Turkish Hezbollah

aka Hizbollah, Hizbullah, South-Eastern Hizbullah

Formed in southeastern Turkey in the 1980s, Turkish Hezbollah, one of Turkey's more active Islamic terror groups (unrelated to Lebanon's Hezbollah), seeks to overthrow the constitutional and secular government of that country and establish a strict Islamic theocracy. Targeting civilians, mainly Kurds, and Kurdish sympathizers in southeast Turkey, Turkish Hezbollah is responsible for hundreds of murders. The group has earned a reputation for brutality—many of its victims were tortured before they died.

Turkish Hezbollah (founded at the height of an armed separatist Kurdish rebellion in the 1980s) focused its early attacks on those who sympathized with the rebel Kurds and on the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the country's largest pro-Kurd terrorist organization and largely opposed to the establishment [Page 369]of a strict Islamic state. At the time, the Turkish government was accused of fostering—even forming—the Hezbollah to act against the PKK as ...