Terror's Yellow Brick Road: Uncovering Red Scare Atrocity Propaganda on Xinjiang
A new investigation uncovers evidence of Turkey's role in trafficking Uyghur fighters from Xinjiang to Ankara and Syria, shifting them around the Middle East to agitate for Jihad
Starting late 2017 while looking to orchestrate a color revolution with the aim of regime change in China, Washington hit a perfect stride with Xinjiang. Posing as grassroots organizations, Uyghur interest groups, and “human rights” orgs, Uyghur exile networks and collectives alike are U.S.-directed labyrinths of figures that have forged, and actively maintain, alliances with the far-right.
The father parent to the present-day Uyghur separatist movement is Isa Yusuf Alptekin, a far-right ultranationalist born at the reel of the 20th century as the son of a local Kashgar official. In the Chinese Civil War, he served under the banner of the Kuomintang (KMT), siding against the Communists while stationed in Xinjiang. The KMT enjoyed both military and economic support from the United States — which included billions in cash, military hardware, and thousands of marines—in a scheme to maneuver around the coming triumph of the Chinese revolution. The outrage of century’s past would hurtle into the 21st, as the U.S substituted the Soviet Union as the folk devil of the day for Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq before supplanting the trio with Russia and China.
Little could he have known, Isa Alptekin and the movement he carried water for would come full circle after his death, seeing support from the Christian Right backing an apocalypticist from Germany. While regime change trolls push conspiracies of "red-brown" alliances between socialists & fascists on Xinjiang, they maintain their own black, pink, blue, and brown overlap of anarchists, ultra-leftists, social democrats, liberals, and pro-NATO militarists in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Syria, Libya, Hong Kong, India, and northwestern China. It is then of no surprise that actors diverse as Mike Pompeo, Joe Biden, DemocracyNow, Jacobin, and Libcom have set aside views alleged to be in contradiction with one another for this effort as the PRC competes with Russia and North Korea as America’s number one bête noire.
Elsewhere, in the dying days of the Trump administration, the American State oversaw the removal of a relatively obscure terrorist group—the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, sometimes referred to as the Turkistan Islamic Party—from their Terrorist Listings in accordance with the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), arguing there’s been no credible evidence the org still exists. A confusing assertion for anyone who followed the War on Terror, Libyan disaster, or American news outlets just 3 months prior when the U.S. noted ETIM controlled “between 1,100 and 3,500 fighters, mostly in Syria and Afghanistan” and the President himself ordered an escalation of a bombing campaign against this little known syndicate, why then was the U.S. suddenly so insistent they were nonexistent? Still considered a terrorist group by the United Nations, European Union, United Kingdom, and Russia, what is the significance of this shady organization?
Adopting the American regime change line on northwestern China, many self-styled “alternative” and “independent” media spokespersons and their outlets seem to suffer from a peculiar case of historical amnesia when asked to confront facts on the largest proponents of this international separatist movement, instead choosing to become pawns in the new disinformation war on Xinjiang. Providing the U.S.’s liberal intelligentsia with a much needed modicum of journalistic credibility to manufacture consent from the most concerted disinformation effort since the wars on the Soviet Union, Korea, Iraq and Libya, a seemingly endless edifice of lies, half-truths, and intentional misrepresentations have been constructed to drum up support for sanctions and war while myths are repeated with increasing frequency. Western governments and their intermediaries have portrayed the PRC as a human rights violator on par with Nazi Germany, spinning new “double genocide” theories made to revise history to make Communists the villains and posits adherents of the ideology as deadly evildoers on par with Hitlerian fascists.
Failing to capture the complexities of a separatist movement composed of diverse and occasionally antagonistic elements, behind its carefully constructed image as a peaceful movement caught in a struggle against a tyrannical regime and omitting facts that may disrupt the David-versus-Goliath narrative, the largest proponents of American hostility on Xinjiang are driven by far-right ideology, envisioning themselves as soldiers fighting a rising empire. Beneath the Western propaganda apparatus, there lie tales of secret alliances forged at the close of World War II, the CIA, Sicilian and American mafias, assassination attempts on the Pope, the U.S.S.R., European death squads, international heroin trafficking, a passport crisis, finance scandals, the Afghan Mujahideen, Nazism, 9/11 and a certain scholar setting up private indoctrination rings globally, exposing an axis of reactionary ethnonationalism stretching across the Atlantic, from the Turkish capital of Ankara to the sun-washed suburbs of Pennsylvania.
Until We Meet Again, in Congress
Amidst the stirrings of Uyghur separatism and revolution in the early 20th century, a short-lived breakaway Islamic Republic found it’s own statehood. Inspired by Muslim reformists and modernists, the establishment of the first East Turkestan Republic carved Kashgar and other areas out of northwestern China for its construction. First and foremost the byproduct of an independence movement, the first ETR was raided in 1934 by warlords in alliance with the Kuomintang and eliminated shortly thereafter. Its example would serve as cannon fodder for the founding of a Second ETR to come 10 years later.
Yusuf Alptekin, the forerunner for today’s international Uyghur separatist movement, would oppose the first ETR’s 365 day run on the accusation that the British state was orchestrating a revolt to seize it, making no comments on the first republic’s violent anti-Hui, anti-Han, and anti-Communist policies. Later, when Alptekin was further subsumed into the KMT’s political apparatus, taking visits to Egypt, Syria, and Turkey during the mass bombings of Chinese Muslims by Japan; he would oppose the coming of a Second ETR a decade after the first, claiming it was a Soviet puppet state (due to pro-U.S.S.R. involvement, factions, and sympathies) and instead chose to continue his work for the KMT while inhabitants of the second ETR denounced him as a puppet. An essential qualification for being appointed a seat of governance under KMT rule was both anti-Communism and anti-Sovietism, something Alptekin had in spades, once even admitting he “sought to eliminate all Russians and leftists in the government,” and that “schools were also encouraged to include religious instruction in their curriculum.”
Under Alptekin's governance, fundamentalists attacked the houses of Han Chinese citizens married to Muslim women and had their wives abducted, many of whom were forced to marry older Muslim men. Though the violence killed many, there was no government response during his tenure. A fervent opponent of miscegenation, Alptekin was one of the driving figures working to prevent intermarriage between Han Chinese and Uyghur Muslims (which the Communist Party has taken measures to ensure isn’t promoted).
As the Chinese civil war grew longer, Alptekin grew more and more upset with the decline of the KMT and met with both American and British consuls in Xinjiang, attempting to deepen outside interventionism in China. With the coming victory of the Chinese Revolution, Alptekin went into exile in 1949, eventually settling in Turkey and emerging as the pre-eminent leader of the separatist movement internationally. He set out to enlist support for the cause of “East Turkestan independence”, courting leading US officials and the Turkish Right. In the same year, the “Peaceful Liberation of Xinjiang” was complete, ending in surrender by the KMT and an end to outside interference by the USSR. By 1955, Mao Zedong would change Xinjiang’s role in the newly established people’s republic from that of a province to an autonomous region.
It was then that Alptekin would keep in touch with then-President Richard Nixon. In a 1969 note to the president, Alptekin declared full-throated support for the American war on Vietnam, stating: “We are hopeful and pleased that the US, as a fortress of liberty, is protecting captive nations.” Altepkin then pleaded for “the most imminent protector of captive nations”, the United States, to support their cause. Writing Nixon the next year, this time on the evils of “Red China”, Alptekin branded the People’s Republic “a great menace” to which the “whole world as led by the United States of America” was under grave threat. Alptekin wrote that the Chinese “menace” was “in the process of evolution to engulf the earth.” The “Chinese war of world conquest,” Alptekin advised Nixon, must be combatted to “speed [up] the process of [dismembering] the Chinese empire.”
Championing this regime change program, Alptekin’s plot was one of the earliest blueprints for imperialist meddling in China, urging the U.S. to generate support for his cause among the “free world,” setting up academic institutes to study “every aspect” of minority nationalities in the state, and calling for the development of a “media propaganda apparatus targeting minority nationalities” by operating “a radio network beaming at these peoples in their respective languages”—not all too dissimilar from the State Department mouthpiece Radio Free Asia—while “devis[ing] a plan to secure [the] collaboration” of minority nationalities to “train the children of the non-Chinese exiles abroad.” In 1970, Alptekin travelled to Washington to meet with members of US Congress and address the House of Representatives.
A day before his meetup with Nixon, the New York Times published a piece on a “Free Turkestan movement” aiming for the “liberation” of China's “westernmost province, Sinkiang” neighboring Kazakhstan with open collaboration by the neighboring Soviet Union. This information, of course, was provided by Alptekin himself.
Erkin Alptekin, the son of Isa Alptekin, is another Pan-Turkic nationalist and ex-KMT official who fled Xinjiang in 1949. Working for Radio Free Europe (originally called Radio Liberation from Bolshevism), and then the CIA, he became the founding president of the World Uyghur Congress in 2004, which describes Alptekin as a “close friend” to the Dalai Lama, a US-backed, CIA-funded talking head for a Tibetan partition from China. The Nazis were both in equal measure inspired and intrigued by Tibetan feudalism, even sending expeditions to the area in 1938. It should then be of no surprise that the Dalai’s introduction to the modern world came from a former member of Hitler’s SS. Throughout the 1960’s, the CIA trained Tibetan paramilitaries in Colorado, supplying them with lethal aid and parachuting them into the Himalayas to fight Chinese Communists. As part of this program, for almost two decades American intelligence paid the Dalai Lama $15,000/mo. Later in life, the longtime U.S asset would be linked to the billionaire sex-trafficking cult NXIVM.
The Lama has a notoriously bad record of alliances, often seen with those on the far right. Alptekin was no different. “We are working very closely with the Dalai Lama,” Alptekin told The Washington Post in 1999. “He is a very good example for us.”
Years later, a new effort — a third “East Turkestan” — was formed in Washington. Amidst the wave of U.S and Uyghur flags, Anwar Yusuf Turani, the new prime minister to the movement, spoke of the new country’s need of economic assistance and international recognition, funded and trained by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. In fact, Uyghurs constituted a significant percentage of detainees — at least 22 — at Guantanamo Bay since 2001. Five of those have been set free, and were eventually sent to Albania, amid much controversy. Another influential organization spun out the World Uyghur Congress network—the Campaign for Uyghurs—is now headed by Rushan Abbas, the former Vice President of the Uyghur American Association and former worker at Guantanamo Bay and doing stints at Radio Free Asia, a self-described propaganda outlet of U.S soft power. Created after the Chinese Revolution as a misinformation tool about socialism in East Asia, it’s parent organization is the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), an arm of atlanticist soft power running state media media abroad.
When the World Uyghur Congress was founded in 2004, then-senior Asia program officer for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) praised the move as a “great accomplishment.” A soft power umbrella org leading U.S.-led propaganda cutouts like the Journal of Democracy and Center for International Media Assistance, the NED was formed by the Reagan Administration as a means to provide extra cover for the conduct of subversive operations internationally, namely the Soviet Union. That same year, Erkin Alptekin was named inaugural president. An ardent anti-communist on a “path set to destroy China” like his father, he was succeeded as President by Rebiya Kadeer, a self-described multi-millionaire who profited from the excesses of China’s “reform and opening up,” claiming to have once been the 7th wealthiest person in the country. According to The New York Times, Kadeer’s “[d]issidence brought the end of her Audi, her three villas and her far-flung business empire”. Kadeer’s husband, SIdik Rouzi, worked for state department outlets like Voice of America and Radio Free Asia. She would meet with George W. Bush numerous times, and kept close relationships with figures like the Dalai Lama and Vaclav Havel.
On December 10th, 2020, the NED’s official twitter account boasted of the National Endowment for Democracy has funding Uyghur groups, showing a map of China with it’s northwestern region torn out and instead occupied by the blue star and crescent moon of the separatist movement. That same year, Congress passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2020, ordering the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), state-backed media outlets from the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), and the State Department to closely monitor the situation in China’s Xinjiang province and file regular reports, threatening sanctions against top Chinese officials. The NED took credit for the passage of this legislation, trumpeting on its website, “Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act Builds on Work of NED Grantees.”
