Kurdish Hezbollah

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Kurdish Hezbollah (Kurdish: Hizbullahi Kurdi) or Turkish Hezbollah is a Kurdish Islamic (Sunni) extremist organization that arose in the late 1980s in response to alleged Kurdistan Workers Party atrocities against Muslims in southeastern Turkey, where many have proposed that Kurdish Hezbollah seeks to establish an independent Islamic state of Kurdistan [1]. In the 1990s, the Turkish army worked with the Hezbollah and other groups as admitted by Turkish politicians, to serve their interests. The result of these cooperations is supposed to have caused over 3,000 unsolved political murders.[2]

The Hezbollah is based primarily in Turkey, has no relation to the Hezbollah group based in Lebanon, and its members are primarily from the Islamic Sunni sect. Some Turkish officials ^{[citation needed]} have stated that the Hezbollah in Turkey have also received some support from Iran. Somebody says that the Turkish army has "created" this group to fight Kurdish separatists Party PKK [3].

Tansu Ciller, the former Prime Minister of Turkey and the leader of the True Path Party, admitted to supporting the Kurdish Hezbollah by helping provide them with weapons through the Turkish state in 1994.[4] Ciller and the Turkish State's direct involvement in the Kurdish Hezbollah is primary reason for many public allegations that the group was created and strengthened by the Turkish military in order to fight against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an insurgent group with aims to establish a democratic Kurdish state in the Middle East.[5]

1 History
2 Activities
3 Strength
4 Location/Area of Operation
5 References
- 5.1 See also
6 External links

[edit] History

Some claim that the Kurdish Hezbollah emerged in the south east of Iran after the Iranian revolution of 1979. However, the exact origins of this group is unknown. The only fact that remains is that the Hezbollah group appeared in Turkey in the early 1990s and became a direct threat to the already rising Kurdish separatist movement.[6] The Kurdish Islamist group (of Sunni thought) began as an oppositional force against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), though recently they have targeted both the PKK and the Turkish government.

Huseyin Velioglu, the former leader of Turkey's Hezbollah was killed on January 17, 2000, by members of the Turkish police forces (Beykoz, Istanbul).

[edit] Activities

Beginning in the mid-1990s, Kurdish Hezbollah expanded its target base and modus operandi from killing Kurdistan Workers Party militants to conducting low-level bombings against liquor stores, bordellos, and other establishments that the organization considered "anti-Islamic." In January 2000, Turkish security forces killed Huseyin Velioglu, the leader of Kurdish Hezbollah, in a shootout at a safehouse in Istanbul. The incident sparked a yearlong series of counterterrorist operations against the group that resulted in the detention of some 2,000 individuals; authorities arrested several hundred of those on criminal charges. At the same time, police recovered nearly 70 bodies of Turkish and Kurdish businessmen and journalists that Kurdish Hezbollah had tortured and brutally murdered during the mid-to-late 1990s. The group began targeting official Turkish interests in January 2001, when its operatives assassinated the Diyarbakır police chief in the group’s most sophisticated operation to date. Kurdish Hezbollah did not conduct a major operation in 2002.

Turkish politicians such as President Suleyman Demirel, have sympathized with the Hezbollah's early aims, in what he and others claimed was to protect the people from the Marxist ideologies of the PKK. However, once Hezbollah objectives conflicted with the Turkish state, the group was declared terrorist.[7]