeda or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known as the PKK)—to finger an obscure group thought to have faded into obsolescence since its heyday in the 1980s and ‘90s.

    1359768123928.cached
    The terrorist attack on the US Embassy in Ankara killed a security guard and wounded several others. (Yavuz Ozden/AFP/Getty)

    According to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the attack was carried out by the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front, or DHKP-C. Founded in the late ‘70s as a Marxist-Leninist group first known as Devrimci Solo, or Dev Sol, it advocated armed struggle to overthrow the Turkish government and replace it with socialism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the group softened its Marxist rhetoric and shifted its focus toward winning recruits among Turkey’s urban ghettos and the country’s notorious prisons, where, officials say, the DHKP-C ran de facto indoctrination and training camps.

    The group—which has long been listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S., European Union, and the Turkish government—gained notoriety in the 1990s for its attacks on American targets, and for its gruesome hunger strikes during Turkey’s controversial prison reforms. In two of its most high-profile attacks, the DHKP-C assassinated two U.S. military contractors in a protest against the first Gulf War, and launched a rocket at the U.S. consulate in Istanbul in 1992. In the late ‘90s, authorities also thwarted plans by the group to launch rocket attacks against the U.S. consulate and Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, where the U.S. had stationed forces to help patrol Iraq.

    Even as it railed against America—a country it described in manifestos as “the total negation of democracy, justice, and freedom”—the group terrorized Turkey with a decade-long series of suicide bombings aimed at government targets. In one of the grisliest, in 2001, a suicide bomber linked to the DHKP-C killed himself and three policemen in Istanbul, wounding 30 others; the group claimed the attack was revenge for the death of 30 inmates who had resisted a move to a maximum-security prison and engaged in a firefight—fueled by smuggled weapons—with Turkish troops. Among the group’s other alleged or actual targets were Turkish soldiers, the Justice Ministry, onetime Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, and the heir to one of Turkey’s richest families, who was murdered alongside a business partner and a secretary by DHKP-C extremists in Toyota’s Istanbul headquarters in 1996.

    Despite its high-profile acts of violence—which led then-CIA Director George Tenet to call out the group, along with Colombia’s FARC rebels and Hamas, in a 2002 report to Congress as a potential target for future American anti-terror operations—it has lost much of its influence in recent years. Turkish authorities and their European counterparts have cracked down on the group at home and abroad, effectively dismantling the group’s leadership and cutting off its funding sources. According to most experts, the DHKP-C’s membership has dwindled, along with its political influence—which makes it all the more bewildering that the group is now resurfacing in the Turkish news.

    In January, Istanbul police announced an operation in seven cities that had detained 85 people accused of having links to the DHKP-C—including 11 lawyers accused of leaking state secrets to Greece and Syria. As noted by Michael Weiss, a Syria analyst and columnist with NOW Lebanon, the far left in Turkey has recently taken issue with the deployment of NATO Patriot missiles to defend the country against potential spillover from the conflict in Syria—one possible motivation for the embassy attack. He says Turkish authorities, locked in bitter animosity with Syria’s government over its neighbor’s brutal civil war, may be keen to press the Syria link in the coming days. “It is interesting that the target was the American embassy,” Weiss says. “Patriot missiles have just arrived in southern Turkey. And not two weeks ago, Istanbul police were claiming the DHKP-C lawyers had been detained on suspicion of giving state secrets to Syria and Greece. So there’s a strong likelihood that Turkish security will try to connect this attack to Damascus in some way.”

    The group might still have enough strength left to cause more problems for the U.S. and Turkey, especially as the countries struggle to deal with the chaos across the border in Syria.

    But Ross Wilson, the American ambassador to Turkey from 2005-08, interprets the attacks as a last gasp in a dying breed of Turkish leftist terror. He says the group has been weakened considerably over the years, and may have staked out such a high-profile target in a bid to get attention—as well as in retaliation for the recent arrests by Turkish authorities. “There have been protests against the Patriots, and there is a strain in Turkey of virulent anti-Americanism, of the kind that turns out to protest whenever we do anything,” says Wilson, who now directs the Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council. “I think the DHKP-C may be trying to get back into the business here—but their agenda is not just opposing Patriots, but [it is] extreme violence and murder. That worked in the 1970s and ‘80s, but Turkey has really moved on from those left-right battles.”

