Kaypakkaya, Ibrahim

(1949-1973)

   Ibrahim Kaypakkaya was a violent leftist Alevi Kurdish revolutionary spawned by Dev Genc in the late 1960s. He headed an armed body called the Turkiye Isci Koylu Kurtulus Ordusu (TIKKO), or Turkish Workers-Peasants Liberation Army, which then established a political organization called the Turkish Communist Party-Marxist Leninist (TKP-ML). Although he died in a Turkish prison in 1973 after being captured, TIKKO went on to play a major role in the terrorist violence that plagued Turkey before the military coup in 1980. Supposedly destroyed by the new military government, TIKKO returned to the scene in the late 1980s, conducting low-level attacks primarily against government, military, and Western targets, while trying to spawn other groups. In January 2003, TIKKO announced that it was changing its name to the Peoples Liberation Army (HKO) and its political party name to Maoist Communist Party (MKP). However, as of 2010, these successor groups have had little impact.