Other leading representatives of WUC have vocally endorsed Turkish military interventionism in Syria to build pressure on Xinjiang. Seyit Tümturk, who served as Vice President, declared that Chinese Uyghurs view Turkish “state requests as orders” and proclaimed thousands were ready to enlist in Turkey’s occupation of Northern Syria “to fight for God” if ordered to do so. Shortly after his comments, Uyghur militants dressed in Turkish fatigues, went to the Turkish side of the Syrian border, and released a video in which they threatened to wage war against China.
Kadeer was also a president for the Uyghur American Association (UAA), a Washington based accomplice to the WUC working hand-in-hand with the American government. Kuzzat Altay, a nephew to Reibya Kadeer, is the current president of the UAA. Also the founder of the Uyghur Entrepreneurs Network, Altay’s business network has organized events in collaboration with the FBI as he and his accomplices shake hands with the anti-Muslim Right for campaign advances. Past presidents of the group include not only Kadeer, but also Alim Seytoff, a former Radio Free Asia asset; and Ilshat Hassan Kokbore, who worked at Booz Allen Hamilton, an infamous American military and intelligence contractor which rakes in billions with American intel agencies. Edward Snowden was employed at the firm while turning whistleblower. Other projects spun from the same web as the UAA and their largest funder—the NED—include the Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), staffed by WUC leaders and former US government officials, the NED, and their senior members.
Not only is Altay’s Twitter account an endless stream of noxious, coronavirus-related propaganda, the figure worked closely with figures like Ted Yoho, an ultra-conservative islamophobe who was 1 of 4 voting against making lynching a federal hate crime and one of 24 voting against a resolution condemning anti-Muslim bigotry while pushing for regime change in Venezuela, defending American aggression against Syria, and arguing that the “US army must defend Taiwan” against China. Altay also spoke on a panel of U.S. backed Chinese exiles organized by the Family Research Council (FRC), a hate group with anti-Muslim sentiment.
On March 21st, this U.S.-backed network of exiled Uyghurs and their virulently anti-communist ring of chauvinist gun nuts were caught on video disrupting a gathering against anti-Asian racism in D.C., barking “Wipe out China!” and “Fuck China!” while driving vehicles with signs saying “We Love USA,” “Boycott China,” and “CCP killed 80 million Chinese people.”
Exile rings like the WUC and UAA still consider China’s Xinjiang region to be “East Turkestan”, some even viewing its Uyghur inhabitants not as Chinese citizens, but a smaller piece in the grander scheme of nations stretching from Central Asia to Turkey under NATO’s guidance.
Operation Gladio: Clandestine Networks and Ratlines
In 1970, Turkey was revealed as a vital outpost in Operation Gladio’s “Strategy of Tension.” Operation Gladio — the codename given to a series of NATO-backed paramilitary networks established after World War 2, inspired by fear of displacement by a rising Soviet Union — established hundreds of so-called “stay behind” networks, named so in case of Red Army expansion into Europe. Should this have occurred, its members would stay behind enemy lines to disrupt Soviet control. Information on Gladio’s “Strategy of Tension” was first discussed by Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a member of the neo-nazi paramilitary group Ordine Nuovo (New Order), after an ordered arrest in Italy by Judge Felice Casson, who was investigating on a case concerning the 1972 Peteano Bombing. Vinciguerra shined a light on these strategies, a method of social control necessitating covert attacks intended to incite fear and mistrust to increase state dependency. Vinciguerra’s testimony described an expansive network of terrorist cells, their creations coordinated by National Security services. Admitting responsibility for the Peteano bombing, Vinciguerra stated he’d been assisted by the Servizio Informazioni Difesa—an Italian military intelligence agency—in a move to protect their asset by smuggling him to Spain following the murders.
In his confession, Vinciguerra noted the following:
“There exists in Italy a secret force parallel to the armed forces, composed of civilians and military men, in an anti-Soviet capacity — that is, to organize a resistance on Italian soil against a Russian army… A secret organisaorganizationtion, a super-organization with a network of communications, arms and explosives, and men trained to use them… “A supersuper-organization-organisation which, lacking a Soviet military invasion which might not happen, took up the task, on Nato’s behalf, of preventing a slip to the left in the political balance of the country. This they did, with the assistance of the official secret services and the political and military forces…”
Continuing, with his narrative, Vinciguerra elaborated further:
“The terrorist line was followed by camouflaged people, people belonging to the security apparatus, or those linked to the state apparatus through rapport or collaboration. I say that every single outrage that followed from 1969 fitted into a single, organized matrix… Avanguardia Nazionale, like Ordine Nuovo (the main right-wing terrorist group active during the 1970s), were being mobilized into the battle as part of an anti-communist strategy originating not with organisations deviant from the institutions of power, but from within the state itself, and specifically from within the ambit of the state’s relations within the Atlantic Alliance.”
And finally, he noted that:
“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game.The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public to turn to the State to ask for greater security. This was precisely the role of the right in Italy. It placed itself at the service of the State which created a strategy aptly called the ‘Strategy of Tension’ in so far as they had to get ordinary people to accept that at any moment over a period of 30 years, from 1960 to the mid eighties a State of emergency could be declared. So, people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains or enter a bank. This is the political logic behind all the bombings. They remain unpunished because the state cannot condemn itself.”
Vinciguerra was given an appearance on BBC in 1992 to speak on Gladio and its operations. Given Vinciguerra’s extremism and connections to various National Security states internationally, it’s wise to be cautious of his word. Still, his statements have been corroborated by others—like Italian and European Parliament—and are supported by both physical and documentary evidence. Contrary to the word of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti’s claim that the 127 arms caches had been decommissioned and that Gladio was not involved in the “Years of Lead”, Vinciguerra’s claims not only held more weight, but offered a greater insight into Italy’s National Security Agency and its invasive mass surveillance system. On 22nd November 1990, European Parliament passed a resolution on the Gladio affair, noting that for over 40 years, “a clandestine intelligence and armed operations organization” had existed in European countries, and “escaped all democratic controls,” having been “run by the secret services of the states concerned in collaboration with NATO.”
Gladio was responsible for bombings, kidnappings, and assassinations to such an extent that the network was publicly exposed in Italy by Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in 1990. By this time, Gladio had already been long been an open secret, but Andreotti’s official notes lended greater credibility to the claims already made. Further investigation into these “Years of Lead” revealed NATO’s hand in the routine atrocities of the time.
Recently in the United Kingdom, the legacies of the Strategies of Tension waged by members of their National Security State was dragged into the public spotlight by a statement to the Undercover Policing Inquiry (UCPI), an independent public inquiry into undercover policing in England and Wales, in which it’s author gave a talk on blacklisting. It accused “Carlo Neri”, a former member of London’s now defunct undercover police unit (the SDS), of multiple transgressions, including attempts to incite 3 people to firebomb a charity shop. This is part of a larger strategy of control developed by American soft-power orgs and supposed "non-violence" operatives like Gene Sharp to push regime change, color revolutions, blacklists, and the increasing militarization of areas, wanting violence on part of those protesting to get police crack downs in response. Most recently, this was a strategy used by protesters in Hong Kong. In 2012, it was alleged Bob Lambert, who as ‘Bob Robinson’ infiltrated animal rights and environmental campaign circles during the 1980s—fathering a child with an activist in the process—and planted an explosive device in a branch of British department chain Debenhams in July 1987. It was one of three bombs simultaneously detonated in Debenhams branches by Animal Liberation Front (ALF) activists, part of a crusade against the sale of real fur. Saying something along the lines of “it would be unfortunate if it was set alight”, one of the activists involved with “Neri” and his operations has since appraised the move as an effort to “lead the horses to water and see if they would drink.”
“Neri’”, whose real name was published online by an investigative journalist in 2019 as Carlo Soracchi, alleged the establishment was owned by Roberto Fiore, an Italian fascist implicated in the 1980 Bologna massacre who then used the looted proceeds used to fund a training centre in Spain. In 1978, Fiore founded Terza Posizione (Third Position), an Italian political group, which served as the public, political wing of Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR), an organization that killed at least 33 people between 1977 and 1981. In June 1983, a judge investigating links between the two groups was assassinated.
After police found a large quantity of explosives and weapons in a local Terza Posizione office in the wake of the Bologna massacre, Fiore and 15 others linked to the bombing fled to London to escape justice. British security services may have secured their passage, and prevented their extradition subsequently — a 1991 European Parliament inquiry into racism and xenophobia noted Fiore had been an MI6 agent since the early 1980s. Upon arrival in ‘Perfidious Albion’, Fiore set about establishing an extensive network of front organisations to fund his activities, and founded International Third Position (ITP) with, among others, later-British National Party leader Nick Griffin. Extolling racial separatism, rural traditionalism, and Catholic fundamentalism, ITP bought a remote Spanish village in 1997, to use as a summer camp for right-wing extremists — undoubtedly the site mentioned by Soracchi.
It was later revealed the purchase was paid for with the proceeds from an organization run by Fiore, Saint Michael the Archangel, which purported to be an apolitical Roman Catholic philanthropic initiative with many charity shops in the UK. Fiore’s business portfolio also included working for restaurants, Italian food shops, English-language schools, and travel-employment agency Meeting Point/Easy London. The company offered young Italians wanting to work and/or study in the U.K. capital a package deal comprising transportation, a well-remunerated job and plush central accommodation, for an attractive fee. When they actually reached London, they found themselves toiling in one of Fiore’s front enterprises for poor wages, paying a premium to stay in one of the 1,300 overcrowded shantytowns he preserved, with tiny and overcrowded shared bedrooms, mattresses in corridors, and communal bathrooms used by up to 15 people. An army of violent white nationalists managed the properties, administering late-night beatings to those unable to pay their rent on time, among other peccadilloes. In February 1994, 28 Labour MPs — among them Jeremy Corbyn — signed an early day motion criticising the then-Conservative government’s refusal to extradite Fiore.
The endeavors were known about by British security services, and allowed to continue for years, despite their criminal nature. Meanwhile, spy-cops surveilled, subverted and sabotaged an untold number of left-wing, progressive political groups, which posed no risk to anyone’s health or safety. While cleared in 1985 of direct involvement in the Bologna bombing, Fiore was eventually convicted for subversive association in absentia and jailed for nine years due to his membership of NAR, reduced to five-and-a-half on appeal. Even this brief term was eventually cancelled under Italy’s statute of limitations, and he was able to return to his homeland in April 1999.
The central role of MI6 and the US Central Intelligence Agency in recruiting and managing the terrorists involved may explain how Fiore came to serve as an agent for the former. Members of Gladio’s Italian unit were also reportedly trained on British soil. These agencies were furthermore instrumental in the concealment of vast caches of explosives, weapons and ammunition in secret locations across NATO member states. In 1991, an Italian parliamentary committee concluded the explosives used in the Bologna bombing were drawn from one such Gladio arsenal.
Units weren’t only deployed in Europe. Another major theatre of operation — and Gladio’s most important hotbed for activity — was Turkey. The Turkish stay-behinds were guerrilla movements, one of their training manuals being the 1961 U.S. Army Field Manual 31–15, ‘Operations Against Irregular Forces’, offering a diagram of planned Gladio cell structures, including the use of terrorist cells. Disclosed in 1970 alongside other documents, it was abundantly clear these Turkish cells were operating their own “Strategies of Tension” domestically. Further confirming these accusations was an especially damning document, a 1970 U.S. Army Field Manual 30–31b ‘Stability Operations — Intelligence: Special Fields’ manual discovered when police raided Licio Gelli’s house. Gelli, a former head of the fascist “Propaganda Due” (P2) masonic lodge, bore responsibility for the torture and mass murder of hundreds of Yugoslav partisans in war and becoming a double agent for both the CIA and KGB. A close friend of Pope Paul VI, Juan Peron of Argentina, future Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, Muammar Gaddafi, and former associate and confidant of Benito Mussolini, his connections to the global power elite were staggering.
Gelli also claimed a friend in the CIA had given him the manual, to which the American State Department replied with accusations of Russian forgery. If his claim is to be believed, the question of why the CIA would pass on a forged Soviet document as their own is raised. The Soviets would certainly have held copies of genuine CIA field manuals, so why they would go to the lengths of creating a fake that’s easily identifiable as such? Contrary to official American denial, the authenticity of the document was even further supported by the former Deputy Director of the CIA Ray S. Cline who noted:
“Well, I suspect it is an authentic document. I don’t doubt it. I never saw it but it’s the kind of special forces military operations that are described. On the other hand you gotta recall, that the defense department and the president don’t initiate any of those orders, until there is an appropriate occasion.”
With both a Mediterranean and Black Sea coastline, and borders with the then Soviet republics of Georgia and Armenia, as well as borders with the Middle East nations of Syria, Iraq and Iran, Turkey’s geographical strategic value was obvious. Its a cross road between Europe to the west, Russia to the north, the Caucuses & China to the east and the Middle East to the South. In addition, as a secular country with a predominantly Muslim population, Turkey is a unique NATO member state, whose cultural influences and reach, combined with its geography, made it a key nation in Gladio strategy.
As Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard stated that Eurasia could only be unified by the cause of Allah since they were overwhelmingly Islamic months before Soviet expansion in 1979, the CIA launched Operation Cyclone — arguably the largest covert operation in the agency’s history — committing over a billion dollars to the Mujahedin, affording them state-of-the-art weapons and advanced hunter-killer training. An anticommunist born to Polish nobility and seared by his family’s experience in WWII, Brzezinski was the driving force behind the Carter administration’s Afghanistan policy. Explaining to the French journal Nouvel Observateur in 1998 that his “secret operation was an excellent idea” with “the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap,” Brzezinski continued his retelling. “The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’”
This operation would serve to create hundreds of terror organizations, including al-Qaeda, the Salafi Group for Proselytism and Combat, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and the al-Jihad Group.
In the same year as Soviet involvement in Afghanistan began to pick up, TIME magazine would unveil its 1979 cover, depicting Russia as a crouched bear, comfortably perched in its position over the rest of the world. Islam — clearly represented by the crescent — would later be made America’s next enemy after the retreat of global Communism.
Weapons were not all that flowed into Afghanistan. A $51 million grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to the University of Nebraska’s Center for Afghanistan Studies and a former Peace Corps produced some 4 million third-grade textbooks that helped transform Afghan schools into centers of warfare. Introduced in 1986, the books were created to ideologically groom Afghan children into foot soldiers.
The Taliban would later come to adopt the books as their own, blotting out the faces of soldiers to comport with religious restrictions while maintaining language that described the Mujahedin as holy warriors fighting in service of God. American meddling in the Soviet-Afghan conflict helped to inflame one of the worst refugee crises in history. According Rüdiger Schöch, a researcher for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), the Afghans were not received in Pakistan as refugees fleeing persecution in their own country, but rather as “partisan holy warriors in a struggle against atheist tyranny” who were “accepted practically under the condition of their outspoken opposition against the regime in Kabul.”
Alptekin in Bed with Fascists: Birds of an Imperial Feather…
While appealing for Washington’s support, Alptekin developed strong ties with the Turkish Right. Their bonds rested on a solid foundation of anti-communist zeal and pan-Turkicism. Alptekin has repeatedly met with Alparslan Türkeş an ultra-nationalist who believed ardently in Turkish ethnic superiority over minorities like Kurds and Armenians, and for whom the eradication of Communism among the Turkic populations of Soviet Central Asia and Xinjiang was “the dream he had most cherished”. The WUC continues to publish articles on its website which give praise to and celebrate Türkeş, and promotes endorsements of East Turkestan separatism by current leaders of the far-right MHP party.
Alparslan Türkeş first received support from the CIA in 1948 as part of a group of 16 Turkish soldiers trained by the U.S. in ‘special warfare’ techniques. In 1952, then Brigadier General Daniş Karabelen, with his colleague Colonel Türkeş, established the Seferberlik Taktik Kurulu (STK — Tactical Mobilisation Group) alongside NATO’s efforts to establish a Counter-Guerrilla force as a Turkish Gladio branch. Its headquarters were the CIA owned American Yardim Heyeti (American Aid Delegation — JUSMATT) building in Ankora.
As mentioned in author Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe-Routledge, while Pan-Turkists in WWII awaited the fall of Stalingrad and concentrated themselves on the Caucasian border to take advantage of suspected collapse, it is of no surprise that Türkeş and his cohort were enthusiastic advocates of Hitler, who attempted to undermine Soviet unity under a Pan-Turkic flag.
By 1965, the STK were incorporated into the newly formed Ozel Harp Dairesi (OHD — Special Warfare Department), a group with the explicitly stated aim of anti-Communist agitation. “In the case of a communist occupation or of a rebellion,” the function of the Department would be “to use guerrilla methods and all possible underground activities to bring an end to the occupation.” The special war methods taught for “irregular activities” including “assassinations, bombings, armed robbery, torture, attacks, kidnap[ping], threats, provocation, militia training, hostage- taking, arson, sabotage, propaganda, disinformation, violence and extortion.”
That same year, men like Alparslan Türkeş and Daniş Karabelen would form Turkey’s Special Warfare Department, which replaced the STK. During the 1970s, the Special Warfare Department (SWD) was run by General Kemal Yamak, who, in his memoirs stated that the United States had set aside around $1M in weapons for the group. This organization within Turkey was effectively a “deep state”, and it was only when Yamak asked then Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit for more cash that Ecevit learned of the operation. Alongside this subversion of Turkey’s own internal order, the CIA also began funding Turkey’s civilian intelligence agency — the ‘National Intelligence Organization’ — in which it maintained a revolving door of moles and operatives. This fact was acknowledged and confirmed in 1979 by its former deputy director — and CIA recruit — Sabahattin Savasman in a local newspaper.
Not wanting to expose to his fellow ministers that Turkey had no real sovereignty to speak of, Ecevit suggested that the organization seek support from Europe. Yamak contacted generals from the United Kingdom and France, from whom he received a positive response. Furthermore, the SWD was again renamed as the “Special Forces Command” and remains largely controlled by the CIA to this day.
The Cold War’s Pan-Turkic boom unleashed by Alparslan Türkeş was a sight to behold. Türkeş was also the architect behind the Grey Wolves, a fascist “youth military unit” named after the mythical wolves that led the scattered Turkish tribes out of Asia to their homeland in Anatolia. As the CIA continued to hire from the far-right, like Pan-Turkist SS-member Ruzi Nazar, a Red Army desertee who joined the Nazis during WWII to fight on behalf of the Eastern Front for the creation of a unified “Turkistan”, more and more of them weaved their interests into the Turkish movement. A prime example of that effect is Nazar, who ran Grey Wolf training ops. After Germany lost a 2nd world war, numerous spies found safe-haven in U.S intelligence. Nazar was one such figure, becoming the CIA’s station chief to Turkey.
Thanks to Gladio, the CIA controlled Turkish affairs for decades. Abdullah Çatlı, as a disciple of Türkeş, was an extremely useful agent and provocateur — an operative capable by expanding both the drug trade and the strategy of tension in Xinjiang and Central Asia.
Abdullah Çatlı and Turkey’s Die Spinne
In 1978, Çatlı had been Second-in-Command for the Grey Wolves. It was also at this time that Catli enjoyed ties to the Turkish mafia, as his goons worked for mob boss Abuzer Ugurlu. That same year, Turkish police linked him to the murder of 7 leftists and he went underground. Çatlı shortly after arrested with colleague Mehmet Ali Agca, the gunman soon to be responsible for a close assassination attempt targeting Pope John Paul II in 1981.
Çatlı would help Ağca escape from jail after his conviction for the murder of a centre-left Turkish newspaper editor. He would act as Agca’s tactical coordinator, keeping him out of the clutches of the law for months, as he moved him through Europe. After a prison escape, Mehmet Ali Ağca made his way to the Hotel Vitosha in Sofia where he met with Bekir Çelenk and other Babas. He returned to his old job as an “enforcer” of the Stibam pipeline that led from the Balkans into Western Europe. Not only did he assist Ağca, Çatlı supplied him with fake IDs and directed his movements months prior to the Pope attack, was trafficking him through France, West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.
During this time, he made several trips to Palermo where he met with Pippo Calò and Toto Riina. He also traveled to Milan for conferences with Henri Arsan. As he crisscrossed through the Mediterranean region, he constantly changed his passport and assumed new identities. In the months before the scheduled hit on the Pope, Ağca and Çatlı were safe and secure in Munich, West Germany. In 1981, West Germany was home to 50,000 Grey Wolves, who acted as storm troopers for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND — Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service) to address any protest or problem with the 1.5 million Turkish workers.
The BND was an outgrowth of Gladio. It had been set up by the CIA under former Nazi General Reinhard Gehlen, who became a member of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta in 1956. The complicity of the BND in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II had been widely ignored by American press, even though Agca later testified in Rome that he had received 3 million German Marks by the German secret service to perform the hit.
Throughout the 1990's, hundreds of Uyghurs were transported to Afghanistan by the CIA for training in guerrilla warfare by the Mujahideen, around the same time The East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) began operating as the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) (which is also known as “Katibat Turkistani.”) Osama Bin Laden pledged his support for ETIM during a 1999 meeting in Afghanistan. On July 28, 2016, TIP became an official faction of Jabhat Al Nusra, which is an al-Qaeda organization in Syria.
When they returned to Xinjiang, they formed the East Turkistan Islamic Movement and came under Çatlı’s expert direction. This policy of destabilization was devised by Bernard Lewis, an Oxford University specialist on Islamic studies, who called for the creation of an “Arc of Crisis” around the southern borders of the Soviet Union by empowering Muslim radicals to rebel against so-called “Communist overlords.”
Türkeş was a founding father of the far-right Nationalist Action Party (MHP). MHP may be just one of the dozens of far-right groups active in Turkey promoting a fanatical, pan-Turkic worldview claiming the right to unification upon territories inhabited by Turkic speaking Muslim communities like Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Xinjiang, but it is by far the most important. They group maintained close ties with the CIA backed Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN) which was originally formed by the so called ‘ace of spies,’ British agent Sidney Reilly.
According to the Washington Post, MHP is headed by a murderous group of “right-wing terrorists” who are “blindly nationalist, fascist or nearly so, and bent on the extermination of the Communists”, and Isa Alptekin appears to have shared the hateful politics of Türkeş and the Turkish far-right, often expressing anti-Armenian views including denial of the Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were murderers of innocent Turks. The Turkish right-wing has always embraced the East Turkestan separatist movement with open arms, appealing to them as a key base of political support. “The martyrs of East Turkestan are our martyrs,” stated Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then mayor of Istanbul, as he inaugurated a park named in honor of Alptekin, following the death of the Uyghur nationalist in 1995.
On November 3, 1996, Gladio’s survival in a post-Cold War world was as obvious as ever in Susurluk, a small town in northwestern Turkey where Abdullah Çatlı was killed in a car crash. 2 other bodies were discovered among the wreckage: his girlfriend, a model known as Gonga Us, and Hüseyin Kocadağ, the deputy chief of the Istanbul police force. Sedat Bucak, a member of parliament for the province of Urfa, survived the crash. Investigators at the scene discovered that Çatlı possessed 8 national identity cards, each with a different alias. One card, bearing an official stamp over Çatlı’s photo, identified him as Mehmet Ozkay, the same alias Mehmet Ali Ağca had used in his travels. They also found that Çatlı held 2 diplomatic passports and a gun permit that had been approved by Mehmet Ağar, Turkey’s interior minister, while Italian Judge Carlo Palermo partly uncovered Çatlı’s drug and arms trafficking network during his investigation of Sicilian smuggling routes. These drugs were moved at Abuzer Ugurlu’s request during Catli’s Second-in-Command run, creating an infamous smugglers’ route through Bulgaria. The route runs through Iran — typically by way of Pakistan — Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria across South East-Europe to a Western European market. Those routes were the ones favored by smugglers who reportedly carried NATO military equipment to the Middle East and returned with loads of heroin. Weapons deliveries were often made in exchange for consignments of heroin that filtered back, courtesy of the Grey Wolves and other smugglers, through Bulgaria to northern Italy. There, the drugs were received by Mafia middlemen and transported to North America. Turkish morphine base supplied much of the Sicilian-run “Pizza connection,” which flooded the U.S. and Europe with high-grade heroin.
Weapons were also found in the car, including a couple pistols, several machine guns, and a set of silencers. Adding to the mystery, the police uncovered evidence that someone had tampered with the brakes of Çatlı’s black Mercedes 600.
In the months that followed the crash in Susurluk, documents were leaked, commissions were set up, and witnesses were located. Marc Grossman, the US Ambassador to Turkey, who allegedly was assisting Çatlı and the activities of the derin devlet (“the deep state”) within Turkey, was mysteriously removed from the post as ambassador despite the fact that he had almost two years left to serve in his position. A career politician with ties to the State Department active since 1977, Grossman has served a variety of posts, including time as the Deputy Chief of Mission in Ankara from 1989 to 1992, and time as number three in the State Department as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Bush Administration. Grossman also worked as a handler in the Turkish branch of Operation Gladio, a U.S./NATO led operation to fund Turkish paramilitary and ultranationalist groups to carry out drug running, false flag operations, and assassinations. When the car crash in Susurluk happened, the scandal threatened to expose Grossman and the U.S.’ role in the entire affair, requiring his early return to Washington.
Former FBI counterterrorism manager John M. Cole has independently verified that there has been a decade-long investigation into the activities of Grossman and others on these matters. Grossman’s role in a Turkish espionage ring that traded in US nuclear secrets was first detailed in the Sunday Times investigation in 2008. Grossman had been the handler for the Grey Wolves, the Gladio unit in which Çatlı had been a member. He also met regularly with leading Turkish babas and Turkish intelligence officials. Shortly before his departure from the ambassadorial post, Grossman had been served a secret warrant from the Susurluk Commission, which sought his testimony concerning the CIA’s involvement with illegal Turkish paramilitary operations in Central Asia and the Caucasus.5 Other leading US dignitaries vanished from their posts in Ankara, including Major Douglas Dickerson, who procured weapons from the United States for various Central Asian and Middle Eastern governments.
Çatlı’s story get’s even wilder. In 1991, he arrived in Chicago, married an American while assuming his Ozkay identity, and was granted a green card. The US immigration officials seemed to be blissfully unaware that he was a prison escapee, a convicted murderer, a known terrorist implicated in the attempted murder of the Pope, and a notorious Baba who ran the world’s largest drugs-for-arms racket. From Chicago, Çatlı was sent on U.S. intelligence missions by the CIA to the newly created republics in Central Asia that had been part of the Soviet Union. Within these countries, he initiated acts of terrorism, including an armed insurrection to topple the government of Heydar Aliyev in Azerbaijan. Çatlı also made trips to Xinjiang, where he helped mount insurrectionary attacks that killed 162 people. For his travels, Çatlı was issued a US passport under the name of Michael Nicholsan. At Çatlı’s funeral, an event that attracted over 5,000 Grey Wolves, Meral Aydoğan Çatlı, his wife, said, “My husband worked for the state. Twenty-two days after the coup on September 12, 1980, the military leaders sent him abroad for training. Then the state helped him escape from the Swiss prison.” Çatlı’s coffin, draped in a Turkish flag, was lowered into the ground to the chanting of cries: “Allah is great.” Çatlı’s acts in Xinjiang were all in hopes of the creation of “East Turkestan”, and 2004 was the year plans all came to fruition.
Çatlı's acts of agitation among the Uyghurs were designed to further the CIA's goal of transforming the Chinese province into a new Islamic republic, which the Agency had named East Turkistan. The Tarim Basin in the southern half of Xinjiang contained as much crude oil as Saudi Arabia.
Çatlı’s car crash at Susurluk was a setback to the plans to mount a strategy of tension that would fuel the Pan-Turkish movement, and the killing of the Kurds, who had their own plans for Central Asia, was a key factor in accomplishing this objective, a major stumbling block to the unification of Central Asia. But Çatlı’s replacement was already in the wings in the form of a Muslim preacher named Fethullah Gülen. During the 1980s, Gülen worked with the Grey Wolves and CIA in covert operations against the PKK, a militant Kurdish group that sought to create an independent Marxist-Leninist state known as Kurdistan from a vast tract of land encompassing eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria, and other Communist groups. His primary contact with the Agency was Morton Abramowitz, who later became the US ambassador to Turkey. By 1990, Gülen had emerged as a key CIA asset and began to establish over 350 mosques and madrassahs throughout Turkey and Central Asia.
Fethullah Gulen’s Islamic Indoctrination Mills, Paid for by the West
Gulen’s movement — which seeks the establishment for a “New Islamic World Order” — has amassed millions of supporters, many of whom contribute between 5 percent and 20% of their income, reaching from Central Asia to the U.S. With billions in assets according to American court records, the man reportedly controlled over 1,000 schools in 130 countries, and the largest American charter school network with more than 140 schools in some 26 states. Beyond schools, the influence of the Gülen movement is hard to understate: it had sympathizers in Turkish parliament, controlled the widely read Zaman newspaper (which was seized from him in 2016 following a coup), the private bank, Asya, the Samanyolu TV television station, and other arms of the Middle Eastern media and industry apparatuses, including the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists (TUSKON). Still alive at 80 years of age, Gulen is a key operative who has fronted for intelligence agencies (most notably the CIA) and been integral in the uptick of Islamic radicalization in Central Asia.
A number of sources have revealed Gulen’s connections to the Special Operations Department of the Polis Özel Harekât Dairesi (Police Special Operations Department), a Turkish tactical police unit of the state’s General Directorate of Security. This unit evolved out of the Counter-Guerrilla, a Turkish Gladio branch, and then was renamed in 1994. In 1998, Gülen fled to Pennsylvania to avoid prosecution on charges that he was attempting to undermine Turkey’s secular government.
Later, a Turkish court ruled that Gülen established a network of schools as a front for a sinister plot, planning to use young people he brainwashed to set up an Islamic state. His defection happened shortly before a scandalous speech was aired on television, wherein he was heard calling on supporters to “work patiently and to creep silently into the institutions in order to seize power in the state.” Turkish prosecutors demanded a 10 year sentence for Gülen for having “founded an organization that sought to destroy the secular apparatus of state and establish a theocratic state”. Gülen was charged in 2000 by secular courts for treason. Unlike the CIA’s favorite Afghan jihadist Hekmatyar, a ruthless anti-communist warlord and State Department asset, the U.S. vied to soften Gülen to the public with a radically different image.
Gülen would petition for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to grant him permanent residency, using a Form I-140 Petition and claiming himself an “Alien of Extraordinary Ability.” A shocking 26 people wrote reference letters supporting his application for a Green Card . The writers were not random; many were not only linked to the American security state, but could be traced to close connections in Turkey, Central Asia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Among the writers was former CIA Deputy Director Graham Fuller and Marc Grossman, a former Turkish ambassador receiving hundreds of thousands from Ihlas Holding, a Gulen-linked Turkish conglomerate active across Central Asia. Grossman’s predecessor as ambassador in Turkey was another man who wrote a reference letter for Gulen, Morton Abramowitz. An advocate for the use of fighters in accordance with American interests like the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets and the Kosovo Liberation Army during the war in the Balkans, Abramowitz acted as an advisor to the Kosovar Albanians. Another player was Enver Yusuf Turani, the former Prime Minister of East Turkistan who worked alongside Abramowitz and Fuller as key players in the establishment of the region. Others who wrote reference letters included Sabri Sayari and Alan Makovsky, both with their own elaborate connections to the United States.
Judging by Wikileaks cables, American diplomats in Turkey were exceptionally knowledgeable on Gulenist activities. Form these cables we learn about the elaborate ruses used by Gulenist sympathizers to infiltrate the Turkish army, Gulen’s request for support from the Jewish Rabbinate’s during his green card application, and the attempt by sympathizers within the Turkish national police to get a “clean bill of health” for Gulen from the U.S. consulate in Istanbul. We also learn that even in the heyday of their alliance, Gulenists presciently regarded Erdogan as a liability.
Despite FBI and Homeland Security officials making numerous attempts to deport him, in 2008, a federal court ruled that Gülen was a person of “extraordinary ability in the field of education” who deserved permanent residency status. This ruling struck many as odd, since Gülen lacked a high-school education, spoke little to no English, and had never penned an article or book on the subject of education.
Abdullah Gül, Turkey’s first Islamist president, was a Gülen disciple, along with former Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Yusuf Ziya Özcan, the head of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education. Conflict between Prime Minister Erdoğan and Gülen arose over Erdogan’s use of the Marmara Flotilla to break-up the Gaza blockade in defiance of Gülen’s wishes. The situation between the two men worsened when Erdoğan became Turkey’s new president. A former ally of the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP), members of the Gulen movement and the AKP formed a tactical coalition against military tutelage and the Turkish secular elite, securing electoral victories in Turkey and forming 3 consecutive majority governments in 2002, 2007, and 2011. The Gülen movement would continue to gain influence in the Turkish police force and judiciary during its alliance with Erdoğan, which saw hundreds of Gülen movement members appointed to various positions within the Turkish state.
Following establishment defeats for the Gulen movement in the early 2010’s, power struggles between pro-Gülen factions and those not aligned began to spark, leading to a MIT crisis and corruption investigations. Erdoğan would later accuse Gülen of attempting a regime change op against the Turkish government through a judicial coup, leading to to the seizure of multiple Gulen outlets. In 2014, Erdoğan issued a request for Gülen’s extradition from the United States on the grounds that the controversial preacher was using his influence to undermine Turkey’s police and state bureaucracy along with the judiciary. Tensions would continue to grow more and more hostile, as events like the kidnapping of Gulen’s nephew by Turkish state officials to leverage political power against the man grew more and more desperate.
Since 2016, the Gülen movement has been classified as a terrorist organization by Turkey, blaming the group for a failed coup while authorities arrested thousands, ordering the detention of over 2,000 Gülen-linked judges and teachers. Among those who worked in conjunction in the coup attempt, the 3 most important regiments involved have been part (members) of NATO’s Rapid Deployable Corps (NRDC) since 2003. Further, the group used the emblem and slogan used by NATO’s Rapid Deployable Corps: “Peace at home, peace in the world.” For those not familiar, NATO’s Rapid Deployable Corps are High Readiness Headquarters, which can be quickly dispatched to lead NATO troops on missions within or beyond the territory of NATO member states. Though Gülen condemned and denied he was in on the coup, his background tells a different narrative. As talk of Erdogan fleeing the country and requesting asylum in Germany were unleashed in the heat of the moment by Western media and was later found to be false, events abroad continued.
Under pressure by Islamist power players like Gülen, Turkey’s slide from quasi-secular statehood to caliphate has constantly been within reaching distance. In past years, the state has overseen crackdowns and a series of political arrests of those in opposition to Erdogan’s right-wing AKP party. Mass arrests became common even for middle-aged liberal women who worked for the Society for Contemporary Life, an org providing educational services & scholarships to poor teenage girls. Hundreds of others were taken into custody during midnight raids, including army officers, renowned journalists, and artists.
Gülen schools have been established throughout the world to expand “the Islamization of Turkish nationality and the Turkification of Islam” in order to bring about a universal caliphate ruled by Islamic law. Over 140 “Gülen-inspired” schools have been established throughout the United States, staffed with Turkish administrators and Turkish educators, who come to the United States with “H-1B” visas — visas reserved for highly skilled foreign workers who fill a need in the US workforce. The trend was even noted by the New York Times, who raised further suspicions about the efforts:
Countries like Uzbekistan and Russia have shared suspicion about Gulen’s schools in the past. When Uzbekistan closed all Gulen’s Madrasas and shortly afterward arrested 8 journalists who were graduates of his schools, finding them guilty of setting up an illegal religious group and of involvement in extremist organizing, the fact was even repeated by CIA cutout RFE-RL. The 70 teachers Gulen sent to his schools in Uzbekistan held American diplomatic status and diplomatic passports while under the aegis of a mysterious organization known as the “US Friendship Bridge.” These madrassas appeared as a front for enabling CIA and State Department officials to operate undercover in the region, with many of the teachers operating under diplomatic passports. Gülen was then implicated by authorities for his role in the attempted assassination of Islam Karimov, the president and head of the Uzbek Communist Party, members of the same authorities who would later help uncover his CIA connections.
Meanwhile just over 2,000 miles away, the Russian FSB took action against the Gulen movement for acting as a CIA front. In December 2002, Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported on the matter, saying “The FSB, the Russian intelligence organization formerly called the KGB, has claimed that the ‘Nurcus’ religious brotherhood in Turkey has engaged in espionage on behalf of the CIA through the companies and foundations it has founded. FSB head Nikolay Patrushev has mentioned the names of these companies and foundations, saying, ‘The brotherhood engages in anti-Russian activities via two companies, Serhad and Eflak, as well as foundations such as Toros, Tolerans, and Ufuk.” Patrushev has accused the brotherhood of conducting pan-Turkish propaganda, of trying to convert Russian youths to Islam by sowing the seeds of enmity, and of engaging in certain lobbying activities. In April of 2008, Russia banned the Gulen Movement completely.
In 2014, the FBI was granted a search warrant and carried out raids at 19 Gülen-affiliated charter schools in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. The FBI has seized documents revealing preferential awarding of contracts to Turkish-connected businesses, though such improprieties are apparently still under investigation. The glacial pace at which the agency has moved can’t help but make one suspect that there’s no real desire to bring Gulen to justice. In a piece by The Hill, the following was revealed:
Largely designated as 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, many of these charter schools use their charitable status to funnel foreign teachers from Turkey into the homeland. These teachers arrive with a special visa called H1B, which is intended to incentivize professionals from abroad with critical skills needed in our labor force. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Gülen affiliated schools are among the largest users of H1B visas. In 2009, for instance, Gülen affiliated charter schools received 684 H1B visas. By comparison, Google Inc. only received 440 that same year.
[…]
Suspicion of irregularities arose when a whistleblower from within the Gülen network testified before a Virginia school board that her husband would kickback 40 percent of his salary to the movement. This was followed by research revealing how “Turkish” language teachers is on the rise within U.S. charter schools since 2006 irrespective that no demand for the language exists.
Where did Gulen movement’s funding come from? American taxpayer dollars through his Charter school network, narcotics trafficking, weapons smuggling, terrorism and money laundering. Since the 1950’s, Turkey has played a key role in heroin production in what some have called a “Golden Crescent” comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. The CIA and its compradors established laboratories in Turkey in the 20th century as various republics within Central Asia were made to be conditioned for the refinement of morphine paste into heroin. The narcotics continued to flow along the Balkan route to Sicily for shipment to America. Other routes were established, including a main line that ran from Bulgaria to Brussels, the location of NATO's headquarters.
Due to the modernization of the world and the growing complexities of the global drug trade, an elaborate system for transferring illegal funds into the U.S. for investments in real estate, corporations, industries, and government bonds was created. These financial institutions who partook in this process included the Bank of Boston, Republic National Bank of New York, Landmark First National Bank, the Great American Bank, People's Liberty Bank and Trust Company of Kentucky, Riggs National Bank of Washington, Citibank, and American Express International of Beverly Hills.
On top of that, U.S intel has been involved in the narcotics market since before the CIA’s creation. The forerunner group that would later become the CIA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), as well as the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) worked with Italian mobsters like Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky as part of Operation Underworld to gain intelligence through Sicilian mobsters to prepare for an Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943. This arose from a private agreement between Allen Dulles, later to become Director of the CIA, and a group of Nazi SS thugs seeking to escape war crimes trials at the end of WW11. SS General Karl Wolff held a series of secret meetings with Dulles, who was then Swiss "Station Chief" for the OSS. The two men thrashed out an agreement - against the direct, written orders of President Roosevelt. This gave the SS group freedom from prosecution in return for agreeing to secretly work for American intelligence against the Russians in the Cold War.
Since it was impossible for the OSS to formally fund this secret network, Dulles agreed the Nazi's would finance themselves from their vast stocks of Morphine, plundered gold and a mass of counterfeit British bank-notes. These were smuggled to Austria in the last days of the war and hidden. They were later sold on the black market and the proceeds used to finance the black SS-OSS network. The subterfuge was so successful that it would later become an irresistible method of underwriting "off-the-books" CIA black operations.
Obtaining a pardon for these wartime services, Luciano was deported to Sicily at the conclusion of World War II, where he proceeded to build his heroin empire. Another mafiosi used in this operation, Don Calogero, was appointed by the US Army to be the mayor of the town of Villalba. Calogero went on to use his influence to become one of the major supporters of the Sicilian independence movement, which enjoyed the support of the OSS prior to 1945, out of fear the mainland might turn Communist. Calogero even used gunfire to break up leftist political rallies, a precursor to the tactics the CIA used in—you guessed it, Operation Gladio.
These operations were run by mafia groups closely controlled by the MIT (Turkish Intelligence Agency) and the military. According to statistics compiled in 1998, Turkey’s heroin trafficking brought in $25 billion in 1995 and $37.5billion in 1996. That amount made up nearly a quarter of Turkey’s GDP. Only criminal networks working in close cooperation with the police and the army could possibly organize trafficking on such a scale. The Turkish government, MIT and the Turkish military, not only sanctions, but also actively participates in and oversees the narcotics activities and networks. In January 1997, Tom Sackville, minister of state at the British Home Office, stated that 80% of the heroin seized in Britain came from Turkey, and that his government was concerned by reports that members of the Turkish police, and even of the Turkish government, were involved in drug trafficking.
In an article published in Drug Link Magazine, Adrian Gatton cites the case of Huseyin Baybasin, the famous Turkish heroin kingpin now in jail in Holland. Baybasin explains: “I handled the drugs which came through the channel of the Turkish Consulate in England,” and he adds: “I was with the Mafia but I was carrying this out with the same Mafia group in which the rulers of Turkey were part.” The article also cites a witness statement given to a UK immigration case involving Baybasin’s clan, and states that Huseyin Baybasin had agreed to provide investigators with information about what he knew of the role of Turkish politicians and officials in the heroin trade. The article quotes Mark Galeotti, a former UK intelligence officer and expert on the Turkish mafia, “Since the 1970s, Turkey has accounted for between 75 and 90 per cent of all heroin in the UK. The key traffickers are Turks or criminals who operate along that route using Turkish contacts.” In 2001, Chris Harrison, a senior UK Customs officer in Manchester, told veteran crime reporter Martin Short that Customs could not get at the Turkish kingpins because they are “protected” at a high level.
In 1998, the highly official International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR) of the U.S. State Department, revealed that “about 75% of the heroin seized in Europe is either produced in, or derives from, Turkey”, that “4 to 6 tons of heroin arrive from there every month, heading for Western Europe” and that “a number of laboratories for the purification of the opium used in transforming the basic morphine into heroin are located on Turkish soil”. The report stresses that Turkey is one of the countries most affected by money-laundering, which takes place particularly via the countries of the ex-Soviet Union, such as Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan, through the medium of casinos, the construction industry, and tourism. INCSR’s 2006 report cites Turkey as a major transshipment point and base of operations for international narcotics traffickers and associates trafficking in opium, morphine base, heroin, precursor chemicals and other drugs.
Another country, Afghanistan, at one point supplied almost 90% of the world’s heroin, which is the country’s main cash crop, contributing over $3 billion a year in illegal revenues to the Afghan economy, which equals 50% of the gross national product. In 2004, according to the U.S. state department, 206,000 hectares were cultivated, a half a million acres, producing 4,000 tons of opium. “It is not only the largest heroin producer in the world, 206,000 hectares is the largest amount of heroin or of any drug that I think has ever been produced by any one country in any given year,” says Robert Charles, former assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, overseeing anti-drug operations in Afghanistan.
Heroin trafficking was also the main source of funding for the al-Qaeda terrorists. A Time Magazine article in August 2004 reported that al-Qaeda has established a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, and in turn is using the drug revenues to purchase weapons and explosives.
By this point though, Gulen’s work was already done. Having already run a media empire, built an expansive network of indoctrination mills in foreign countries, and having provided Islamist factions more than enough cannon fodder needed to go and wage Jihad abroad, Gulen’s fleeing—and subsequent protection—by the American National Security State has proven to be an effective method in protecting one of the most dangerous men in the world.
The Saudi Kingdom: Cold War and Covert Action
In the 1970’s, violent clashes between members of the Syrian state and fundamentalist groups would set the stage for the civil war to follow. Under the superintendence of Hafez al-Assad, where clashes dominated and blood-and-guts was the name of the game, Muslim Brotherhood demonstrations rolled out following the declaration of a constitution with secular clauses. Though it would later be amended to clarify the President had to follow Islam, Brotherhood demonstrations would escalate. One gruesome event recalls a massacre wherein fighters slaughtered over 80 cadets at a Syrian military academy. Over the next few years, an assassination attempt on Assad, car bombing which killed some 200 people, and the killings of hundreds of Alawite members of the ruling Ba’ath Party befell the Syrian population.
Tensions would reach another broiling point in 1982. Amidst rumors of Hafez al-Assad being ousted in a coup d'état, information soon reached the city of Hama—a hotbed of conservative Sunni sentiment—which then sent the Muslim Brotherhood into frenzy. This resulted in the Syrian state sending over 9,500 troops to quash the resistance. While surviving members would flee and join nearby Islamist guerrillas being groomed in Afghanistan by the United States and Saudi Arabia, others would defect to the West, where the groundwork for an exile network was being put together.
In the inceptive days of 2011’s Syrian Civil War, a megaplex of often antagonistic demands across political groups took center view in global media. While some were demonstrators protesting repressive governance, Islamist factions conquered and were at play both in and outside the country. Countries like Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey would form an axis with the West that stirred rebel forces. As more outside powers began asserting influence over factions in the country, like Turkey and Qatar pushing for disproportionate representation of the Muslim Brotherhood on the Syrian National Council, and weapons pouring in through Turkey via Libyan shipment by American supply chains (referred to as a ‘ratline’) for rebels, whatever was left of a ‘peaceful’ uprising had unfolded into crushing violence.
In July 2015, the Wall Street Journal published a piece acknowledging “local militias backed by Saudi Arabia, [and] special forces from the United Arab Emirates and al Qaeda militants all fought on the same side” to wrestle for control over “most of Yemen’s second city, Aden, from pro-Iranian Houthi rebels.” The Islamic Party is closely linked to al-Qaeda and is active in the war on Syria, in the specifically in the Idlib province where the U.S. greenlit missile shipments that have ended up in the hands of said groups. Ahrar al-Sham, another sectarian Salafist group aligned with al-Qaeda, has also been supported by Turkey and the Saudi regime.
Saudi backing remains a crucial front in the war on Syria. By matching covert war expenditures for the Mujahideen, the House of Saud was able to provide domestic extremists with a 1-way ticket into Pakistan where they could be equipped with military training before fighting Soviet soldiers. Thanks to Saudi support, indigenous members of the Mujahideen stationed in Afghanistan were supplemented by thousands of foreign fighters called “Afghan Arabs”, who would later function as an ally of Al-Qaeda in Libya and network themselves into Syria. Now, analysts on the area have reported a notable uptick of Chinese Uyghurs joining jihad groups in Afghanistan, reportedly fighting alongside the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
In a leaked email from 2014, Hillary Clinton acknowledged—citing Western intelligence sources—that U.S. backed regimes in the Middle East like Saudi Arabia and Qatar have supported ISIS, triggering a moral panic that would give Trump’s anti-interventionist posturing on his campaign trail to American presidency 2 years later— from his berating of wars in Afghanistan/Iraq, his stated refusal to arm “moderate rebels” in Syria, and his suspicion of NATO—a distinct fervor, embodying a very real hysteria among foreign policy elites. In another email, this time from 2016, Clinton noted she sought out “a more robust” and “covert” series of actions trying to “vet, identify, train and arm cadres of rebels” in Syria that would have fought Bashar al-Assad’s regime, tepidly noting that “the Al-Qaeda-related jihadist groups that have, unfortunately, been attracted to Syria.” She also notes that the amount of extremist forces marching toward Syria had “been complicated by the fact that the Saudis and others” were shipping large amounts” of weapons “not at all” targeted toward who Clinton calls “people that we think would be the more moderate” and “least likely to cause problems in the future.”
In August 2014, Clinton sent John Podesta—a former White House Chief of Staff—a list of notes on Syria, Iraq and U.S. policy in the Middle East, in an email titled “Here’s what I mentioned.”
Already having declared itself to be a global caliphate several weeks before Clinton’s intelligence notes, the same year ISIS would invade and take control of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Weeks after the sending of the notes to Podesta, then-Vice President Joe Biden criticized both Saudi Arabia and Turkey in a talk at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government for their actions. Though he would later apologize to Turkey, experts and former ISIS militants note that Turkey at least indirectly supported ISIS for years as a means to weaken Kurdish rebels and the Bashar al-Assad government. The CIA, which has spent billions of dollars arming and training rebels hoping to topple the Syrian government, and relies heavily on Saudi money to fund its covert campaign.
The country produces somewhere around 17% of the world’s oil and holds billions in American debt. During Obama’s two terms, Saudi Arabia spent more than $50 billion on American made weaponry—exceeding the amount of money given during George W. Bush’s two terms—and has approved deals in the billions. As Salon previously reported, a classified 2009 cable signed by Clinton acknowledged the presence of “donors in Saudi Arabia” which “constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide” while Washington’s lavish spending on lobbyists and public relations was used to expand the amount of nations under the West’s imperial umbrella. Among them is John Podesta’s brother, Tony Podesta, a Democratic Party lobbyist registered on the Saudi government’s payroll. The Foreign Agents Registration Act shows the Saudi regime paid Tony Podesta’s firm, the Podesta Group, a $140,000 monthly fee through the end of 2016, and Tony himself consults on the Saudi account. Another news outlet, Politico, would then report on a 104-page white paper circulating on Capitol Hill, said to detail the Saudi government’s efforts to fight terrorism.
While the degree to which the Saudi regime’s support for al-Qaeda in the years leading up to 9/11 is still hotly contested, it is known that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Questions of whether the country was involved in a collective plot reached new heights as 2016 led to the release of 28 classified pages from a 2002 congressional investigation into the attacks, offering new information about the FBI’s investigation into Omar al-Bayoumi, a wealthy Saudi business student working with the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. Finding al-Bayoumi to be “an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists”, the 28 pages paint a more conspiratorial picture, relaying FBI reports of al-Bayoumi’s “extensive contact with Saudi government establishments in the United States” and “numerous reports from individuals in the Muslim community, dating back to 1999,” alleging that al-Bayoumi may be “a Saudi intelligence officer” while keeping notable figures like Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Khalid al-Mihdhar in the narrative. And though al-Bayoumi would later find an apartment for the two men — both of them future 9/11 hijackers — and lent them money for rent, the 28 page FBI report notes there were “indications in the files that his [al-Bayoumi’s] encounter with the hijackers may not have been accidental.”
ISIS’ ideology is very similar to Wahhabism, an extremist Sunni ideology spread by Saudi Arabia. When the Islamic State needed textbooks for children in its Syrian capital, Raqqa, the extremist group printed out copies of Saudi state textbooks it found online and used those. Other groups similar to ISIS, like the the salafist Turkestan Islamic Party, are still recognized by the United Nations, European Nation, and many other countries as a terrorist organization, despite Washington’s 2018 de-listings. And though the Saudi regime has sided with the PRC on it’s counterterrorism measures, the state still supports groups like Jaysh al-Islam, a violent salafist-islamist rebel faction with political power in East Ghouta who have put Alawite men and women in cages and paraded them as human shields.
The group’s founder, the now deceased Zahran Alloush, has openly called for the ethnic cleansing of religious minorities from Damascus. While Western media largely maintains its omerta around the Salafi-jihadi group or only referencing it out of the context of overall struggle in Syria, it remains an active Saudi proxy and was one of the first rebrands of Syria's Al Qaeda affiliates. Saudi Arabia also backs the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a militia formed from the ranks of defectors from the Syrian Army and various bands of Islamist fighters affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. And while regime-change trolls smeared independent journalists and news networks for years as "Assadist", many went silent as one of their media mouthpieces—the Washington Post—finally admitted the FSA consists of far-right Salafi-jihadist extremists.
In part also bankrolling the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, Saudi Arabia also backs these CIA-approved rebels who have abducted Syrian Christians. Through constant collaboration with the American National Security sector and the Saudi federal bureaucracy, weapons and gear shipped to rebel factions by the Arab kingdom have made their way across groups they claim to be in opposition to like al-Qaeda and their sub-factions. Members of al-Qaeda like Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, Abu Yahya al-Libi, and al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. On top of that, the al-Qaeda aligned al-Fajr Media Center distributes promotional material for the Turkistan Islamic Party. The two factions have became increasingly more aligned with one another and TIP leader Abdul Haq even confirmed loyalty to al-Qaeda in 2016. Other TIP members like Abdul Haq al Turkistani would choose to join al-Qaeda's executive leadership council in 2005 while different members like Abdul Shakoor Turkistani were appointed as military commander for al-Qaeda and its forces in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan. Abdul Haq was so apparently highly placed in al-Qaeda leadership he even served as a mediator between rival factions of the Taliban and played integral roles in military planning. In the 2015 Jisr al-Shughur offensive, the TIP would interfere as part of a network of al-Qaeda linked groups alongside other groups like al-Nusra as part of the Army of Conquest coalition, the TIP sent the "Turkistan Brigade" for support. In a separate offense, al-Qaeda affiliated TIP Jihadists fought in Aleppo.
In a 2010 report by the Jamestown Foundation, it was reported that "though there is no question a small group of Uyghur militants fought alongside their Taliban hosts against the Northern Alliance”, the “scores of terrorists Beijing claimed that Bin Laden was sending to China in 2002 never materialized" and that "the TIP’s "strategy" of making loud and alarming threats (attacks on the Olympics, use of biological and chemical weapons, etc.) without any operational follow-up has been enormously effective in promoting China's efforts to characterize Uyghur separatists as terrorists." In the 2015 Battle of Kunduz in Afghanistan, thereweremultiple reports that Islamist militants of Uyghur ethnicity joined the Taliban in their attack although these reports did not mention TIP by name.
In a 2017 report by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, facts of a shifting demographic in Northern Syria were confirmed, locating thousands of Uyghur militants in the area. Alongside Turkey’s own role facilitating the build-up of militant factions in the past few years, President Erdogan firmly backed American covert operations during terrorist attacks on country. Starting in 2011, the Turkish state would officially became a flashpoint for international terror, with a final destination in mind for terrorists: Idlib.
The Syrian Parallel State: Welcome to Idlib’s Fifth Column, Propped Up by Ankara
In recent times, the international Uyghur separatist movement has strengthened its connections with Washington and the American National Security State, lobbying to up the pressure on Xinjiang and pushing for sanctions and its eventual isolation. Conglomerations like the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and their affiliate networks — including the Uyghur American Association (UAA), Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP), and the Campaign for Uyghurs (CFU) — are almost wholly made up of individuals with direct attachments to the U.S. government, military, and regime change establishment. Clearly inspired by the right-wing, neoliberal shock therapy ops spawned by American intelligence agencies in former Soviet republics, groups like the WUC and UAA act as bulletin boards for ruling interests, constantly expanding their regime change affiliate networks with clear goals of sparking a color revolution. In recent years, militant Uyghur cells and their paramilitary factions have materialized in northwestern China, some supposedly in support of Turkic-speaking Uyghur ethnic minorities while others were just in on the ride to fight. On March 1st, 2014, 8 Uyghur agitators hacked 33 civilians to death at a train station in Kunming. Insurgents were found with hand-painted East Turkestan flags, saying they wanted to go abroad to wage jihad. The East Turkestan Movement laid claim to the Kunming attacks, ending in the sentencing of 4 people. At least 29 to 31 were killed and over 100 were injured. As a result, China tightened its security in Xinjiang to prevent additional domestic acts of terrorism. To get more specific, greater control was exercised over religious expression and practice.
The mentality of Chinese Uyghur jihadists does not fit the stereotype of ISIS and Al Qaeda. While members of al-Qaeda and ISIS see themselves as soldiers on the right side of a holy war, Uyghurs instead insist they’re living within their rights to self-determination. They didn’t flood into Syria alone: many came with wives, children and/or parents, with full multi-generational families living illegally in the rural Idlib countryside. Uyghur cells have established schools for their children, who are taught in the Turkic language. Some even occupy homes and farms owned by Syrian families made homeless by Chinese Jihadis.
According to a research file publicized in October of 2019 by Turkish think tank SETA, “Out of the 28 factions [in Turkish forces abroad, I may add], 21 were previously supported by the United States, three of them via the Pentagon’s program to combat DAESH. Eighteen of these factions were supplied by the CIA via the MOM Operations Room in Turkey, a joint intelligence operation room of the ‘Friends of Syria’ to support the armed opposition. Fourteen factions of the 28 were also recipients of the U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles.”
In simple language, this means the rank-and-file anti-Assad lobby of the Obama administration have been recycled through the Turkish military to serve its invasion of northern Syria, where militants would be unloaded to ethnically cleanse Kurds while settling Uyghurs in nearby cities (reminiscent of the Turkish state using Kurds to supplant Armenians). Far from being the first outlet to recognize this trend, other sources have reported on Turkey settling Uyghurs in Syrian Kurdish cities. Considering former American ambassador to Syria Robert S. Ford disclosed that the U.S. spent at least $12 billion in Syria-related military and civilian expenses from 2014-2017 in a written testimony prepared for a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in 2018 with the cost of American operations reaching around 11 digits, one can only wonder how much money went to these Uyghur filled areas, and how much more of it made it to the Turkish state while they fund the same militants changing Syrian demography.
According to the Jamestown Foundation, Turkish connections were used by Uyghur fighters to go into Syria and the humanitarian Uyghur East Turkistan Education and Solidarity Association (ETESA) which is located in Turkey, sent Uyghurs into Syria, endorsed the killing of the pro-China Imam Juma Tayir, applauded attacks in China, and posted on its website content from the TIP. As a means to ease the process of migration, the Turkistan Islamic Party began distributing an Arabic magazine—the Turkistan al-Islamiya—to acquaint the population and other militant groups on their plight as migrants to wage jihad against China.
Uyghurs like these, claims a 2015 report by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a staunchly pro-Israel news cutout headquartered in Washington, were entering Syria and occupying abandoned villages in the north, filling them with families and fighting alongside the Al-Nusra Front (formerly known as Al-Qaeda) and ISIS/Daesh in proxy struggles against the Bashar al-Assad regime. The video shows the TIP flag flying in the Jisr al Shughur area of the Idlib province that had been taken from Assad forces in April of the same year, noting that “after the raid, [the] Syrian city looks more like China than Damascus.” That same month, the TIP released photos and videos, revealing itself as a key player in the battle over the area. The TIP was also seen setting up a training camp with families, alongside the new colony of 3,500 Uyghurs in a near village.
In September 2015, the Los Angeles Times reported that the TIP and al Nusra captured the Syrian airbase, Abu Duhur, in Idlib and proceeded to execute 56 Syrian soldiers. The Times cautioned that while “the Turkish government is a key backer of various Syrian rebel factions…hard-core Islamist groups now dominate the opposition forces fighting to oust the government of Syrian resident Bashar Assad.” Later, The Long War Journal reported TIP photos of its newly captured arsenal, showcasing MIG fighter jets as well as other advanced weaponry. Abu Duhur is a strategic airport about 35 miles southeast of Aleppo, and a major government garrison in the Idlib province.
TIP also released photos of its little jihadist “cubs” in Syria, in parallel with the MEMRI video noting ISIS likewise recruited Uyghurs from Turkey, and settled them in Raqqa with jihadist cubs attending the schools of Abu Bakr al Baghdadi. Terrorism Monitor noted in 2012 that TIP fighters and their families in Syria were estimated to number 1,000, but with the steady stream of Chinese Uyghurs entering Syria via Turkey the past few years, the number now is likely higher. Based on undercover reporting in Idlib, his large cluster of Uyghurs forms one of many jihadi colonies scattered throughout Syria, Turkey, and various regions in the Middle East.
Moreover, Uyghur militants in the area are further boosted by American support because of their intermingling with the rebel opposition in Idlib seeking the overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad. Despite the bipartisan Stop Arming Terrorists Act (SATA) bill being passed before Congress with the express aim of preventing the use of American tax dollars to fund terrorist groups in the region, a 2017 report confirmed that of the 38 checkpoints in the province, 27 belonged to Al-Qaeda and its allies (the TIP and Jaish al Fatah), nine belong to Ahrar al Sham, and two belonged to the Free Syrian Army. Considering the facts, it’s no wonder the TIP was able to get ahold of advanced American weaponry like anti-tank TOW missiles, drones, and possible surface-to-air missiles. Given that TIP and al-Nusra militants in Syria have already planned and executed attacks against China’s overseas interests, like the August 2016 attack on the Chinese Embassy in Kyrgyzstan, this is no minor game. Even more active Uyghur cells in Syria were uncovered in early 2018, like the infamous Katibat al Ghuraba. Currently,Washington is positioning the head of the Syrian Al-Qaeda chapter, Mohammad Jolani, as their next asset, who has dozens of connections to other groups like al-Qaeda and al-Nusra.
In addition to providing a cadre of battle-trained fighters to ship back to China and it’s border, a part of Erdogan’s plan—in part—seemingly depends on altering Syrian demographics by repopulating the Idlib province with Uyghurs who’ve attacked Syrian homeowners and farmers, causing them to flee and abandon their properties ahead of potential “peace talks” or a future break-up of the country. The MEMRI video goes on to make the same observations, noting that “thousands of Chinese turkistanis” fleeing China were also resettled in the Zanbaq area, and that Syrian populations are being targeted, seemingly on the basis of ethnicity. While just one of the many accomplices to the project of establishing a ‘Turkic’ ethnostate in the region, it’s clear the Turkish President has a vision for a Turkic colony, one perhaps more vivid than any of his allies—or enemies. Given Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war, it is of no surprise a war torn country held by dozens of Islamist factions would have an abundance of smaller parallel states, each working to expand their rule further. But what’s particularly exceptional about the role Turkey plays in the civil war is that the actions seem to act as outgrowths of the Turkish fifth column, a group of staunch Islamists seeking to undermine the larger group of officials appointed by Erdogan after his purging of members of the Gulen movement.
A smaller piece in the grander puzzle that is the transformation from a secular state into a piece of a larger federation of Islamic states acting as a motherland to the Turkic-speaking race originating in Xinjiang and other -stan nations and the tribes that fled before warriors of the Mongolian steppes before settling. It is then of no confusion why Uyghur militants in the region are looking to Zionism for answers. While Erdogan’s outlook leads him to denying Ottoman genocides, partaking in the brutal occupation of Syria, ethnic cleansing, the purging of religious minorities, and displacing Kurds; he has, in the past, seemed sympathetic to the plight of ethnic Uyghurs, targeting demographics in zones held by allies of the Turkish state on Syria's northern front and replacing Kurds with other more ‘turkic’ groups.
In a move of exceptional nationalism, Uyghurs figured into Erdogan’s notorious honor guard of 16 soldiers dressed in historical warrior costumes, who astounded the world when they appeared during a welcoming ceremony for President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority in January 2015.
Each warrior seen above is to represent one of the 16 “great Turkish empires” commemorated on Turkey’s official seal. Thanks to Hurriyet, we know that the Uyghur warrior was the sixth man from the top of the steps on the left, with the black flaps hanging down and almost obscuring his face. Turkey’s neo-imperialist incitement of Turkic pride involves more fascistic ethno-nationalism than historical dress up.
Additionally, in 2018 the U.S. oversaw the removal of ETIM/TIP from their Terrorist Listings in accordance with the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), arguing there’s been “no credible evidence the org still exists”. A confusing assertion for anyone who followed the War on Terror, the Libyan disaster, or American news outlets just 3 months prior when the U.S. noted ETIM controlled “between 1,100 and 3,500 fighters, mostly in Syria and Afghanistan” and the President himself ordered an escalation of a bombing campaign against this little known syndicate, this choice by the American state was indicative of larger plans, and trends, both for and toward the terrorist militias in the region. Much like how Washington is seeking to have new terrorist assets active in Syria, it is at the same time attempting to whitewash groups like ETIM/TIP as national liberation strugglers and freedom fighters.
In 2018, Major American Military General James Hecker gave a press conference, in which he noted that not only was ETIM real, but also that they were working hand in hand with the Taliban and boasted that his forces were destroying their training bases, thereby reducing their terrorist activities both in the Afghanistan/Pakistan/China border region and inside China itself.
In a piece by the Washington Post, Brigadier General Lance Bunch boasted: “anybody that is an enemy of Afghanistan, we’re going to target them.” “[W]e’ve got new authorities now that allow us to be able to . . . target the Taliban and the ETIM where they previously thought they were safe.”
At the same time of ETIM’s delisting of ETIM/TIP for “not existing”, the Trump administration added Cuba, a small socialist country about 90 miles away from Florida, to its list of state sponsors of terror. Then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed to the island’s “malign interference in Venezuela and the rest of the Western Hemisphere” as his reasoning, though a report released by the Department of Health and Human Services outlined that the “malign influence” Cuba was “exerting” abroad was this: offering doctors and other medical teams to other needy countries during a global pandemic killing millions.
The Passport Scandal, Brought to you by Turkey
Another plan formulated by Turkish authorities oversaw a scandal concerning mass amounts of fraudulent Turkish passports shipped to scores of Uyghur refugees, where they would then leave China on international flights, making their way to Istanbul. Since 2011, foreign service officers have long been aware that many Turks have been obtaining visas under false pretenses, with the penultimate aim of teaching in Gulen’s charter schools, while China has made complaint of illegal immigration of Uyghurs to Syria since 2012. There was a flare in China-Turkey relations over this issue in November 2014, when Beijing accused Turkey of promoting illegal immigration for Uyghur refugees caught in Thailand, which then culminated in a violent anti-Chinese protest in Turkey over the repatriation of Uyghurs to the area. The next year, forces in Shanghai arrested Turkish and Chinese citizens, accusing them of providing altered Turkish passports to terrorist suspects from the western region of Xinjiang. While one of many, the passport scandal revealed the sophistication of the organized smuggling rings run in and out of Syria via Turkey—airlines and airports full of passengers going on jihad, while Turkish businesses made profit via hand-over-fist control of everything from taxis, hotel rooms, food, and organ transplants by terrorist groups.
In a late 2017 report by the Associated Press, writer Gerry Shih interviewed Uyghur refugees making their way to Turkey, where they’d be forced to live as “second-class citizens”. In what the author describes as his interviewee ‘putting on a brave face’, she replied: “Turkey will protect our freedom and our religion.” “This life is better.” Elsewhere, in Today’s Zaman, the English edition of one of the many former media arms of Fethullah Gülen’s information consortium, it was exposed that supposedly more than 100,000 fake Turkish passports were produced to assist fighters to join Syrian jihad, with each sold for $200, with some claiming more than 50,000 Uyghurs from China came to Turkey via Thailand and Malaysia before proceeding to Syria. That same year, when the Thai government stopped over 100 Uyghurs on their way to wage jihad in Syria (via Turkey) and sent them back to China, anger among circles grew . In what should have been huge news internationally, the Thai government later allowed 170 of the Uyghurs it had detained for over a year to go to Turkey.
In August of the same year, a shrine was bombed in Bangkok, killing 20 people, mostly ethnic Chinese holiday-makers. The key suspect fled to Turkey, and an accomplice to the bomber was arrested and found to be carrying 11 Turkish passports. The bombing was suspected to have been carried out by Grey Wolves in retaliation for Thailand’s previous deportation of Uyghur suspects to the PRC instead of allowing them to make way to other regions. Months prior the bombing, a group of 200 protesters waving East Turkestan flags attacked the Thai consulate in Istanbul in response to Uyghur repatriation. Reportedly led by the Grey Wolves and East Turkestan Culture and Solidarity Association, the latter organization was headed by Seyit Tümturk, who served as WUC Vice President from 2008 to 2016 and belonged to the organization’s founding pantheon.
The Turkish MHP party leader Devlet Bahçeli defended the attacks, asking: “How are you going to differentiate between Korean and Chinese? They both have slanted eyes. Does it really matter?” Ironically enough, his remarks coincided with the display of a Grey Wolves banner at Istanbul headquarters reading, “We crave Chinese blood.”
In other cases of extremist demonstrations by Islamist groups, members of ISIS in 2017 vowed that “rivers” of blood “would flow” in their war against the Chinese state. These threats coincided with Chinese troop deployments in Xinjiang triggered by a deadly knife attack at a government compound. By no means a byproduct of coincidence, a report from early 2015 wherein Al-Jazeera sympathetically gave profile to Uyghur refugees residing in Turkey was released to the public. In the case of one interviewee, reporters at the outlet made note of the assistance provided by the Turkish embassy to Uyghur refugees, stating:
After three months of travel, they arrived in Malaysia, where they stayed for nine months.
He said he was discovered traveling with a fake passport at the airport on his way out of Malaysia, as other Uighurs in transit have been, [and] was arrested and thrown into prison for three months along with his family. His wife, who had been pregnant throughout the trek, gave birth to their seventh child in prison.
He sought assistance from the Turkish Embassy in Malaysia, and after four months in Istanbul, he and his family have settled in Kayseri.
Alongside one of the many journeys across these trafficking route’s, some Uyghur’s were even held for questioning in Indonesia. Authorities there were suspicious of their Turkish passports, and when confronted, insisted they were Turkish citizens traveling as tourists in Asia. When Indonesian officials summoned the Turkish Embassy, they confirmed they were Turkish. In cases like these, if Uyghurs were able to get into Turkey, they would not be able to leave unless on under government direction abroad, in that case guaranteeing they’d be stuck on jihad duty in countries like Syria while indirectly under control of the Turkish state. In the case of Indonesia, the above story wasn’t the only case of this in the country. In 2015, TIME Magazine published a piece on terrorist buildup in Southeast Asia, covering the case of a man named Alli who was being groomed to carry out a suicide bombing.
“Alli,” they write, “the Uyghur suspect, is believed to have entered Indonesia via Batam, a small island off Singapore—along with two of his Uighur compatriots who remain at large. In Indonesia, he is accused of getting a fake ID card that said he was born in Pontianak, West Kalimantan.” Needless to say, Turkish travel docs are key in expediting Uyghur travel to Turkey or any areas sympathetic to its efforts along the way. While Malaysian authorities detained 155 Uyghurs crammed in two apartments with forged Turkish passports in 2014, another Turkish paper, the Turkish Press, described the central importance of Turkish travel documents to Uyghur refugees, stating:
For Cengiz, it took ten days to reach Malaysia. “The shortest trip takes six days,” Ezizi says. Illegal immigrants received fake Turkish documents in Thailand: “You have to pay an additional $1,000 to get your passport.”
Arriving into Malaysia safely does not mean the mission is accomplished. A Uighur has to surrender to Malaysian security guards in order to reach the final destination: Turkey.
Firstly, an immigrant has to pay a fine for crossing into Malaysia by an illegal route. The Malaysian authorities then order deportation to the country where the fake passport belongs. “This means Turkey,” Ezizi maintains. Very few tried to get another country’s passport. Mainly, they take forged Turkish passports as “other countries do not accept Uighur migrants.”
…
Ezizi points out that when a Uighur arrives into Istanbul with a fake passport, the person is released after a short judicial process: “Sometimes, that person can be sent to jail temporarily but would be released quickly.”
The LA Times even visited the Uyghur emigre community in Kayseri, Turkey, and touched on the passport issue and trafficking operations through Thailand, stating:
It took about a month in Bangkok to plan the next stage of their journey, the men said. They linked up with an organized crime network from Turkey and paid about $3,500 for forged Turkish passports, which they used to travel overland to Malaysia.
Malaysia, Mohammed said, was "worse than Thailand." "People would say: 'Give us your wallet, give us your jewelry or we will report you,'" he recalled.
In November after 11 months in Malaysia, they boarded a plane bound for Istanbul. There, Turkish immigration authorities discovered the forged passports.
"They said, 'You are Uighur?'" Mohammed recalled. "They confiscated them and let us come in."
An article from the Hurriyet Daily News, a popular Turkish media outlet, reported that the Turkish government is not only officially hospitable to Uyghur refugees in transit and on arrival, it is also actively facilitating their departure from Xinjiang, writing:
A month ago [January 2015], 500 Uighur Turks fled the western Chinese region of Xinjiang and settled in state housing previously used as official residences for police officers in the city of Kayseri.
…
Some also said they flew to Turkey with the help of Turkish government; however, they do not want to give the details of the journey because their relatives are trying to flee using the same methods.
Shortly after the publishing of the Hurriyet article—which also revealed that, in addition to the announcement that 500 Uyghurs who recently arrived in Turkey, there were an additional hundreds more detained in Thailand who hoped for escape to Turkey—the PRC cracked the whip at Turkey on the passport issue. In January 2015 the plot further thickened, as the Global Times, a daily tabloid run under the watch of the Communist Party of China, revealed that in November 2014 authorities exposed a scheme involving Turkish citizens inside the PRC selling their passports to Uyghurs who wanted to assume Turkish identities and escape the country. When the customers were identified, the passports were apparently mailed back to Turkey for modification, then mailed back to the PRC for delivery. It is safe to assume that then, Turkish passport holders would obtain replacement passports from the Turkish consular office.
Further evidence of notable Uyghur migration was covered in an AP News report (as well as Reuters) from December 22nd, 2017, where the author spills on the details of 5,000 Uyghur Muslims that have traveled to Syria to train with the Turkistan Islamic Party and fight alongside al-Qaeda — playing key roles in several battles — since 2013. Syrian President Bashar Assad’s troops are still clashing with Uyghur fighters as the multi-year conflict continues to escalate. “We didn’t care how the fighting went or who Assad was,” one ETIM fighter told the AP; “We just wanted to learn how to use the weapons and then go back to China.” For many, Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in the wake of the Urumqi riots was the catalyst. “We’ll avenge our relatives being tortured in Chinese jail,” another fighter told the AP. A 2015 New York Times report also notes that one Chinese Muslim had been trained in Libya before going to Syria to fight government forces. The U.S. has effectively given Turkey free rein to both maneuver and recycle terrorist factions in order to reach its political ambitions abroad.
For the last 4 decades, the CIA and secret Pakistani ISI forces in Afghanistan have sought to recruit and train Uyghur mercenaries, planning to use them as a future terror force for maintaining interests in regions close to China, while Chechnyans from the Russian Caucasus region were recruited for the same reason. Both groups were funneled into the Middle East in various American regime-change ops, and after the 2001 World Trade Center bombing, the very forces that U.S. secret operations had helped to cultivate for anti-Soviet saber rattling became the new enemy. The similarities between the two struggles is astounding: a thirst for independence shared by both groups that decades of immersion in multi-ethnic countries hasn’t quenched, the powerful “godless foreigners oppressing Muslims” dynamic that worked so well in Afghanistan and carried over to Chechnya and now Xinjiang and surrounding -stans, the religious dynamics, the challenge of militant Wahabbism, well-heeled charities backed by Saudi sheikhs, outside money/groups, and their fifth columns of madrassahs, to traditional religious/political practice. In Chechnya, Wahabbists were able to achieve an at least temporary and partial ascendancy. In the PRC, the exact opposite has happened.
With the background presented to us, let’s take a look at an image of the individual who appeared on camera in the immediate aftermath of the shoot-down of the Russian Su-24, the same man who claimed that he and his friends had shot at and killed the Russian pilot, and were also responsible for the attack on the Russian rescue helicopter with a U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank missile that killed a Russian marine:
That’s Alparslan Celik, and he’s standing in front of the flag of ‘East Turkestan’ and is giving the signature ‘Grey Wolves’ hand salute. He’s not Syrian, he’s not even a Syrian Turkman; he’s just Turkish, the son of a former MHP mayor of an Eastern Turkish town.
Some have referred to President Erdogan’s buildup of Uyghur forces in the area a personal “mercenary army”. In the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul, Nurali T., a Uyghur Turk working for ISIL to transport terrorists into Syria with implicit allowance of the Turkish government, provides militants with passports..
Given this information, Western media would have a hard time arguing it isn’t suspicious, as it would require arguing it was just a coincidence that members of this long-term, NATO-sponsored, pan-Turkic paramilitary group with direct connections to recent Turkish-linked terrorist atrocities in China and Thailand were in the right place at the right time to kill the Russian pilot after he ejected and that within a few hours Fox News and CNN reporters were there on the scene to interview this Grey Wolf to broadcast him about the murder of the Russian pilot, in doing so pushing Turkish/Russian relations past the point of no return.
Who’s Ready for the Rapture?
On December 23, 2016, the American National Security State bustled with its next regime change strongman. While this relatively obscure German evangelical now seems to have come out the blue, he was the product of more than a decade of assiduous grooming by a revolving door of regime change aficionados, then just beginning his career pivot to Xinjiang after a brief focus on Tibetan culture and born-again Christian writings with a Foreign Affairs article about Xinjiang’s police and surveillance apparatus. A lecturer at the German base of Columbia International University, a U.S.-based Christian outlet considering the “Bible [to be] the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ”, his work on China is a byproduct of his biblical worldview. Named Adrian Zenz and backed by infamous groups like the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOCMF), the man is a mixture of several elements that create a character who oscillates between been laughable and terrifying. Established as a Reaganite outgrowth of the National Captive Nations Committee—a group founded by Ukrainian nationalist Lev Dobriansky (who’s daughter, now sits on the board for the VOCMF) to lobby against any effort for detente with the Soviet Union—its co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, was a top leader of the fascist OUN-B militia that fought alongside Nazi Germany during its occupation of Ukraine in WWII and helped found the World Anti-Communist League described by journalist Joe Conason as “the organizational haven for neo-Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semitic extremists from two dozen countries.”
An antisemite who would publish a book further expanding upon his reactionary views, Zenz predicts the fall of capitalism will bring the Antichrist “within a few decades”, and that things like gender equality and “postmodern relativism and tolerance thinking”—as well as the promotion of homosexuality, gender equality, and non-violent parenting—to be threats to Christianity and exemplary of the deceptive power of the anti-Christ. He further elaborates, writing that “[h]ate crime and anti-discrimination laws will likely play a major role in the suppression of biblical Christianity” as part of an “anti-Christian ‘tolerance’ campaign”, as it would “forbid employers to discriminate based on gender or sexual orientations”. Zenz’s views are cornerstone to his mission in seeing his faith-based Cold War crusade come to full fruition.
Instead of focus on concerns of arbitrary/pre-emptive detention, the possible curbing of speech rights, cultural chauvinism, or pushing for a responsible, non-partisan independent party to investigate Xinjiang, in 2017 Zenz would join the infamously conservative Jamestown Foundation’s sensationalist China Brief and would continue his pivot to Xinjiang, first focusing on the increasing militarization of the area and even having his work deemed as a “fair assessment” by Ian Goodrum, a popular writer for pro-CPC outlet China Daily. He would later come to be the face behind the infamous “1 million imprisoned” in Xinjiang statistic, a now debunked talking point in part based on a fragile, house of cards balancing on 8 anonymous grains of sand from the Kashgar prefecture. Other works by him, like the so-called “Karakax List” have also been debunked, including his claim that 80% of women in China at childbearing age were planned to be sterilized, something so quickly seen as a sham statistic it had Twitter users blowing it apart within hours.
In spite of his detractors, Zenz has consistently released report after report, and has gained attention by figures on the American far-right like Mike Pompeo for his efforts. Among the newest batch of lies cooked up by he and his faulty reporting, Zenz intentionally uses loaded phrases cherry-picked from a lexicon reminiscent of Western chattel slavery like "cotton picking" & "slave labor" to trigger specific associations with the past to fuel his allegations of slave labor in the northwestern province. Helping provide wind under the sails of campaigns lobbying against “forced labor” in Xinjiang, helping force Uyghur workers out of their jobs while extracting handsome payouts from American apparel companies without repatriating those hit hardest.
Current Turkey-China Relations
In recent years, as the Turkish state has grown closer to the People’s Republic and increased assistance in apprehending Uyghurs who’ve been accused by authorities of terrorism. It still largely refuses to return Uyghurs to China directly, though the Republic has been accused of sending them to other countries like Tajikistan where extradition to China is easier.
In February 2021, Erdoğan spoke on the need for a new constitution, a “civilian”constitution. Recalled that the republic’s last 2 constitutions — enacted in 1961 and 1982 — were drafted following military coups, and Erdogan noted they “contained ‘indelible’ traces of the ‘military tutelage.’” Urging all political parties to support the move, rising unemployment and diminishing purchasing power are some of the most pressing issues in Turkey today, and the public largely blames Erdoğan’s regime for their worsening quality of life. Political mobilization has picked up in Ankara, with opposition leaders meeting daily behind closed doors in search of common ground and raising speculation of new electoral alliances. As his popularity continues to plummet as the republic’s next presidential contest veers closer and closer, the threat of militant Islam seems to be on the horizon. Take, for example, the words of AKP deputy Cengiz Aydoğdu, who’s argued that “the regulation of a person’s basic rights and freedoms was never left to the hands of the state in our history”, and that “Sharia is above everything, which means that the law is above everything”, indicating there are AKP politicians ready to embrace the return Sharia Law in a New Turkey. In December 2019, a constitutional law professor, Kemal Gözler, wrote that there are “[t]hose who think that it is necessary for the modern legal system in Turkey to be replaced by Islamic law.” In Gözler’s article “The Value of Islamic Law” (‘İSLÂM HUKUKUNUN DEĞERİ’) they give some salient numbers: enrollment of students at faculties of theology has increased fivefold in the period from 2010 to 2019, shooting from 6,252 to 33,202. The overall number of theology faculties has also risen from 24 to 92, and the number of faculty members rose from 1,120 to 4,121 in that same 9 year period. Most surprisingly, Gözler states that at the moment a grand total of 407 individual Turkish academics are working at Islamic law and Fiqh (Fıkıh or Islamic jurisprudence) departments in nationwide theology faculties.
Given the facts at hand, there’s little doubt that a new Turkish Constitution could possibly rush the state into an era of revived Islamism, illustrated in many public displays clamoring for a revived Caliphate and reinstitute Sharia during last year’s restoration of the Aya Sofya Mosque in İstanbul.
Nonetheless, the future remains unclear.