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Mali hotel attack: 80 hostages freed from seized hotel (updated)

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maliEighty hostages held by Islamist gunmen have been freed from a luxury hotel in Mali’s capital as government special forces moved floor by floor to clear the building, Reuters reports, citing the country’s state broadcaster and a security source.

Malian special forces have entered the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, to end a siege by gunmen who had been holding 170 people hostage.
“The attackers are still inside. We’re hearing gunfire from time to time,” said a witness outside the Radisson Blu hotel.Gunmen have launched an attack on the Radisson Blu Hotel in the centre of Mali’s capital, Bamako, the BBC reports.
The hotel’s owners said that two people had locked in 140 guests and 30 employees, the AFP news agency reports its statement as saying.

Police have surrounded the hotel, which the gunmen entered shooting, and shouting “God is great!” in Arabic, a security source told Reuters.

A BBC reporter says the US-owned hotel is popular with expats working in Mali.

In August, suspected Islamist gunmen killed 13 people, including five UN workers, during a hostage siege at a hotel in the central Malian town of Sevare.

France, the former colonial power in Mali, intervened in the country in January 2013 when al-Qaeda-linked militants threatened to march on Bamako after taking control of the north of the country.

The US embassy in Bamako has tweeted that it “is aware of an ongoing active shooter operation at the Radisson Hotel”.

All US citizens were asked “to shelter in place” and “encouraged to contact their families”.

“It’s all happening on the seventh floor, jihadists are firing in the corridor,” a security source told AFP.

Some reports say about 10 gunmen in total are believed to be involved in the incident.

The Rezidor Hotel Group, which owns the Radisson Blu, said it was aware of “the hostage-taking that is ongoing at the property today”.

The UN force in Mali took over responsibility for security in the country from French and African troops in July 2013, after the main towns in the north had been recaptured from the Islamist militants.

 

Turkey 49 hostages swapped for 180 ISIL terrorists, report claims

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193762_newsdetail

The report also stated that the state’s key bodies, the MİT, the Prime Ministry Office and the President’s Office, competed against each other in an effort to give the impression that the hostage release was the result of their diplomatic attempts. In order to create this perception, the three agencies used certain media outlets affiliated with each other to claim the result as its own success. This prompted rumors that an internal power struggle was taking place over the hostages.

The terrorist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) released 49 hostages who were abducted from the Turkish Consulate General in Mosul in June in exchange for Turkey’s release of 180 key figures from the jihadist group, the Taraf daily reported on Thursday.

Forty-nine members of the consulate staff were held hostage by ISIL for 101 days before being released on Sept. 20, but speculation as to how they were freed continues to occupy the country’s agenda. Taraf claimed that a number of key ISIL figures were traded for the hostages.

Giving a detailed report on the hostage release, Taraf claimed that US air strikes on ISIL militants in Iraq in August resulted in wounded terrorists being sent to Turkey for treatment. The US then warned Turkey not to release those militants. But, ISIL said they would kill the hostages if those ISIL fighters were not allowed to return to Iraq and Syria. The Turkish government then developed a swap plan for the release of the hostages, simultaneously ridding Turkey of the ISIL elements and releasing the hostages.

Local tribes mediated for swap deal

Local tribal figures who are providing support to the US’s campaign against ISIL in Iraq acted as mediators in the exchange process. With their help a deal was reached and the logistics were finalized. The ISIL militants would bring the hostages to the Turkish border and inform the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) of the hostages’ location, the report said.

In the wake of the hostages’ return, the government, in accordance with the deal, gathered ISIL militants who had been detained during medical treatment in Turkish hospitals. One hundred eighty fighters were then taken to a military post in Van. Whether the ISIL terrorists who killed a police officer, a military officer and a Turkish citizen in Niğde province in March were included in the swap deal is not clear. However, rumors circulating in government circles indicate that these terrorists were meant to be among the terrorists to be exchanged; however, the decision was abandoned, Taraf reported.

As part of the deal, the returned militants were given an undisclosed amount of money before they were handed over to ISIL.

 

Turkey accused of conspiring with IS against Assad after hostage release

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182681Mystery surrounds the surprise release of 49 Turkish diplomats and their families held captive for three months by ISIS. The Turkish government is denying any deal with the hostage-takers, making it unclear why ISIS, notorious for its cruelty and ruthlessness, should hand over its Turkish prisoners on Saturday, Sept 20 without a quid pro quo, foreign commentator Patrick Cockburn said in an article published at The Independent.

