Police on Friday captured a leader of the Turkish militant Islamist organization Hezbollah in a raid on a house in the central Anatolian city of Konya, the Anadolu news agency reported.
| Turkish Hezbollah is another Frankenstein story. It's a separate bloodline from Leb Hezbollah and its siblings. I understand it was actually helped along in its infancy by the Turkish government, but then turned on the its patrons when they turned out not to be ideologically pure enough. |
Wanted for 13 years, police launched the raid after discovering that Mehmet Aga had been living under an alias of H.S. and was carrying false identity papers.
Anadolu reported that Aga was a leader of the illegal group's military wing. Turkish Hezbollah, not related to the Lebanese group of the same name, was established in the 1980s and is believed to be responsible for many murders of Kurdish separatists. It was at first supported by the state, but after the group started murdering moderate Islamists the authorities cracked down and in a shootout in 2000 in Istanbul the leader of the group was killed. Following the shootout police discovered the bodies of around 70 Turkish and Kurdish businessmen who had been tortured and then killed. |