Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authorities has prioritized safety and authorities commonly perform safety raids. File.
| Picture Credit score: Reuters
Safety forces within the Turkish capital carried out sweeping raids on Tuesday (June 23, 2026) forward of subsequent month’s NATO summit, and detained greater than 200 individuals with suspected hyperlinks to extremist teams, together with the Islamic State group, officers mentioned.
Some media shops, nonetheless, reported that a few of these detained had been politicians or activists, resulting in allegations of arbitrary detentions.
U.S. President Donald Trump is predicted to hitch different leaders of the 32‑member alliance in Ankara for the July 7–8 summit.
Turkey is planning strict safety measures for the summit, together with banning demonstrations and proscribing entry to roads resulting in airports, in addition to sealing off areas across the summit venue and accommodations internet hosting delegations.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authorities has prioritized safety and authorities commonly perform safety raids. Final month, safety forces detained 324 individuals suspected of hyperlinks to the Islamic State group in a nationwide sweep.
Early on Tuesday, Turkish prosecutors issued detention orders for 241 suspects, and 209 of them had been subsequently taken into custody in police and gendarmerie raids round Ankara, in line with a press release from the chief prosecutor’s workplace. The raids had been nonetheless underway later Tuesday to absorb the remainder of the suspects.
Amongst these detained had been 56 alleged Islamic State militants and 35 members of the Revolutionary Folks’s Liberation Get together/Entrance, a far‑left group identified for armed assaults and assassinations in Turkey, the assertion mentioned.
Birgun, an impartial left-leaning newspaper, and different media reported {that a} politician, an LGBTQ activist and not less than three attorneys allegedly near left-wing teams had been additionally among the many detained. That result in issues that the federal government might be utilizing safety as a pretext to silence critics and stop attainable anti-NATO demonstrations in the course of the summit.
“This arbitrary wave of detentions and arrests focusing on leftist and socialist establishments as soon as once more reveals the state the nation has reached,” the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Get together, DEM, mentioned. “Turning Ankara into a large jail with bans imposed for the NATO Summit is unacceptable.”
The Islamic State group has additionally carried out quite a few lethal assaults in Turkey, together with the 2017 New 12 months’s taking pictures at an Istanbul nightclub that killed 39 individuals.
Printed – June 24, 2026 04:49 am IST