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 a counter-guerrilla group, a claim the government unequivocally denied. Nevertheless, Hezbollah was thought to have infiltrated state institutions. Turkish security officials maintained that Hezbollah members had been trained in—and financed by—Iran to subvert Turkey's secular government and that Hezbollah formed as early as 1979 as the Iranian Revolution began supporting terror as a means to establish Islamic states throughout the region. The group used mosques and bookstores for recruitment and maintained safe houses throughout Turkey.

Experts believe that Hezbollah's roots go back to the Kurdish Islamic movement of the early 1980s. At that time, the PKK was a significant problem for the Turkish government, so any terror action against the PKK was basically ignored. Hezbollah was able to operate with great freedom, and often carried out brutal attacks in broad daylight. Between 1991 and 1995, the height of the conflict between Hezbollah and the PKK, some 700 people were killed.

In addition to the murders of hundreds of civilians within the past decade, Turkish officials say Hezbollah may be responsible for the murders of several leading Turkish academics and journalists who supported a secular government. Beginning in 1995, the Turkish government arrested and tried scores of Hezbollah members. Just before 2000, the group began infiltrating Istanbul and cities of western Turkey, murdering and often robbing to fund their cause. When one militant used a stolen credit card, Turkish security officials were able to trace it to Hezbollah; a massive attack on the organization was then launched. Nearly 100 Hezbollah militants were arrested in southeast Turkey and, on January 17, 2001, the organization's leader, Huseyin Velioglu, was killed in a shootout.

That same day, two other Hezbollah leaders were arrested, leading to the discovery of the bodies of hundreds of Hezbollah victims, which had been buried in Hezbollah safe houses. The corpses showed evidence of having been tortured and buried alive; many had broken bones. Videotapes recovered by Turkish authorities revealed these torture sessions, even documented some of the executions. Grisly findings were made in various Turkish cities—Adana, Antalya, Diyarbakir, Ankara, Konya, Tarsus; these victims puzzled Turkish security officials because many were Kurds, themselves enemies of the state.

Hezbollah membership is unclear, though one Turkish security official claimed they had seized documents suggesting around 20,000 members. The anti-Hezbollah operation of 2000, though, was a severe blow to the group. Thousands of Hezbollah sympathizers were taken into custody in security raids and questions about the group's structure, strategy, system of education, and finances were answered.