[Wash Times] Turkish intelligence officers ordered the nation’s border police not to inspect truckloads of bomb-making materials shipped by companies in Turkey to Islamic State operatives in Syria in recent years, a former top Turkish counterterrorism official said.Although Ankara denies it ever allowed private companies to supply the terrorist group, Ahmet S. Yayla, who held high-level Turkish law enforcement posts from 2010 to 2014, said the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a clandestine policy to facilitate cross-border transfers of explosive materials to the group.
"Police were told to close their eyes when large shipping container trucks rolled across the Syrian border with Turkey," Mr. Yayla told The Washington Times. "The protocol was that if national intelligence was arranging the movement, there was [no] stopping for inspection."
Mr. Yayla, an adjunct professor at George Mason University and an outspoken critic of the Turkish government, made the assertions amid growing scrutiny of Ankara’s suspected role in arming the Islamic State, also known as ISIS and ISIL.
Turkish diplomats strenuously denied the charges during a half-hour meeting at the Turkish Embassy late last month. The diplomats insisted that they could speak only on background and therefore could not be quoted by name.