First commercial flight in six years leaves Sanaa for Amman

ANKARA: As a part of its countrywide counterterrorism operations, Turkey has arrested a suicide bomber allegedly linked to Daesh who was planning an assault within the southeastern province of Urfa, bordering Syria.

Bashar Al-Mizhen, codenamed Abi Enes Al-Kathani, has confessed to the authorities.

Mizhen, who joined Daesh in 2015 and acquired particular arms coaching from the phobia group, was allegedly getting ready the assault in coordination with the Damascus department of Daesh.

He’s the tenth terrorist caught this 12 months on Turkish soil. The authorities seized a number of digital supplies and are presently inspecting numerous organizational paperwork belonging to the phobia group.

Daesh members have carried out quite a few assaults in opposition to Turkey, together with at the least 10 suicide bombings, seven bombings, and 4 armed assaults, which killed 315 individuals and injured a whole lot of others.

Final 12 months, Turkey additionally arrested a Daesh terrorist recognized because the right-hand man of the late terrorist chief Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

Within the first quarter of this 12 months, dozens of Daesh members, together with the sons of its high officers in Iraq, had been caught in a number of Turkey cities, together with Urfa, the northern province of Samsun and the western province of Izmir.

Final month, Turkey’s intelligence brokers additionally caught two Daesh terrorists who had been planning assaults in opposition to the nation’s troops on dwelling soil and in Syria.

Nihat Ali Ozcan, a retired main now serving as a safety analyst on the Ankara-based suppose tank TEPAV, mentioned such operations are held consecutively as a result of one operation feeds one other with the intelligence knowledge that’s gathered.

“Inside its territories, Turkey hosts about 3.7 million unregistered Syrian refugees proper now. Including the unregistered refugees and people who are settled within the protected zones in northern Syria, this quantity has reached 7.5 million,” he informed Arab Information.

“We can’t assume that every one of them are harmless individuals,” he mentioned.

“There are a number of Daesh sympathizers amongst them. All immigrant-receiving international locations are on the similar time importing the home issues of their international locations of origin,” mentioned the retired main.

“In Turkey, one can determine a number of sorts of financial, cultural and security-related challenges that Syria has exported together with a number of ideological(ly-driven actors who’re in competitors with each other),” Ozcan added.

There are about 430,000 registered Syrian refugees in Sanliurfa, making town the fourth-largest host of displaced individuals after Istanbul, Gaziantep and Hatay.

Ozcan additionally underlined the influence of faith-based actors in Sanliurfa, together with tribes and clans which have linguistic, non secular, and kinship ties with Syrians, which additionally feed this safety eco-system and increase the sympathizer base of Daesh on this metropolis.

Specialists have emphasised that any assault plan of Daesh, together with its timing and scope, is expounded to its personal organizational dynamics, and must be thought-about a reminder of how harmful the present scenario in neighboring Syria and Iraq is, because the terrorists transfer throughout borders to meet their wider aims.

“Daesh acts in line with its personal rationale. It makes use of terror to affect nice lots, (ship) message(s) to the political actors and present(s) … the world that it steps up efforts to bolster its presence in different areas as nicely,” Ozcan mentioned.

Daesh nonetheless retains a big presence in northern Iraq and Syria, as proven by one of many greatest assaults in years, which was the jail assault within the Kurdish-controlled northeast Syrian metropolis of Hasakah in January that left a whole lot useless and allowed a number of prisoners to flee.

In April, two Iraqi troopers had been killed and two others wounded in an assault by Daesh within the western Anbar province, whereas seven Peshmerga and three civilians had been killed in one other Daesh assault in northern Iraq in December 2021 — an assault that was condemned by Turkey.

“A number of years in the past, Daesh seized big (swathes) of Iraq and Syria. Right this moment, regardless of its vital lack of a territorial base, the phobia group nonetheless struggles to keep up its existence by way of new ways,” Ozcan mentioned.

The worldwide coalition in opposition to Daesh, which was shaped in 2014 and now contains 84 states and worldwide organizations, gathered final Wednesday in Morocco to coordinate efforts in opposition to any resurgence of the extremists within the Center East and North Africa.

“During the last a number of years, Daesh has been significantly weakened in Iraq and Syria, however it stays a risk, in search of any alternative to reconstitute itself,” senior US diplomat Victoria Nuland mentioned throughout the assembly.

Daesh just lately urged its sympathizers to reap the benefits of the continued battle in Ukraine to stage new assaults in opposition to European nations.