"The Pillars of al-Qaeda in Turkey
View: Onder Aytac & Emre Uslu
When Sammaz Demirtas, the deputy chief of the Istanbul Police, told a reporter on July 29 that 'there are 1,000 al-Qaeda members in Istanbul, all of whom are under surveillance, and we are expecting a terrorist attack soon,' the media criticized him. In reaction to growing media criticism, the Turkish National Police Directorate initiated an investigation into him. However, on Aug. 10, the police arrested Lu'ai Sakra, the head of al-Qaeda's Turkish cell, while he was planning an attack on Israeli tourist ships in Alanya. These two events brought the al-Qaeda question under the spotlights of the Turkish media once again. The questions that need to be asked by ordinary citizens as well as intellectuals are: Who are these terrorists that are totally alien to Turkish Islam and where do they come from? What do they want to achieve, and how do they recruit in Turkey?"
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