Turkey detains hundreds of Isis suspects after deadly shootout

Turkish police detained more than 300 suspected Isis members on Tuesday, a day after a shootout south of Istanbul left three police officers and six militants dead.

The raids against suspected Isis cells came amid widespread warnings by the country’s authorities of a possible New Year attack and fears that the jihadi group is returning to prominence globally.

This month’s shooting in Bondi Beach, which left 15 people dead, was inspired by Isis, according to Australian police. The US last week also launched multiple missile strikes against alleged Isis camps in Nigeria, where US President Donald Trump has claimed jihadis have been slaughtering Christians.

Turkish police detained 357 suspected Isis militants on Tuesday following simultaneous raids in 21 provinces across the nation, including in Istanbul and Ankara, interior minister Ali Yerlikaya said on X.

Some of the suspects were linked to the militants who had opened fire the day before against police from an Isis safe house in Yalova, a district south of Istanbul, the office of Istanbul’s chief prosecutor said.

Several of the other detainees are suspected of collecting funds under the guise of a religious charity and funnelling it to Isis-linked networks in Syria, it added.

Isis no longer rules over large areas of Syria and Iraq, both of which border Turkey. But the militant group has continued to operate on a small scale in parts of the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, on Monday said: “We will continue our fight against the bloodthirsty criminals who threaten the peace of our nation and the security of our state, both within and beyond our borders, in a resolute, multi-faceted and uncompromising manner.”

Turkish authorities regularly step up Isis raids around the end-of-the-year holidays since a 2017 attack in an Istanbul nightclub killed 39 people. At the time, Turkey was a critical transit point for jihadist fighters entering and leaving Syria during the civil war there.

Since then, Isis attacks in Turkey, which is an overwhelmingly Muslim country, have been rare, with the last recorded incident taking place in January 2024 when armed men attacked an Istanbul church, killing one person.

The US has also stepped up anti-Isis operations in recent months. In addition to Nigeria, US forces carried out large-scale strikes against dozens of targets in Syria after Trump vowed to retaliate for an attack there on December 13 that killed two US army soldiers and a civilian interpreter.

Defence secretary Pete Hegseth subsequently described the Syria strikes as “not the beginning of a war” but “a declaration of vengeance . . . We will continue”.

The US military said it was aware of at least 11 “Isis inspired” plots or attacks “against targets in the United States” over the past year, and that American counter-Isis operations in the Middle East have killed more than 20 alleged terrorists and netted more than 300 prisoners.

“We will not relent,” Admiral Brad Cooper, commander of US Central Command, said on Tuesday.

The US continues to maintain a small troop presence in Syria, where security officials are concerned that Isis might reconstitute in the wake of the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

But Trump has pushed to refocus American military resources elsewhere, in a pivot away from the Middle East “forever wars” of past US administrations.

US backing for the Syrian Democratic Forces, its long-standing partner in the fight against jihadis in Syria, remains a sore point for Turkey, which sees the group as indistinguishable from Kurdish separatists who have long battled the Turkish state, although a peace process is now under way.

Under a March agreement, integration of the SDF is supposed to happen by the end of this year, although progress has been halting amid recent bouts of sectarian violence.

Additional reporting by Abigail Hauslohner in Washington