By BEN HUBBARD, SEBNEM ARSU and CEYLAN YEGINSUSEPT. 20, 2014
Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, center, in suit, welcomed freed hostages Saturday as they arrived at Esenboga Airport in Ankara on Saturday. European Pressphoto Agency
ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey secured the release of 49 hostages who had been held for more than three months in Iraq by the jihadists of the Islamic State on Saturday, marking a moment of joy for Turkey while raising questions about how it had managed to secure their release.
Turkey said its intelligence agency had led a covert operation to bring home the hostages, who included diplomats and their families, but insisted that no military actions had been taken and that no ransoms were paid.
But Turkish officials provided no information on why or how the captives were transported from Mosul in Iraq to Raqqa in Syria before being brought to the Turkish border. Nor did they explain how they extracted such a large group, which included women and children, from Mosul, the de facto capital of the world’s strongest jihadist group, without facing significant resistance.
“Right now, the government is on top of things because they got the release of the hostages, and they should be congratulated for that, but a lot of people will be asking how this happened,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul.
An employee of the Turkish Consulate in Mosul was greeted by family members. Credit Reuters
“I still don’t understand what ISIS got out of this,” he said, using an alternative name for the Islamic State.
The release of the hostages will most likely give a boost to the presidency of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former prime minister, and could affect Turkey’s participation in the international coalition that the United States is seeking to build to fight the Islamic State.
Turkey, a predominantly Sunni Muslim country and a NATO ally, declined to sign a communiqué calling for a military campaign against the Islamic State, saying that it feared repercussions for the hostages.
Some analysts said the end of the hostage crisis would give Turkey more strategic flexibility, although the fear of reactions could still keep it from getting involved militarily.
“One of the main hurdles for Turkey’s strategy was the hostage crisis and, therefore, the release of the hostages will no doubt give Turkey more freedom with respect to its own strategy to resist the Islamic State,” said Mensur Akgun, director of the Global Political Trends Center in Istanbul. “This doesn’t mean that Turkey will forget about its other reservations regarding national security when giving the green light to the demands from partners.”
Turkey has agreed to contribute to an international alliance against the group, which has seized territory in Syria and Iraq for its self-declared caliphate near Turkey’s southern border.
Ankara also agreed to open its Incirlik air base in southern Adana Province for logistical and humanitarian support, and pledged to strengthen border security, especially in the south.
Its goal there is to stop the transport of foreign fighters who have long used Turkey’s porous borders to join the militant group’s front lines.
The hostages had been seized in June from the Turkish Consulate in Mosul, in northern Iraq, and included Consul General Ozturk Yilmaz, other diplomats, children and guards.
While the freed hostages were advised not to speak to the news media, some details about their ordeal emerged, suggesting a harrowing affair made worse by the raging conflicts on both sides of the Iraq-Syria border.
Mr. Yilmaz, the consul general, said that airstrikes aimed at the Islamic State in Iraq had killed two of the men guarding the hostages and that some in the group were wounded when the blast showered them with glass.
In an interview with Turkey’s NTV television station, Mr. Yilmaz said the militants had put a gun to his head so they could take propaganda photos of him and the others, but he had refused to cooperate.
“We would prefer to be killed if anything bad happens to women, children and our flag,” he said.
The semiofficial Anadolu news agency said that Turkey had used drones to track the captives as they were moved. It said that Turkish intelligence teams had tried five times to rescue the hostages, but that each attempt had been thwarted by clashes near where they were held.
Another hostage, asked whether he and the others had been tortured, said, “Surely, we went through certain things.”
“The Turkish intelligence agency has followed the situation very sensitively and patiently since the beginning, and as a result, conducted a successful rescue operation,” Mr. Erdogan said in a statement.
One senior American official, who asked not to be identified, said Saturday that Turkey had not notified the United States before securing the return of the hostages, or made a specific request for American military help in connection with their release.
Turkey fears Islamic militants not just over its borders, but also inside of them. It has a no-entry list of 6,000 potential jihadist suspects, and last year it deported 1,000 foreigners on the basis of suspected links to jihadist groups, a government official said in a recent interview.
Though Ankara will no doubt remain concerned about the Islamic State’s possible retaliation throughout Turkey if it contributes to a military operation against it, analysts said, the hostages’ release still might change the situation..
After crossing the border from Syria, the freed hostages boarded a plane in the Turkish city of Urfa to Ankara to be reunited with their families.
Hundreds of people showed up at Esenboga Airport in Ankara, waving flags, to greet the freed hostages, television reports showed.
“We as a strong state brought our nationals back home, but how about millions of others that expect to return home?” Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said, addressing the cheerful crowd and underlining the growing refugee crisis along Turkey’s southern borders. More than one million Syrian refugees have fled to Turkey, including more than 200,000 at more than 20 camps built in several border towns.
Adding to those numbers, more than 60,000 Kurdish refugees from the Kobani area of northern Syria have crossed into Turkey since Friday, Turkish officials said, fleeing an assault by Islamic State fighters. Several hundred Kurdish fighters crossed the border in the other direction on Saturday to help defend the area, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
On Friday, thousands of Iraqi Kurds, in fear for their lives, crossed into a Turkish border town, Sanliurfa, from Kobani, a Syrian village that Islamic State militants have surrounded.
Ben Hubbard reported from Ankara, Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul, and Ceylan Yeginsu from London. Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from Washington.
