MUST READ: BACK WITH A VENGEANCE: TURKISH HEZBOLLAH

Back with a Vengeance: Turkish Hezbollah
By Gareth Jenkins

In a recent report submitted to the country’s National Security Council (NSC), Turkish police warned that the most powerful militant Islamist group in recent Turkish history has now recovered from the killing of its founder and the arrest of a substantial proportion of its armed wing in a series of police raids in 2000-01. The report claimed that what became commonly known as the Turkish Hezbollah has built a formidable social powerbase in the predominantly Kurdish southeast of the country and once again begun to pose a serious threat to national security (Hürriyet, January 9).

The Turkish Hezbollah has no connection with any other radical organization with the same name [1]. Until recently the Turkish Hezbollah preferred to refer to itself either as İlim, meaning “Science”—after the name of the bookshop where its members originally met—or simply as Cemaat, Turkish for “community.” It was only in 2004, when one of its members published a clandestine defense of its violent campaign under a pseudonym, when the organization first referred to itself as Hezbollah [2].

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Pertinent Links:

1) Back with a Vengeance: Turkish Hezbollah

2) Back with a Vengeance: Turkish Hezbollah (PDF File)