Turkish security forces arrested Friday 16 foreigners in the Black Sea province of Samsun with suspected links to the ISIS terrorist organization.
Security sources said that anti-terror teams carried out simultaneous operations to arrest the suspects in the districts of Ilkadim and Atakum in northern Turkey.
The suspects included 15 Iraqi nationals and one Syrian and proved to be active among ISIS ranks. The security sources said they possessed digital materials that promoted the ideology of the terror group.
On Thursday, the anti-terror teams in western Kutahya province arrested four ISIS suspects, whose names were listed as members of terror groups in a document seized in Syria's northeastern Hassakah province in 2018.
Last week, security forces in Istanbul arrested 14 people with suspected links to the extremist organization.
The suspects included 13 foreign nationals, some of whom are suspected of being active in Syria.
The Istanbul Police Department said in a statement that the 14 suspects were arrested at 20 different venues in simultaneous anti-terror operations by police and intelligence teams.
Since 2015, ISIS has claimed responsibility for a number of terrorist operations, in which more than 300 people were killed and hundreds others were injured.
Those operations include at least 10 suicide bombings, seven bomb attacks, and four armed attacks.
Turkish security services have been carrying out ongoing campaigns against the organizations’ cells, arresting more than 5,000 of its members.
Over the past five years, more than 3,000 others have been deported.
Turkey launched the campaign to deport foreign fighters in November 2019, after the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a US raid in Idlib earlier in October.
