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Powerful Bomb Materials Reach ISIS via Turkey
After The New York Times reporters noticed large quantities of ammonium nitrate – a fertilizer which can easily be turned into explosives -- being sent from a Turkish border town to an Islamic State-controlled area of Syria, a politician from the town freely admitted: “It’s not for farming. It is for bombs.
As long as the Turkish people benefit from this — regardless of where it goes on the other side — it is a good thing,” added Mehmet Ayhan, a politician from Akcakale, Turkey.
When mixed with fuel, ammonium nitrate becomes a powerful explosive. It was the main ingredient in the bomb planted by Timothy McVeigh in a federal building in Oklahoma in 1995. That bomb damaged 324 buildings within a 16-block radius of the federal building, killing 168 people and injuring 680 others.
"Four times on two recent days, reporters for The New York Times saw large wooden carts loaded with fertilizer enter the crossing and come back empty a short time later. The workers then refilled their carts from a pile of sacks as large as a semi-truck in a nearby lot," the Times reported.
"You have a lot of people now that are invested in the business of extremism in Turkey," Jonathan Schanzer, an expert on terrorism, told Business Insider. "If you start to challenge that, it raises significant questions.”
In January, the Turkish government was forced to admit that its intelligence service funneled arms to Al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. The Turkish so-called “moderate” Islamist government was caught in a long cover-up and threatened to shut down social media outlets that didn’t block the reporting of the scandal.
The scandal began in 2013 when Turkish police searched trucks headed to Syria to deliver weapons to Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria.
On November 7, 2013, Turkish police stopped a convoy of three trucks supposedly delivering humanitarian aid to Syria. The convoy was led by personnel from the country’s MIT intelligence service. The police found 935 mortar shells inside the convoy, believed to be headed for Jabhat al-Nusra.
The MIT personnel told the police that they had no authority to search the truck and a tense standoff followed that almost turned into a brawl. It ended when the governor of the province intervened and sent a threatening message to the police. It said, “MİT personnel works in direct connection with the Prime Ministry and their detention requires punishment.”
The public prosecutor who authorized the search, Ozcan Sisman, subsequently filed a complaint accusing the government of obstruction of justice. He and five other prosecutors involved in investigating various arms shipments to Syria were then suspended.
Two similar incidents happened on January 1 and January 19, 2014.
On January 1, the Turkish police stopped a truck headed to Syria supposedly with humanitarian supplies. It was believed to be owned by the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), an organization closely linked to Turkish President Erdogan (who was then prime minister) and linked to Hamas. The police found weapons inside and IHH said it had no connection to the vehicle.
The driver said he worked for MIT and tried to stop the search. A thorough search was again prevented on the governor’s orders. The involved police officers were reassigned. Chiefs and deputy chiefs in the Hatay Province’s Terror and Organized Crime Department had the same done to them.
On January 19, the Turkish police searched seven trucks delivering supplies to Syria. Two vehicles had ammunition inside and one had weaponry. A separate car following the trucks belonged to MIT.
According to one of the other suspended prosecutors, Aziz Takci, the vehicles used in these two incidents were owned by the government and officials were involved in their shipments but these facts were left out of court filings.
A year later, government documents were leaked online proving that the Turkish intelligence service was orchestrating the arms deliveries to Al-Nusra. One report from the Gendarmerie General Command flatly states, “The trucks were carrying weapons and supplies to the al-Qaeda terror organization.”
In September, the former U.S. ambassador to Turkey said Erdogan’s government had been working with Al-Nusra and other Islamist extremist groups like Ahrar al-Sham, a group linked to Al-Qaeda. He said that Turkey resisted American pressure to stop the support and to prevent their use of the Turkish-Syrian border.
Turkey has refused to participate in the US coalition against the Islamic State and will not allow strikes to be launched from its soil.
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