MESOP INTELLIGENCE : Veteran intel expert labels Iran-backed Tawhid-Salam as most dangerous terror group
A SURVEILLANCE VIDEO STILL SHOWS A MEETING IN İSTANBUL BETWEEN TAWHID-SALAM MEMBER AND NASER GHAFARI, THE TOP REPRESENTATIVE OF THE QUDS FORCE IN TURKEY. (CLICK BOTTOM LINK FOR PICTURE)
26 March 2014, Wednesday /ANKARA, TODAY’S ZAMAN – Former İstanbul Police Department intelligence bureau chief Ali Fuat Yılmazer has said Iran-linked notorious terrorist organization Tawhid-Salam is “the stealthiest and the most dangerous terrorist organization of recent times” Turkey has ever faced.
He lamented that a painstakingly difficult three-year-long investigation into Iran-backed terrorist organization Tawhid-Salam has been foiled and ridiculed by some government officials, leading most suspects to flee the country.
Yılmazer, who has specialized in fundamentalist and extremist religious terror groups, said it was very difficult to expose this clandestine terror network that has access to top officials in Turkey, yet the police have done a solid and careful investigation to expose the wider network of Iranian agents that has been set up in Turkey and discovered connections to senior government officials.
“The Salam terror investigation included very important details,” Yılmazer said in a live TV interview on Tuesday night. The veteran intelligence expert underlined that Tawhid-Salam is a very important terrorist organization that is backed by Iran. He also lashed out at Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ, who ridiculed the investigation, saying: “A group of people say hello with ‘Salam alaikum’ [Peace be upon you] and others reciprocate with ‘Alaikum salam’ [Also upon you]. On some people’s say-so, a terrorist organization was supposedly founded, which is called Tawhid Salam. It is ridiculous.” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also adopted a cynical stance about the existence of the terrorist group, raising questions of a cover-up in the government just as Erdoğan tried to do for the corruption scandal that was exposed on Dec. 17.
Former intelligence chief said this is a terrorist organization that was responsible for the assassination of several journalists and academics in the 1990s, including Uğur Mumcu, Bahriye Üçok, Ahmet Taner Kışlalı and several other intellectuals. The organization is also noted for killing US, Saudi Arabian and Israeli diplomats, as well as Iranian dissidents who took refuge in Turkey.
He said the organization stayed dormant for a while until it was reactivated several years ago and started committing bombing attacks and surveillance activities on sensitive targets in İstanbul. Yılmazer said the investigation cannot be hushed up despite government efforts to keep the investigation from going to court. Information recently released online related to the terrorist activities of the Tawhid-Salam (also known as Jerusalem Army), which was first identified in 1996, has revealed that pro-government dailies Star and Yeni Şafak sought to discredit a secret probe of the group that would implicate senior government officials working on behalf of Iran by claiming that up to 7,000 people with no connection to one another were wiretapped in an investigation of what was supposedly a fake terrorist organization.
However, Yılmazer said only 234 people were wiretapped in three years during the investigation and the original tip about the reactivated Iranian-linked cells was made on Aug. 8, 2010, when an individual came forward in Bursa city.Some of the details of the investigation have recently come out when Twitter user @ACEMUSAKLARI started uploading documents, photographs and video footage from what seems to be from the original investigation file onto online portals.
According to video footage posted on YouTube, Kamile Yazıcıoğlu, a 49-year-old woman who had fled from her abusive husband, Hüseyin Avni Yazıcıoğlu, reported anti-terror units to the Bursa police, saying that her husband had been working for Iranian intelligence and provided documents as evidence to back up her claims. She later repeated her testimony to İstanbul anti-terror units in depositions given in March and April 2011. The allegations triggered a secret three-year investigation into Yazıcıoğlu and his accomplices and contacts, both among Turkish officials and Iranian intelligence agents. Prosecutors in İstanbul launched an investigation on April 8, 2011, case file 2011/762.
2011 attack targeted Israeli consulate
An investigation into the information and documents provided by the whistleblower Kamile led police to discover further incriminating evidence against the organization. For example, the bomb attack that targeted the Israeli Consulate in İstanbul’s Etiler district in 2011, in which Ayten Bal, then 38, lost her leg and seven others were injured, had been staged by the Iranian Tawhid-Salam group. The initial investigation suggested the bombing was an act of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), due to the proximity of the blast location to a police school building, but a deeper investigation made it clear that Salam had carried out the attack.