    Still, the group might still have enough strength left to cause more problems for the U.S. and Turkey, especially as the countries struggle to deal with the chaos across the border in Syria. “If the DHKP-C, whose hallmark is threatening U.S. interests in Turkey, is indeed behind this attack, it suggests to me that—as small as this and similar groups are,” says Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkey at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “they will pose a continued risk to further U.S.-NATO deployments in Turkey.”

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/02/what-s-behind-the-turkey-bombing-a-look-at-the-dhkp-c.html

  • Profile: Turkey’s Marxist DHKP-C

    Profile: Turkey’s Marxist DHKP-C

    Turkey’s extreme-left Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) has waged a violent campaign for more than three decades.

    _65658553_dhkp

    Ankara says the DHKP-C has killed dozens of police officers and soldiers along with more than 80 civilians since it was formed in 1978.

    The banned group wants to replace the Turkish government with a Marxist one.

    It also opposes what it calls US imperialism and has several times targeted US military personnel and diplomatic missions.

    The DHKP-C is branded as a terror organisation by the US and the EU.

    The group has claimed a suicide attack against the US embassy in Ankara which killed the bomber and a guard on 1 February 2013.

    During the previous month, Turkish police made more than 80 arrests in raids targeting the group.

    Among those detained were students, lawyers, reporters and even members of a pop group who were thought to have links with the DHKP-C.

    The group was formed in 1978 as Dev-Sol (Revolutionary Left), a Marxist-Leninist splinter group from a larger group called Dev-Yol (Revolutionary Path). It changed its name to DHKP-C in 1994.

    In its early years the group recruited supporters mainly in high schools and universities.

    But analysts say its main power-base is among the urban poor.

    In 2000, the group spearheaded a long-running hunger strike in Turkish prisons over the introduction of high-security jails.

    More than 60 people died in the prison protest, most of them DHKP-C members. Another 30 inmates were killed when the army stormed prisons in December 2000 to end the campaign.

    The group has been blamed for the killings of two retired generals, a former justice minister and a prominent businessman.

    Experts say that during the 2000s the DHKP-C tried to gain prominence by imitating the tactics of al-Qaeda.

    But many of its senior figures fled abroad following Turkish police raids in 2004.

    The group’s founding leader Dursun Karatas spent years in exile after escaping from an Istanbul prison in 1989. He died of cancer in the Netherlands 2008.

    via BBC News – Profile: Turkey’s Marxist DHKP-C.

  • Turkey bombing: What is the DHKP/C terrorist group?

    Turkey bombing: What is the DHKP/C terrorist group?

    A suicide bomber detonated an explosive strapped to himself Friday in front of the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, killing himself and a Turkish guard, the AP reported.

    TURKEY-US-EMBASSY-BLAST

    AFP/Getty Images

    (AFP/Getty Images)

    The attack destroyed the entrance to the building, Turkey’s foreign minister said, and the force of the explosion left body parts strewn around the scene.

    White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that the bombing “was clearly an act of terror.”

    Turkish media identified the bomber as Ecevit Şanli, allegedly a 30-year-old member of the outlawed Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C).

    If the reports are true, it might mean that the terrorist group, which some experts describe as long past its heyday, is seeing a revival now that the Syrian conflict has given the U.S. and Turkey new reason to cooperate on foreign policy.

    The DHKP/C is a Marxist-Leninist party and terrorist group that strongly opposes any NATO or U.S. influence over foreign policy in Turkey. For the past few decades, they’ve targeted a series of Western and Turkish officials, professors and businessmen with suicide bombings.

    Today’s attack is similar to another suicide bombing on Sept. 11, 2012, when an explosion in a police station in Istanbul’s Sultangazi district killed a police officer and the bomber.

    The group was far more popular in the ’70s and ’80s, though, and it has lost much of its influence since then.

    “It went from being a group with mass appeal to one with just a few hundred members,” Soner Cagaptay, an expert on Turkey at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Daily Beast. “They see the world through the prism of the Cold War. It’s really kind of surprising they’re still around.”

