Türkiye's National Intelligence Organization has captured a man it describes as a figure in Daesh's Türkiye network and brought him back into the country from a conflict zone, according to Turkish security sources. The man, Talip Güler, had been wanted on an international locate notice, and MİT says it tracked him for years before pulling him out of the fighting zones where he had been operating.
The operation, as the security sources describe it, targeted what the terrorist group ran as its "Türkiye province," a clandestine structure known inside Daesh as the Faruk Office. Güler, who used the code name Abdüsselam Türki, is said to have crossed illegally into Syria in January 2014 and to have worked there in contact with the network's leaders. Anadolu Ajansı and Sözcü both carried the account from the security sources.
The family tie is the thread that led to him. Güler is the younger brother of Kasım Güler, whom Türkiye accuses of having served before 2021 as Daesh's so-called Türkiye province chief and as the finance handler of the Faruk Office. Kasım was himself brought into Türkiye in a 2021 MİT operation, and the agency says that after taking him it kept working on the younger brother, following his movements step by step until it could bring him in too.
Once in Türkiye, Güler gave a statement in which, the security sources say, he admitted what he had done for the group. His account, as they relay it, covered his radicalization inside Türkiye, his illegal crossing into Syria, his joining Daesh, and the work he carried out alongside his brother inside the organization. Those are the state's characterizations of his confession, and the case against him will now move through the courts.
The capture fits a pattern Türkiye has leaned on hard. Rather than wait for suspects it wants to surface at a border, MİT has spent years reaching into Syria and Iraq to seize people it accuses of terrorism and return them for trial, a method it has used against both Daesh and the PKK. The agency framed this operation the way it usually frames them, as part of a continuing effort to break up Daesh's ability to plan attacks inside Türkiye and to map how the group recruits and moves money.
Daesh has struck Türkiye before, in suicide bombings and gun attacks across the last decade, which is the backdrop that makes the Türkiye province structure more than a bureaucratic label. Naming a finance network and pulling in the people accused of running it is the unglamorous half of counterterrorism, the part that happens away from the headlines and years after the attacks it is meant to prevent.