A pro-Kurdish news source has claimed that YPG-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) have seized arms including M72 LAW produced by Turkey for the Turkish Army, in one of the neighborhoods of Syrian town of Tabqa, they captured from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) following an armed campaign on Friday.
While clashes continue in Tabqa between SDF and ISIL, SDF cleared six neighborhoods of ISIL militants who left behind a large amount of weapons and ammunition. Pro-PKK/YPG Fırat news agency (ANF) has showed a footage that the arms captured from ISIL include a M72 LAW which are produced by Turkey’s Machinery and Chemical Industry Institution (MKEK) for the Turkish army.
On the other hand, Turkey’s Birgün daily reported on Wednesday that militants from the Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) sold an armored vehicle belonging to the Turkish military to ISIL. According to the report, videos acquired by the daily show FSA militants selling or handing over an armored vehicle to ISIL militants. The armored vehicle was used by the Turkish army in Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria, which ended in late March.
Birgün claimed that a tank with the tag number 243768, worth over $600,000, was first seen with a FSA militant in a video and later in a different ISIL video in which an ISIL member points to the vehicle and says “booty.” According to Birgün, Turkey’s General Staff has launched an investigation into the incident but no results have yet been obtained.
The relations between Turkey’s Islamist Erdoğan regime and ISIL is not a new issue. “ISIL suspects have been released in big numbers under Erdoğan’s rule,” wrote Abdullah Bozkurt, the president of Stockholm Center for Freedom on April 24. “What I call ‘revolving door policy’ by Erdoğan-led AKP government has always been in effect, letting Jihadists go free after a brief journey through the criminal justice system. There are dozens of cases to suggest that this has been a pattern all along. The last example came from Sultanbeyli district where many ISIL suspects were let go in the trial hearings despite serious charges filed against them in the indictment,” wrote Bozkurt.
In another article titled “Turkey’s Intel Agency MİT Helped Jihadists Kidnap Foreigners In Syria” on April 19, Bozkurt also wrote on how a Turkish al-Qaeda militant who had been involved in kidnapping for a ransom to raise revenue for the radical armed group was saved by the government of Turkey’s autocratic President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who hushed up the probe, thwarted the trial hearings and eventually secured the release of all suspects from prison.
National Intelligence Organization’s (MİT) help for known Jihadists of Russian nationals who decapitated Aleppo’s Greek Orthodox Bishop Boulos Yaziji and Syriac Orthodox Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim in 2013, was the issue of Bozkurt’s another article on the subject.
April 30, 2017