Hailed in Ankara as a triumph for Turkey, the freeing of the diplomats seized when Mosul fell to ISIS on 10 June raises fresh questions about the relationship between the Turkish government and ISIS. The Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says the release is the result of a covert operation by Turkish intelligence that must remain a secret.

He added on Sunday that “there are things we cannot talk about. To run the state is not like running a grocery store. We have to protect our sensitive issues; if you don’t there would be a price to pay.” Turkey denies that a ransom was paid or promises made to ISIS.

The freeing of the hostages comes at the same moment as 70,000 Syrian Kurds have fled across the border into Turkey to escape an ISIS offensive against the enclave of Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, which has seen the capture of many villages.

The assault on Kobani is energising Kurds throughout the region with 3,000 fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) based in Iraq’s Qandil mountains reported to be crossing from Iraq into Syria and heading for Kobani.

The Turkish security forces closed the border for a period on Sunday after clashes between them and the refugees. They fired tear gas and water after stopping Kurds taking aid to Kobani according to one account, or because stones were thrown at them as they pushed back crowds of Kurdish onlookers, according to another. Most of those crossing are women, children and the elderly, with men of military age staying behind to fight.

Many Kurds are expressing bitterness towards the Turkish government, claiming that it is colluding with ISIS to destroy the independent enclaves of the Syrian Kurds, who number 2.5 million, along the Turkish border.

Nevertheless, the strange circumstances of both the capture of the 49 Turks and their release shows that Ankara has a different and more intimate relationship with ISIS than other countries. Pro-ISIS Turkish websites say that the Turks were released on the direct orders of “the caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. They had been moved to Raqqa, the Syrian headquarters of ISIS from Mosul, and both men and women were well-dressed and appeared to have suffered little harm from their imprisonment. This is in sharp contrast to the treatment of Alan Henning, the British taxi driver seized when taking aid to Syria, and of the journalists who have been ritually murdered by ISIS.

A number of factors do not quite add up: at the time the diplomats and their families were seized in June it was reported that they had asked Ankara if they could leave Mosul, but their request was refused. It was later reported by a pro-government newspaper that the Consul-General in Mosul, Ozturk Yilmaz, had been told by Ankara to leave, but had not done so. Former Turkish diplomats say that disobedience to his government’s instructions by a senior envoy on such a serious matter is inconceivable.

Critics of Erdogan and his Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu say that since the first uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in 2011 they have made a series of misjudgements about developments in Syria and how Turkey should respond to them.

Having failed to persuade Bashar al-Assad to make changes, they assumed he would be overthrown by the rebels. They made little effort to distinguish jihadi rebels crossing the 560 mile long Syrian-Turkish border from the others. Some 12,000 foreign jihadis, many destined to become suicide bombers, entered Syria and Iraq from Turkey. Only at the end of 2013, under pressure from the US, did Turkey begin to increase border security making it more difficult for foreign or Turkish jihadis to pass through, though it is still possible. A Kurdish news agency reports that three ISIS members, two from Belgium and one from France, were detained by the Syrian Kurdish militia at the weekend as they crossed into Syria from Turkey.

The hostages had no idea they were going to be freed until they got a telephone call from Davutoglu. While treated better than other hostages, they were still put under pressure, being forced to watch videos of other captives being beheaded “to break their morale” according to Yilmaz. He said that ISIS did not torture people though it threatened to do so: “The only thing they do is to kill them.”

“The Turkish government may not be collaborating with ISIS at this moment, but ISIS has benefited from Turkey’s tolerant attitude towards the jihadi movements. As with other anti-Assad governments, Ankara has claimed that there is a difference between the “moderate” rebels of the Free Syrian Army and the al-Qaeda-type movements that does not really exist on the ground inside Syria,” the article said.

The Independent. Turkey accused of colluding with Isis to oppose Syrian Kurds and Assad following surprise release of 49 hostages
Photo: Radikal
http://youtu.be/f_2MyQx98J4

Why did ISIL agree to give up the Turkish hostages?

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e-uslu-b-1EMRE USLU
e.uslu@todayszaman.com

The “hostage crisis” between Turkey and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is one of the most mysterious and bizarre “crises” that any nation could face. When the Turkish Consulate General in Mosul was seized and 49 people — including Turkish diplomats and security personal — were taken by ISIL, many people asked why the consulate hadn’t been evacuated.

Conflicting statements were released; after that, then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan confidently stated that Turkey would take the hostages with ease, as if they were not in the hand of the most brutal terrorists. Many people believed that it was a political saga that both the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government and ISIL had agreed upon rather than a real hostage-taking.