About 60,000 Syrian Kurds flee to Turkey from Islamic State advance
By Daren Butler
SURUC Turkey Sat Sep 20, 2014 3:16pm EDT 16 Comments
1 of 4. A Turkish soldier stands guard as Syrian Kurds cross the border fence into Turkey near the southeastern town of Suruc in Sanliurfa province, September 19, 2014.
(Reuters) - About 60,000 Syrian Kurds fled into Turkey in the space of 24 hours, a deputy prime minister said on Saturday, as Islamic State militants seized dozens of villages close to the border.
Turkey opened a stretch of the frontier on Friday after Kurdish civilians fled their homes, fearing an imminent attack on the border town of Ayn al-Arab, also known as Kobani. A Kurdish commander on the ground said Islamic State had advanced to within 15 km (9 miles) of the town.
Local Kurds said they feared a massacre in Kobani, whose strategic location has been blocking the radical Sunni Muslim militants from consolidating their gains across northern Syria.
The United States has said it is prepared to carry out airstrikes in Syria to stop the advances of Islamic State, which has also seized tracts of territory in neighbouring Iraq and has proclaimed a caliphate in the heart of the Middle East.
U.S. forces have bombed the group in Iraq at the request of the government, but it is unclear when or where any military action might take place in Syria, whose president, Bashar al-Assad, Washington says is no longer legitimate.
Lokman Isa, a 34-year-old farmer, said he had fled with his family and about 30 other families after heavily armed Islamic State militants entered his village of Celebi. He said the Kurdish forces battling them had only light weapons.
"They (Islamic State) have destroyed every place they have gone to. We saw what they did in Iraq -- in Sinjar -- and we fled in fear," he told Reuters in the Turkish town of Suruc, where Turkish authorities were setting up a camp.
Sitting in a field after just crossing the border, Abdullah Shiran, a 24-year-old engineer, recounted scenes of horror in his village of Shiran, about 10 km (six miles) from Kobani.
"IS came and attacked and we left with the women but the rest of the men stayed behind ... They killed many people in the villages, cutting their throats. We were terrified that they would cut our throats too," he said.
HUDDLING IN FIELDS
Turkish soldiers looked on as the refugees, many of them women carrying bundles on their heads, streamed across. Hundreds of people huddled in the dusty fields with their few belongings.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus put the number of Syrian Kurds to have crossed the 30-km section of the border that has been open since Friday at 60,000. Officials said many thousands were still waiting to cross on Saturday evening.
"The United States, Turkey, Russia, friendly countries must help us. They must bomb Islamic State. All they can do is cut off heads, they have nothing to do with Islam," said Mustafa Saleh, a 30-year-old water industry worker.
"I would have fought to my last drop of blood against Islamic State, but I had to bring the women and children."
Kurdish forces have evacuated at least 100 villages on the Syrian side since the militants' onslaught started on Tuesday.
"Islamic State sees Kobani like a lump in the body, they think it is in their way," said Rami Abdulrahman, who runs the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors Syria's civil war.
Islamic State has executed at least 11 Kurdish civilians, including boys, in the villages it has seized near Kobani, the Observatory said.
Abdulrahman said more than 300 Kurdish fighters had crossed into Syria from Turkey late on Friday to help push back Islamic State, but that it was not clear which group they belonged to.
"Islamic State is killing any civilian it finds in a village," Mustefa Ebdi, director of a local radio station called Arta FM, told Reuters by telephone from the northern outskirts of Kobani. He said he could see thousands of people waiting to cross the border into Turkey.
"People prefer to flee rather than remain and die," he said. "(Islamic State wants) to eliminate anything that is Kurdish. This is creating a state of terror."
On his Facebook page, Ebdi said the killing of 34 civilians - women, elderly, children and the disabled - had been documented. He said the residents of 200 villages had been forced to flee.
CLOSING IN
Scrambling to coordinate aid, the mayor of Suruc, Orhan Sansal, described the situation in the area as "chaotic".
"Help is coming but there are problems with accommodation. Some people are staying with relatives, some in wedding halls, some in mosques and municipal buildings," he said.
Esmat al-Sheikh, commander of the Kurdish forces defending Kobani, told Reuters by telephone that clashes were occurring to the north and east on Saturday.
He said Islamic State fighters using rockets, artillery, tanks and armoured vehicles had advanced towards Kobani overnight and were now only 15 km away.
At least 18 Islamic State fighters were killed in clashes with Syrian Kurds overnight as the militant group took control of more villages around the town, according to the Observatory.
Iraqi Kurdish leader Masoud Barzani called on Friday for international intervention to protect Kobani from the Islamic State advance, saying the insurgents must be "hit and destroyed wherever they are".
Western states have increased contact with the main Syrian Kurdish political party, the PYD, whose armed wing is the YPG, since Islamic State made a lightning advance across northern Iraq in June.
The YPG says it has 50,000 fighters and should be a natural partner in the coalition the United States is trying to build.
But such cooperation could prove difficult because of Syrian Kurds' ties to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a group listed as a terrorist organisation by many Western states due to the militant campaign it has waged for Kurdish rights in Turkey.
The PKK on Thursday called on young men in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast to join the fight against Islamic State. On Saturday Kobani's local radio station broadcast a call to arms from PKK commander Murat Karayilan in Kurdish.
(Additional reporting by Asli Kandemir in Istanbul, Sylvia Westall and Tom Perry in Beirut,; Writing by Seda Sezer and Sylvia West
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