    But Turkey’s recent cooperation with the U.S. on Syria might have given the group a new raison d’etre.

    Friday’s attack could have been prompted by Turkey’s cooperation with the U.S. in preventing spillover from Syria’s civil war in Turkey, as Reuters reported:

    Turkey is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East with common interests ranging from energy security to counter-terrorism and has been one of the leading advocates of foreign intervention to end the conflict in neighboring Syria.

    Around 400 U.S. soldiers have arrived in Turkey over the past few weeks to operate Patriot anti-missile batteries meant to defend against any spillover of Syria’s civil war, part of a NATO deployment due to be fully operational in the coming days.

    The attack may have also been retaliation for the detention of more than 50 alleged DHKP/C members by Turkish police last month, but that wouldn’t explain why it occurred at the U.S. Embassy.

    One DHKP/C splinter group called the “Urgent Ones” has reportedly been attempting to stir up sectarian conflict around Turkey in the hope that the Turkish government will abandon its anti-Assad policy.

    “Using the leftist, anti-U.S. and anti-E.U. ideological campaigns overtly laced with anti-imperialist jargon, the group strives to broaden support for the Assad regime,” wrote Abdullah Bozkurt, a columnist for the Turkish paper “Today’s Zaman.”

    via Turkey bombing: What is the DHKP/C terrorist group?.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/02/01/turkey-bombing-what-is-the-dhkpc-terrorist-group/

  • US warns citizens against visiting Turkey missions after blast

    US warns citizens against visiting Turkey missions after blast

    Istanbul:The US consulate in Istanbul warned its citizens against visiting its missions in Turkey until further notice after a suicide bomber killed himself and one other person in an attack on its embassy in Ankara.

    “The Department of State advises US citizens traveling or residing in
    Turkey to be alert to the potential for violence, to avoid those areas where disturbances have occurred and to avoid demonstrations and large gatherings,” the consulate statement added.

    The attacker detonated explosives strapped to his body after entering an embassy gatehouse. .

    Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the bomber was a member of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), a far-left group which is virulently anti-US and anti-NATO and is listed as a terrorist organisation by Washington.

    The White House said the suicide attack was an “act of terror” but that the motivation was unclear. U.S. officials said the DHKP-C were the main suspects but did not exclude other possibilities.

    Islamist radicals, extreme left-wing groups, ultra-nationalists and Kurdish militants have all carried out attacks in Turkey in the past. There was no claim of responsibility.

    “The suicide bomber was ripped apart and one or two citizens from the special security team passed away,” said Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

    “This event shows that we need to fight together everywhere in the world against these terrorist elements,” he said.

    In New York, the UN Security Council strongly condemned the attack as a heinous act.

    Turkish media reports identified the bomber as DHKP-C member Ecevit Sanli, who was involved in attacks on a police station and a military staff college in Istanbul in 1997.

    KEY ALLY

    Turkey is a key USally in the Middle East with common interests ranging from energy security to counter-terrorism and has been one of the leading advocates of foreign intervention to end the conflict in neighboring Syria.

    Around 400 U.S. soldiers have arrived in Turkey over the past few weeks to operate Patriot anti-missile batteries meant to defend against any spillover of Syria’s civil war, part of a NATO deployment due to be fully operational in the coming days.

    An embassy security guard arrives at the Gate 2 of the US embassy just minutes after a suicide bomber has detonated an explosive device at the entrance of the U.S. Embassy in the Turkish capital, Ankara. AP

    The DHKP-C was responsible for the assassination of two U.S. military contractors in the early 1990s in protest against the first Gulf War and launched rockets at the U.S. consulate in Istanbul in 1992, according to the U.S. State Department.

    Deemed a terrorist organisation by both the United States and Turkey, the DHKP-C has been blamed for suicide attacks in the past, including one in 2001 that killed two police officers and a tourist in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square.

    The group, formed in 1978, has carried out a series of deadly attacks on police stations in the last six months.

    The attack may have come in retaliation for an operation against the DHKP-C last month in which Turkish police detained 85 people. A court subsequently remanded 38 of them in custody over links to the group.