Although ISIL had the Turkish diplomats in its hands, they were treated as if they were not hostages. For instance, the Turkish consul was allowed to use his cellphone during his captivity of more than 100 days. ISIL is not a stupid organization which does not know that an electronic signal could be used as intelligence to reveal where the hostages are. In order for ISIL to allow the Turkish diplomat to use his cellphone, it must have had a guarantee that Turkey would not conduct an operation to rescue the hostages.

Like its beginning, the hostage-taking saga ended in a bizarre way. ISIL released the Turkish hostages, but left many unanswered questions behind it.

A retired American diplomat friend of mine raised the following questions:

“It was good news indeed that the Turkish hostages were released, but the circumstances, as reported in the Turkish press, do not ring true. No shots were fired, no military pressure was applied, and no ransom paid. Why, then, did ISIL agree to give up the hostages? There must have been a quid pro quo. The assumption among some of the bloggers here is that Turkey agreed to something that ISIL wanted, like a guarantee not to engage in offensive operations against the ‘Islamic State’.”

These are some of the questions that remain unanswered. At this stage no one, except a few people who negotiated with ISIL, can answer these questions.

More importantly, I don’t think the Turkish press — and especially the pro-government media outlets — will give us accurate background information about the negotiation process.

It is a typical tendency of Turkish media outlets that under such circumstances, they run heroic stories, most of them fabricated with barely any truth in them. Thus, I tend to read the Turkish press with caution these days. It would take years for the Turkish press to write true stories about events like this.

It is not a new phenomenon to the Turkish media. We know it from the Abdullah Öcalan case. When Öcalan was brought to Turkey, we read many heroic stories about how he had been captured. Similarly, we read stories how other Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants such as Şemdin Sakık were brought to Turkey.

In order to understand what has really happened between Turkey and ISIL, the pro-government Turkish media is the least reliable source of information. I prefer to follow the news from opposition media outlets and pro-ISIL Internet sites.

Tevhidhaber.net, a pro-ISIL website that openly and freely publicizes in Turkey — which is another bizarre fact, that the Turkish authorities are shutting down Twitter and YouTube and closing Twitter accounts which criticize the government but allow ISIL to freely propagate in and recruit from Turkey — stated that Turkey had guaranteed not to join the international coalition against ISIL.

As a security expert, I will make some guesses about the possibilities of what Turkey might have promised to ISIL to get the hostages back.

First, as the ISIL website claimed, some form of guarantee to not join the coalition against ISIL. Another possibility is to give ISIL a promise to delay possible international operations inside Syria to allow it to gain some time and more territory. If these are not possible, Turkey may even offer to play an intermediary role between the West and ISIL to end the violence.

Second, Turkey may provide strategic information to ISIL to defeat its enemies in Syria and Iraq. In fact, when ISIL was pushed back in Iraq, it launched offensives against the PKK/Democratic Union Party (PYD) stronghold Kobane and seized some strategic locations. Without information such as strategic intelligence about the locations of PYD units and powerful weaponry, it would have been difficult for ISIL to win against the trained PKK militants.

Third, instead of giving direct aid to ISIL, Turkey might have given aid in the form of economic, armament or intelligence help to the pro-ISIL tribal leaders who facilitated the negotiations.

Turkish hostages freed, but questions linger

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By SUZAN FRASER and RAPHAEL SATTER, Associated Press

Updated 8:54 am, Saturday, September 20, 2014

628x471ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish authorities say they have freed 49 hostages from one of the world’s most ruthless militant groups without firing a shot, paying a ransom or offering a quid pro quo.

But as the well-dressed men and women captured by the Islamic State group more than three months ago clasped their families Saturday on the tarmac of the Turkish capital’s airport, experts had serious doubts about the government’s story.

The official explanation “sounds a bit too good to be true,” said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat who chairs the Istanbul-based Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies. “There are some very legitimate and unanswered questions about how this happened.”

The hostages — whose number included two small children — were seized from the Turkish Consulate in Mosul after the Islamic State group overran the Iraqi city on June 11. Turkish leaders gave only the broadest outlines of their rescue Saturday.

 

Turkish hostages seized in northern Iraq are free: Davutoglu,

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(Where they hostages realy)?

(Reuters) – Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Saturday 49 Turkish hostages seized by Islamic State militants in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in June have been brought safely back to Turkey by the country’s intelligence agency.

The hostages, including diplomats, soldiers and children, were seized from Turkey’s consulate-general in June. Davutoglu said they were being brought to the southern Turkish city of Sanliurfa.

 

(Reporting by Orhan Coskun; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Paul Tait)