France passed intelligence to Turkey ahead of IS attack on church, but Turks downplay warning

Abdallah Bozkurt/Stockholm

According to confidential information obtained by Nordic Monitor, French intelligence alerted Turkish authorities two months before an attack by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (IS) on an Istanbul church, but Turkish officials called it this warning of misinformation and attempts to weaken them.

The intelligence was passed to Turkey's main law enforcement agency, the Directorate of General Security (Emniyet), by a French liaison officer stationed at the embassy in Ankara, amid a temporary closure of a dozen Western embassies and consulates in Istanbul and Ankara for security reasons. concerns.

The Emniyets counterterrorism office disseminated French intelligence to other agencies on November 30, 2023, using a confidential communications code (2023113022440984091). Intelligence services have warned that individuals or groups linked to ISIS may be planning attacks on Jewish and Christian sites in Istanbul, including the Neve Shalom Synagogue, the Ahrida Synagogue, the Or-Ahayim Balat Jewish Hospital and the Church of Saint Mary of Blachernae, an oriental hospital. Orthodox Church.

The intelligence turned out to be accurate, as evidenced by the ISIS attack on the Church of Santa Maria (Meryem Ana Dou Kilisesi) in the Saryer district of Istanbul on January 28, 2024, which left one person dead. A post-attack investigation found that ISIS inspected several sites in Istanbul before choosing Santa Maria, prioritizing it for its accessible location and optimal escape routes.

According to internal Turkish government communiqués reviewed by Nordic Monitor, the counterterrorism office received several intelligence reports around the same time as the French warning, some providing specific names, locations and dates of potential attacks . One document explicitly stated that ISIS had already deployed teams to monitor Christian and Jewish sites in Turkey, photographing and recording potential targets and their surroundings in order to prepare an operational team.

However, Turkish authorities have not only rejected extensive intelligence warnings of an imminent IS attack, but also launched a campaign against Western embassies, accusing them of trying to tarnish Turkey's image as a what a safe country. Ultimately, the attack on the Santa Maria Church was carried out by the Khorasan Province branch of ISIS, commonly known as ISIS-K or ISIL-K.

Additionally, several suspects arrested for aiding and abetting the attack were already known to Turkish authorities; some had even been briefly detained and then released before the incident.

A Turkish government document details intelligence provided to Turkey by the French embassy liaison officer, who warned of an imminent attack by ISIS:

French_intelligence_on_ISIS

In contrast, intelligence about an imminent IS attack was taken seriously by foreign diplomats in Türkiye. In November and December 2023, not only did the French embassy and its consulates temporarily close, but several other Western diplomatic missions also closed, citing a specific terrorist threat in the country. Additionally, several consulates have issued public statements warning their citizens to avoid crowded places while in Türkiye.

Rather than taking the intelligence seriously and implementing enhanced security measures, Turkish authorities have focused on criticizing Western countries for their terror alerts, thereby attempting to downplay the threat. Then-Turkish Interior Minister Sleyman Soylu called the closures a form of “psychological warfare,” while Merelik, a spokesperson for President Recep's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Tayyip Erdogan condemned the actions as efforts to tarnish Turkey's reputation, saying the country remains safe.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry even summoned nine ambassadors from the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, France and Italy to warn them on Turkey's security, saying such actions only promote the sinister agenda of terrorist organizations. .

Mevlt Avuolu, then Turkish Foreign Minister, went so far as to claim that the West was trying to undermine Erdogan's government in the run-up to the upcoming elections by using the threat of terrorism as a pretext. He said: “If they try to create an image of Turkey as unstable, there is a terrorist threat in Turkey, which is neither in the spirit of friendship nor in the spirit of alliance. Especially if they try to put Turkey, the AKP government and ourselves in a difficult position before the elections, our people know very well what is behind this.

While publicly reprimanding foreign ambassadors and attempting to downplay the terrorist threat, Turkish authorities were aware that intelligence shared by France and other countries was corroborated by intelligence collected months earlier by police and intelligence agencies Turks before the attack. In fact, some documents regarding the impending ISIS attack in Türkiye predated the warnings issued by foreign embassies in Ankara.

However, the Erdogan government has mainly focused on the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections in May 2023, directing its attention and state resources towards victory. President Erdogan, who has long harbored paranoia that the West intends to oust him from power, saw any threat to his re-election as an attempt to undermine his electoral strategy.

The Erdogan government has a poor record of effectively cracking down on ISIS networks in Türkiye. ISIS has long exploited Turkey for the transfer of fighters, logistics, financing and target identification, as evidenced by information from the United Nations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Turkish court documents .

For years, President Erdogan's Islamist government has allowed ISIS and other jihadist groups to use Turkey as a hub for its proxy wars in Syria. Many IS suspects have been released after brief detentions and arrests, reflecting what has been described as a revolving door policy within Turkey's criminal justice system. Additionally, many members of the judiciary and law enforcement remain supportive of jihadist groups, including ISIS.

At times, the Turkish intelligence agency MIT (Milli stihbarat Tekilat) collaborated with some ISIS groups in Turkey and abroad to orchestrate terrorist attacks aimed at advancing the political goals of the Erdogan government. A series of ISIS attacks in Turkey in 2015 and 2016 were allegedly orchestrated by Turkish intelligence services to help Erdogan regain the majority he lost in the Turkish Parliament during snap elections in November 2015 and to prepare the ground for a false flag coup attempt in July. 2016.

A previously published intelligence report by Nordic Monitor revealed that Lhami Bal, the mastermind behind a series of deadly terrorist attacks in 2015 attributed to ISIS, actually worked for MIT. Bal, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Bakr or Ebu Bekir, held secret meetings with MIT agents in the Turkish capital of Ankara in 2016.

The clandestine operation was overseen by Kemal Eskintan, who headed the agency's special operations department. Known among jihadist groups as Abu Furqan, Eskintan played an important role in Turkey's covert efforts to support armed jihadist groups in the Middle East and Africa, thereby aligning with the government's political goals. Erdogan.

In recent years, the Erdogan government has systematically avoided disclosing the number of convicted IS members, who are believed to represent only a small fraction of those detained. Many ISIS detainees have been released before formal arrest by police or prosecutors, or before indictment. Those who were incarcerated often won their release during trial. Very few have actually been convicted, and even fewer have had their convictions upheld on appeal.