    “HUGE EXPLOSION”

    U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone emerged through the main gate of the embassy shortly after the explosion to address reporters, flanked by a security detail as a Turkish police helicopter hovered overhead.

    “We’re very sad of course that we lost one of our Turkish guards at the gate,” Ricciardone said, describing the victim as a “hero” and thanking Turkish authorities for a prompt response.

    U.S. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland condemned the attack on the checkpoint on the perimeter of the embassy and said several U.S. and Turkish staff were injured by debris.

    “The level of security protection at our facility in Ankara ensured that there were not significantly more deaths and injuries than there could have been,” she told reporters.

    It was the second attack on a U.S. mission in four months. On September 11, 2012, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three American personnel were killed in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

    The attack in Benghazi, blamed on al Qaeda-affiliated militants, sparked a political furore in Washington over accusations that U.S. missions were not adequately safeguarded.

    A well-known Turkish journalist, Didem Tuncay, who was on her way in to the embassy to meet Ricciardone when the attack took place, was in a critical condition in hospital.

    “It was a huge explosion. I was sitting in my shop when it happened. I saw what looked like a body part on the ground,” said travel agent Kamiyar Barnos, whose shop window was shattered around 100 meters away from the blast.

    CALL FOR VIGILANCE

    The U.S. consulate in Istanbul warned its citizens to be vigilant and to avoid large gatherings, while the British mission in Istanbul called on British businesses to tighten security after what it called a “suspected terrorist attack”.

    In 2008, Turkish gunmen with suspected links to al Qaeda, opened fire on the U.S. consulate in Istanbul, killing three Turkish policemen. The gunmen died in the subsequent firefight.

    The most serious bombings in Turkey occurred in November 2003, when car bombs shattered two synagogues, killing 30 people and wounding 146. Part of the HSBC Bank headquarters was destroyed and the British consulate was damaged in two more explosions that killed 32 people less than a week later. Authorities said those attacks bore the hallmarks of al Qaeda.

    Reuters

  • Making sense of the Ankara embassy bombing from Istanbul

    Making sense of the Ankara embassy bombing from Istanbul

    Emergency personnel are seen on Friday in front of a side entrance to the U.S. Embassy in the Turkish capital.

    ISTANBUL — “Have you heard the news?” my editor at the local Turkish newspaper asked. Lazily clicking through various media outlets’ homepages as I shouldered the phone to my ear, I assumed he was referring to the still-missing New Yorker in Istanbul.

    “Yeah, but the investigator hasn’t —”

    “No, not Sierra,” he interrupted. “The U.S. Embassy was bombed this morning.”

    I immediately jumped on Twitter, where I watched and retweeted as developments unfolded. First, news of a blast near the embassy in Ankara. Then, photos of the damaged front entrance. After that came 140-character blurbs reporting several injuries, a suicide bomber (or was it a package?) and one, no, two deaths.

    The distance between Ankara and Istanbul, where I live, is more than 200 miles. But I felt a world away as I drank my latte, watched two boys rough-house in the street and wrapped up another story on the investigation into Sarai Sierra’s mystifying disappearance.

    Meanwhile, my American cellphone has not stopped buzzing since 3:30 p.m. I’ve received dozens of Facebook messages and e-mails from concerned family members and friends back home. As I rushed to meet my daily deadline, I put my phone on silent.

    After filing, I cautiously opened my inbox. My heart sank — three messages from mom. I knew what they said before I read them.

    “IMPORTANT!!” shouted the first subject line. I took a deep breath before clicking it open. As I read the message interspersed with exclamation points and phrases in all caps, I could hear her frightened voice and see her furrowed brow.

    Let me add an important aside: Mom’s been trying to get me to come home since I moved here two years ago. The oldest of three daughters, I was the first in my immediate family to go to college and the first to travel abroad. She had no idea I was going to end up living in Turkey when I hugged her goodbye in January 2011. Neither did I.

    She and my sisters traveled to Istanbul this past summer and, as I did when I first stepped off the plane, fell in love with the city and its storied history, generous people and distinct cuisine. But that hasn’t stopped my mom (and many of my family members, for that matter) from sending frantic messages every time a protest occurs or bomb detonates, not just in Turkey but anywhere in the region.

