Hizbullah

(Turkey)

   Hizbullah, or Kurdish Hizbullah (initially at times also referred to as Hizbullah-Contras in reference to its supposed covert support by the Turkish state in a manner similar to the covert U.S. support for the contras in Nicaragua), was a Kurdish Islamic movement in Turkey apparently supported by the Turkish government during the war against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in the early 1990s. More than 1,000 assassinations were carried out between Hizbullah and the PKK as well as against various civilians perceived to be supportive of the PKK cause. Well-known victims included the intellectual Musa Anter in 1992 and Mehmet Sincar, a parliamentary member of the Demokrasi Partisi (DEP), in 1993.

   Although the government denied any involvement, Prime Minister Tansu Ciller apparently played a leading role in these events. Evidence that emerged from the Susurluk scandal in 1996 indicated how the state supported criminal right-wing gangs against perceived enemies. Further evidence emerged early in 2000 when the police found several hundred gruesomely tortured bodies of some of the disappeared buried at hideouts used by the group and killed its leader Huseyin (Durmaz) Velioglu in the famous Beykoz Operation in Istanbul.

   Earlier, Said Kavva, formerly a member of the Syrian Brotherhood's Kurdish Branch, had been one of the founders in Turkey of the Partiya Islamiya Kurdistan (PIK). Although PIK was nonviolent, many suspected it to be under Saudi influence, and the organization eventually split. From 1991 to 1995, as noted above, Hizbullah and the PKK waged a vicious war against each other. The former referred to the PKK as the Partiye Kafirin Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Infidel Party. After a truce was finally reached through the efforts of two Iraqi Kurdish Islamist leaders (Sheikh Osman Aziz and Ethem Barzani) Hizbullah fell into internecine fighting between two of its factions, Menzil (a more modernist group) and Ilim, which was more fundamentalist. Ilim emerged victorious but was then eliminated by the Turkish state after Ilim tried to expand into the western part of Turkey, and the state finally realized what a Frankenstein monster it had helped to create.

   The Hizbullah organization in Turkey was not related to any of the other groups called Hizbullah in the Middle East (including Kurdish Islamists in northern Iraq). In 2008, further revelations regarding Hizbullah occurred during the continuing Ergenekon trial in Turkey of ultranationalists and retired military officers charged with planning violent campaigns to destabilize the AK Party government. Recent evidence indicates that Hizbullah may have reemerged, pursuing a more sophisticated, multifaceted strategy based on nonviolent political activism in eastern Anatolia.

   See also Deep State; Jitem.