As a result of police surveillance of Salam member Abdülhamit Çelik, Hakkı Selçuk Şanlı was identified as one of the founders of Tawhid-Salam. Çelik admitted in testimony given in May, 2000 as part of the Tawhid-Salam probe that he had been trained in Iran for over two months to stage attacks and conduct intelligence operations in Turkey on behalf of Iran.
During his testimony, Çelik, who is also the owner of the Sena dental firm, acknowledged that the Iranian-based Quds Force, a special unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, had obtained bombs from Çelik and staged attacks similar to those that occurred in Georgia and Thailand. A storage unit in İstanbul was rented by an Iranian member of the Quds Force, Rızazade Metin, under a false identity. A further police investigation used CCTV recordings to trace a bomb-laden bike to a storage unit in the İstanbul district of Fatih.
According to the case file, Yazıcıoğlu already had a criminal record for his involvement in staging a controversial protest called Jerusalem Night in Ankara’s Sincan district in late January of 1997, at which the Iranian ambassador delivered a fiery speech. Yazıcıoğlu was then director of the Sincan Municipality’s education and culture department and organized an event that the military used as a pretext to oust the government in the Feb. 28, 1997 post-modern coup. The military sent tanks rolling through Ankara’s Sincan district to issue a stern warning to the government after the event. Yazıcıoğlu was convicted of aiding and abetting a terrorist organization and served over three years in an Ankara prison. After his release he moved to İstanbul, where he kept a low profile until 2008, when he was reactivated by Iranian intelligence, according to his wife’s testimony. Yazıcıoğlu had maintained close contact with the prime suspects in the Mumcu and Muammer Aksoy murders.
Former intelligence chief Yılmazer said police had discovered that suspects in the terrorist organization had surveyed the Çekmece Nuclear Research and Training Center (ÇNAEM) in İstanbul as well as the areas containing the American and Israeli consulates.
Twitter user @ACEMUSAKLARI alleges that Kamile, the wife of Yazıcıoğlu, told the police that her son had told her how he and his father had surveyed the ÇNAEM in İstanbul from a vehicle and marked landmarks around the facility on a map, which included explanatory notes. She also said her husband had satellite photos of the Israeli and American consulates in İstanbul, with detailed plans of back alleys and side streets marked on the images. The documents allegedly provided by his wife included top-secret military maps of the southeastern provinces of Adana and Gaziantep and confidential information on public officials, including Cabinet members and senior members of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party). One document obtained by the police contains notes Yazıcıoğlu took on a conversation he had with two ruling party deputies, S.K. and H.Ç., in October, 2010 in İstanbul.
These two deputies, from the provinces of Bursa and Muş, told the the Iranian informant the Turkish prime minister’s thoughts on the NATO early warning radar system to be deployed in Malatya’s Kürecik district as part of NATO’s missile defense system. S.K. says Erdoğan was no longer allowing the Iranian border to be used as a garrison for the US, Israel and Europe and was resisting efforts to that end by Turkey’s allies. He said Erdoğan was really strengthening political, economic and military ties with Iran and that he was the radar system as a NATO trap to derail Turkey’s ties with Iran.
The other deputy, H.Ç., claims that in Erdoğan’s view, NATO and the US are as terrorist as Israel, adding that Erdoğan will know what to do with them when he gets the chance. The leaked documents reveal further incriminating evidence against the suspects. For example, one document details how Yazıcıoğlu recruited young men into a terrorist organization, focusing his efforts on those with anti-Israel and anti-US views. Handwritten notes seized by the police contain directions to drop points and secret meetings with Iranian intelligence agents. Police made a video recording of his meeting with Naser Ghafari, the top representative of the Quds Force in Turkey, who works undercover as a political attaché in the Iranian Consulate in İstanbul. Police say Ghafari has contacts in Turkey other than Yazıcıoğlu. The roots of the Salam terror network go way back. In 1996, Salam member Çelik was arrested for killing two Iranian regime opponents in Turkey and sentenced to up to 12 years in jail, though he was released in 2004 following an amnesty agreement known as “Erdoğan’s amnesty.”