    As much as I hate to admit it, she’s got a point.

    According to the Pew Research Center’s 2012 Global Attitudes Project, only 15 percent of Turks have a favorable opinion of the United States. Conversely, 72 percent view the United States unfavorably.

    In the past, I’ve been able to alleviate my chronically worried mother’s fears about my safety by pointing out that none of our governmental buildings had been targeted recently, as has happened in the Arab Spring countries. Perhaps, in retrospect, that wasn’t the greatest example I could have given.

    After all, this isn’t the first time a U.S. diplomatic mission has been attacked in Turkey.

    In 2008, six people were killed when gunmen attacked Turkish police guarding the entrance to the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul. Only five years before that, an al-Qaeda-linked gang of Turks killed 58 people in various suicide truck bombings around Istanbul.

    As my mom reminds me every day, Turkey also is in a geopolitical hot spot.

    Think of what’s happened in the past two years alone — social and political upheaval has swept the Middle East and North Africa; Syria is riddled with conflict; already tense relations between the United States and Iran have deteriorated; four people were killed in an attack on an American diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, etc.

    But do I worry about my safety in Istanbul? Honestly, other than frequent harassment, no. Perhaps it sounds naïve, but those concerns don’t match my reality here. It hasn’t affected my daily life.

    And it hasn’t, at least until now, stopped others from visiting Istanbul, consistently ranked among the world’s most popular tourist destinations.

    I pumped out a quick message, knowing my mother’s anxiety would not subside until she heard from me. “Hey mom, I’m fine. Promise I’m being safe. Just sitting in a café, writing.”

    Less than a minute later, my inbox chirped. “OK, love you.”

    via Making sense of the Ankara embassy bombing from Istanbul.

  • Turkey Rounds Up Human Rights Lawyers

    Turkey Rounds Up Human Rights Lawyers

    Dorian Jones

    January 18, 2013

    ISTANBUL — Security forces in Turkey have detained more than a dozen lawyers as part of a nationwide sweep against illegal leftist groups. Among those detained include some of the country’s most well-known human rights advocates.

    In a crackdown on the activities of an illegal left wing group, 15 lawyers were among 85 people detained under anti-terror laws by Turkish security forces in a nationwide operation.

    38D4A690-84CC-47AF-95BC-9EEE69B2B369_w640_r1_s

    Turkish police try to push back protesters trying to enter a courthouse where prosecutors were to deliver final arguments in a trial against nearly 300 people accused of plotting to overthrow the government, in Silivri near Istanbul. Turkey, December 13, 2012.

    ​​With many of the detained lawyers being well-known human rights defenders, several human rights groups around the world have voiced alarm.

    Emma Sinclair Webb, who is with U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, said, “It’s very concerning to find lawyers the targets of police operations at four o’clock in the morning, having their doors broken down. These lawyers are all known for their activities in defense of human rights, for pursuing police violence cases.”

    Security forces said they target members of the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front (DHKP-C), a group blamed for a number of attacks in Turkey since the 1970s. The Turkish government has accused the lawyers of transferring instructions from the group’s imprisoned leaders to militants.

    Seven of the detained lawyers belong to the Progressive Lawyers Association, which last year launched a telephone hot line for people to report police abuse.

    In a statement, the lawyers’ group condemned the detentions, calling them an attack against people and institutions that oppose the government and struggle for democracy and freedom.

    The arrests also included five members of a popular left-wing folk music group.

    Sinclair Webb of Human Rights Watch said the detentions part of a worrying trend. “This looks to be part of wider clampdown under anti-terror laws, which we have seen in Turkey over the last few years increasing,”he said. “This clampdown affects journalist’s, human rights defenders and lawyers.”

    According to international human rights groups, Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world. The government claims none of them are in jail for their pursuits of journalist activities.

    In a report this week, the watchdog group Freedom House categorized Turkey as only a partially free country in its “Freedom in the World Report,” due to what it described as a serious decline in civil liberties and political rights.

    via Turkey Rounds Up Human Rights Lawyers.