HIZBULLAH

Hizbullah: translation

(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 KurdishIslamicmovement inTurkeyapparently supported by the Turkish government during the war against theKurdistan 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 intellectualMusa Anterin 1992 and Mehmet Sincar, a parliamentary member of theDemokrasi Partisi(DEP), in 1993.

Although the government denied any involvement, Prime MinisterTansu Cillerapparently played a leading role in these events. Evidence that emerged from theSusurlukscandal 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 theSyrianBrotherhood's Kurdish Branch, had been one of the founders in Turkey of thePartiya 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 thePartiye Kafirin Kurdistan, or Kurdistan Infidel Party. After a truce was finally reached through the efforts of twoIraqiKurdish 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 northernIraq). In 2008, further revelations regarding Hizbullah occurred during the continuingErgenekontrial 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 alsoDeep State; Jitem.