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- Oct 25, 2009
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Turkey Extremism | Turks increasingly turn to Islamic extremism - Los Angeles Times
Turkey's secular tradition and official monitoring of religious practice for years helped restrain extremism at home and in the diaspora. But the newer movements churn out Internet propaganda in Turkish as well as German, an effort to recruit among a Turkish immigrant population in Germany that numbers close to 3 million.
"We are seeing almost as much propaganda material from these Turkic groups as we are from Al Qaeda," said Evan Kohlmann, a U.S. private consultant who works with anti-terrorism agencies around the world. "Turks were perceived as moderate with few connections to Al Qaeda central. Now Germany is dealing with this threat in a community that could be a sleeping giant."
...Combat-hardened Central Asians have adopted a global agenda and tapped a new recruitment pool. Only five years ago, Kohlmann said, there was little need for Turkic-language translators to monitor extremist Internet traffic; now they are in demand.
"These groups are trying to establish their pedigree and catering their propaganda to Turkic speakers who don't speak Arabic or Pashto," the dominant language in the Afghan-Pakistani border region, he said. "Their media organizations are saying: We are the equivalent of Al Qaeda for Turks."
The Islamic Jihad Union, an Uzbek-led group, has alternately competed and worked with Al Qaeda. The organization trained and directed two Turks and two German converts who have agreed to plead guilty in a 2007 bomb plot against U.S. targets in Germany.
Last year, the group announced that another recruit, a 28-year-old Turk born in Bavaria, killed two U.S. soldiers in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.
During the same period as the attack last year, half a dozen French and Belgian militants were training in Al Qaeda compounds in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. The subsequent description by a French trainee of the nationalities of the fighters he encountered departs from the commonly held image of an essentially Arab movement.
Turkey's secular tradition and official monitoring of religious practice for years helped restrain extremism at home and in the diaspora. But the newer movements churn out Internet propaganda in Turkish as well as German, an effort to recruit among a Turkish immigrant population in Germany that numbers close to 3 million.
"We are seeing almost as much propaganda material from these Turkic groups as we are from Al Qaeda," said Evan Kohlmann, a U.S. private consultant who works with anti-terrorism agencies around the world. "Turks were perceived as moderate with few connections to Al Qaeda central. Now Germany is dealing with this threat in a community that could be a sleeping giant."
...Combat-hardened Central Asians have adopted a global agenda and tapped a new recruitment pool. Only five years ago, Kohlmann said, there was little need for Turkic-language translators to monitor extremist Internet traffic; now they are in demand.
"These groups are trying to establish their pedigree and catering their propaganda to Turkic speakers who don't speak Arabic or Pashto," the dominant language in the Afghan-Pakistani border region, he said. "Their media organizations are saying: We are the equivalent of Al Qaeda for Turks."
The Islamic Jihad Union, an Uzbek-led group, has alternately competed and worked with Al Qaeda. The organization trained and directed two Turks and two German converts who have agreed to plead guilty in a 2007 bomb plot against U.S. targets in Germany.
Last year, the group announced that another recruit, a 28-year-old Turk born in Bavaria, killed two U.S. soldiers in a suicide bombing in Afghanistan.
During the same period as the attack last year, half a dozen French and Belgian militants were training in Al Qaeda compounds in the Waziristan region of Pakistan. The subsequent description by a French trainee of the nationalities of the fighters he encountered departs from the commonly held image of an essentially Arab movement.
