Turkey arrests 18 members of Daesh

The fight against Daesh is still going on all over the world. The presence of the Jihadist group is spreading to more and more countries every day, radicalising people clandestinely in order to increase the ranks of its army.

In the first four months of 2020, Turkey is one of the countries that has deployed the most devices to investigate and arrest members of Daesh; a total of 354 militants of the group have been captured.

This same Monday, the official agency Anadolu announced that the Ankara authorities have arrested 18 foreign citizens accused of belonging to the Jihadist group Daesh.

The Prosecutor's Office issued an arrest warrant for 20 people and the security forces are continuing the operation to arrest two more alleged members. These are 18 suspects of Iraqi nationality and two of Syrian nationality who are believed to be linked to the organisation in Syria.

According to EFE, the detainees were taken to the anti-terrorist police headquarters in Ankara, where they were interrogated.

Although Daesh's last attack in Turkey took place on New Year's Eve 2016, the country plays a geostrategic rearguard role for the terrorist group, both in recruiting and raising funds and in transferring European or Asian members to the front in Syria.

Last Friday the US Embassy in Turkey suspended consular attention to the public due to signs of "terrorist attacks and kidnappings" of US citizens and other foreigners in Istanbul and other cities in the country.
 

On 26 October 2019 Daesh's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, blew himself up when he was cornered by American troops in northwest Syria, where he was in hiding. Months earlier, the caliphate had ceased to exist, but, as with al-Qaeda after the death of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, the threat of the Islamic state has not disappeared.

It took the terrorist group a few days to appoint another successor in an attempt to prove that its loss did not deal the organisation a fatal blow. On 31 October Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Quraishi was announced as the new successor to the terrorist group which, at its peak, came to control a large area of Syria and Iraq.

However, apart from his name, and the fact that his name is al-Quraishi is supposed to be a direct descendant of the prophet Muhammad (which enabled him to be named 'caliph'), little was known about the new leader's true identity.

Experts suggested that he might be Amir Muhamad Said Abdelrahman al-Mawla, also known as Hajji Abdullah. A five-million-dollar reward weighed on his person as a "terrorist wanted by the United States" for his role in the kidnapping, murder and trafficking of Yazidian women in northwest Iraq. 

The reward was raised to ten million in March, when Washington concluded that Al-Mawla was Daesh's new leader. However, this reward is a far cry from the 25 million offered for information on al-Baghdadi.

In its offer of a reward, the State Department states that he was already a "prominent leader" of the al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) group, and that he "rose quickly through its ranks to assume a leadership position as al-Baghdadi's 'number two'". 

His rise in Daesh's ranks is meteoric, as within a few months he was appointed head of the Sharia in Mosul. There he took on a number of functions, including mediating disputes with other groups, appointing judges and even passing judgement in a number of cases. 

These were his activities until he became 'number two' of the group in Mosul being aware of their activities, kidnappings, executions and killings.

Nearly a year later, the new leader has not shown his face nor addressed his legion of followers around the world in an audio message, thus contributing to increased speculation about his identity and actual command capacity, although it could also be a tactic to protect himself and avoid being targeted by anti-terrorist forces.
 

The person who did speak on the eve of the anniversary of Al-Baghdadi's death was the spokesman for the group, Abu Hamza al-Quaraishi, who published an audio message on 18 October calling for continued attacks and prison raids to free detainees, as the group did in Afghanistan last summer.

The spokesman made special mention of the militia in several African countries, urging them to attack governments and "crusading companies" and to stop the "ongoing Christianisation campaigns".

Daesh is expanding his networks throughout Africa by calling himself by different names. Daesh in West Africa (ISWA) operates in the Lake Chad Basin and has since 2019 under its umbrella Daesh in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), which operates in Burkina Faso, Mali and western Niger. These terrorist groups have stepped up their actions, as has Daesh in Central Africa (ISCA).

This latter subsidiary, established in 2019, operates chiefly in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and in the province of Cabo Delgado, in northern Mozambique, but on 14 October it perpetrated an attack in southern Tanzania with some twenty deaths.

As for Syria and Iraq, where Daesh was forged, the group has also stepped up its actions in recent months. In the former country it is once again operating in liberated areas while in the latter it is taking advantage of the complicated political, economic and social situation. The terrorist group is also still active in Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen.