Turkey’s spy agency systematically downplayed the Islamist views of men seeking to join a Syrian rebel group, which was supported by the United States Central Intelligence Agency on account of its moderate leanings.
The United States
began to fund and train
the Free Syrian Army (FSA) soon after it was established in 2011. The
group said its mission was to depose the Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad and institute a Western-style multiparty democracy in Syria.
By 2015, much of the recruitment and
vetting for the FSA was taking place in Turkish regions bordering
northern Syria, where thousands of opponents of al-Assad’s regime had
fled with their families. The CIA relied on its Turkish counterpart, the
National Intelligence Organization, known as MİT, to recruit and
conduct initial vetting of FSA volunteers from Syrian refugee camps. The
MİT was desperately short of personnel for such a large-scale
operation, and reached out to the Turkish Special Forces Command for
assistance. Eventually, Special Forces Command officers were put in
charge of reaching out to potential FSA volunteers and vetting them.
Successful candidates would then be forwarded to the CIA.
One such officer was Lt. Murat Aletirik,
who vetted dozens of FSA volunteers in 2015 and 2016. However, he was
arrested following the failed coup of July 15, 2016, and was tried for
alleged participation in armed insurrection against the Turkish
government. During his testimony in 2018, which was leaked this week,
Lt. Aletirik told the court that he and his fellow officers were issued
guidelines by the MİT on how to select fighters for the CIA-funded
program.
According to Lt. Aletirik, the MİT
guidelines centered on whether FSA candidates were “sympathetic towards
the [Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as] PKK, the [Democratic Union
Party, or] PYD, or offshoots of the PKK”. These groups support autonomy
for the Kurds, a non-Turkish and non-Arab ethnic group in the Middle
East. Turkey, along with the European Union and the United States,
classify the Turkish-based PKK as a terrorist organization. Turkey
claims that the PYD, which operates in Syria, is also a terrorist group.
However, Washington supports and funds the PYD, and even worked with
its militias in the war against the Islamic State.
According to Lt. Aletirik, the MİT
guidelines had little to say about how to filter out potential FSA
volunteers who were found to harbor sympathies for Salafi-Jihadist
groups, such as the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, or al-Nusra. In fact, said
Lt. Aletirik, he and his fellow officers had instructions to downplay
such findings and forward candidates to the CIA, so long as they did not
have pro-Kurdish sympathies. It is believed that, eventually, the CIA
caught on to this, and began turning down hundreds of FSA candidates
that had been vetted by the Turkish military. This slowed down the
vetting process tremendously, with only a fraction —possibly fewer than
10 percent— of all candidates joining the CIA-run program.
In 2017, the United States shut down the program,
reportedly after a direct order was issued by President Donald Trump.
Today the FSA is almost completely supported and funded by the Turkish
state. Locals often refer to it tongue-in-cheek as the “Free Syrian
Turkish Army”.
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