49 Turks held by group freed

Hostages of Islamic State spent 101 days in captivity

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, center left, stands with freed hostages at the airport in Ankara, Turkey, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2014. Dozens of Turkish hostages seized by Islamic militants in Iraq three months ago were freed and safely returned to Turkey on Saturday ending Turkey’s most serious hostage crisis. The 49 hostages were captured from the Turkish Consulate in Mosul, Iraq on June 11, when the Islamic State group overran the city in its surge to seize large swaths of Iraq and Syria. (AP Photo)
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, center left, stands with freed hostages at the airport in Ankara, Turkey, Saturday, Sept. 20, 2014. Dozens of Turkish hostages seized by Islamic militants in Iraq three months ago were freed and safely returned to Turkey on Saturday ending Turkey’s most serious hostage crisis. The 49 hostages were captured from the Turkish Consulate in Mosul, Iraq on June 11, when the Islamic State group overran the city in its surge to seize large swaths of Iraq and Syria. (AP Photo)

ISTANBUL -- Forty-nine Turkish hostages who had been held for months in Iraq by Islamic State militants were returned to Turkey on Saturday after what Turkey said was a covert operation led by its intelligence agency.

The hostages, including diplomats and their families, had been seized in June from the Turkish Consulate in the Iraqi city of Mosul.

"The Turkish intelligence agency has followed the situation very sensitively and patiently since the beginning and, as a result, conducted a successful rescue operation," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in a statement Saturday.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said Saturday that he is prepared to give whatever support is needed in the fight against the Islamic State group but called for a "comprehensive strategy" to tackle the roots of extremism across the region.

In response to recent attacks, hundreds of disparate Kurdish fighters have raced from Turkey and Iraq into neighboring Syria to defend a Kurdish area under siege by Islamic State militants. Thousands of Iraqi Kurds, in fear for their lives, have crossed into a Turkey border town, Sanliurfa, from Kobani, a Syrian village that Islamic State militants have surrounded.

The details of the Turkish hostages' release were unclear. The semiofficial Turkish news agency Anadolu reported that Turkey had not paid ransom for them or engaged in a military operation. It said Turkey had used drones to track the hostages, who had been moved to different locations at least eight times during their 101 days in captivity.

The agency said Turkish intelligence teams had tried five times to rescue the hostages, but each attempt had been thwarted by clashes in the area where they were being held.

One senior U.S. official, who asked not to be named, said Saturday that Turkey had not notified the United States before securing the return of the hostages, nor had it made a specific request for U.S. military help in connection with their release.

"I am sharing joyful news, which as a nation we have been waiting for," Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said in Baku, Azerbaijan, where he was on an official visit. "After intense efforts that lasted days and weeks, in the early hours, our citizens were handed over to us and we brought them back to our country," he said.

The prime minister left Baku for the Turkish province of Urfa, where the freed hostages, who included Consul General Ozturk Yilmaz, other diplomats, children and consulate guards, initially had been taken from Raqqa, the de facto headquarters of the Islamic State militants.

One hostage, who was not identified publicly, told a Turkish reporter for CNN aboard the flight to Urfa that the hostages had been moved eight times.

"We had tough days, very bad days," he said.

Another hostage, asked whether he and the others seized had been tortured, said, "Surely, we went through certain things."

One former hostage, Alptekin Esirgun, told the Anadolu news agency that militants held a gun to Yilmaz's head and tried to force him to make a statement.

Yilmaz described Mosul as "the most dangerous place in the world, a place thousands of people get killed," and "the hub of terror incidents." He said it was "nowhere easy to wave a flag."

The news agency said the hostages had been held at eight separate addresses in Mosul and their whereabouts were monitored by drones and other means.

Yilmaz said he was proud of the strength that the Turkish state has shown during the ordeal and praised efforts that led to their release.

But as the men, women and children captured by the Islamic State group more than three months ago clasped their families Saturday on the tarmac of the Ankara airport, experts had 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 is chairman of the Istanbul-based Centre for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies. "There are some very legitimate and unanswered questions about how this happened."

Turkish leaders gave only the broadest outlines of their rescue Saturday. Davutoglu said the hostages' release was the work of the country's intelligence agency rather than a special forces operation.

"After intense efforts that lasted days and weeks, in the early hours our citizens were handed over to us and we brought them back," Davutoglu said.

Egypt's stance

In his first interview with a foreign media outlet since taking office in June, Egypt's el-Sissi sought to present himself and his government as being at the vanguard of confronting militancy, citing it as the reason for his ouster of Egypt's first freely elected president more than a year ago -- a move that brought international criticism and strained ties with a top ally, the United States.

He said that Egyptians had realized the danger of "political Islam" and that if he had not acted, the Arab world's most populous nation would have faced "civil war" and bloodshed now seen in Iraq and Syria.

"I warned about the great danger a year ago," he said. "But it was not clear [to others] until the events in Iraq and the Islamic State's sweep" over much of that country.

El-Sissi did not elaborate on what support Egypt might give to the U.S.-led coalition aimed at fighting the extremist group.

When asked if Egypt might provide airspace access or logistical support for airstrikes, he said, "We are completely committed to giving support. We will do whatever is required."

But he appeared to rule out sending troops, saying Iraq's military is strong enough to fight the militants and "it's not a matter of ground troops from abroad."

Speaking from his Ittihadiya presidential palace, he said it was "very important" to stop foreign extremists from joining militant groups in Syria and Iraq, warning that they will return to their home nations, including in Europe. But he said a broader strategy is needed that also addresses poverty and improves education throughout the region.

Militants of the extremist Islamic State group have been barreling through the area near the borders of Turkey, Syria and Iraq for the past three days, prompting Kurdish leaders to plead for international help.

Civilians seeking safety began gathering on the Turkish border Thursday. Turkey did not let them in at first, saying it would provide them with aid on the Syrian side of the border instead. By Friday, it had changed its mind and started to let in several thousand.

The numbers grew quickly as more entry points opened, and by late Saturday afternoon, more than 60,000 had crossed, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said.

Their numbers add to the 2.8 million Syrians who have become refugees in the past three years, and another 6.4 million who have been displaced within their own country -- nearly 40 percent of Syria's pre-war population of 23 million.

"Kobani is facing the fiercest and most barbaric attack in its history," said official Mohammed Saleh Muslim, head of Syria's powerful Kurdish Democratic Union. The group's members dominate the Syrian Kurdish group known as the YPK, which is fighting the Islamic State militants.

"Kobani calls on all those who defend humane and democratic values ... to stand by Kobani and support it immediately. The coming hours are decisive," he said.

Several hundred Kurdish fighters streamed into the Kobani area from Turkey, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Kurdish official Nawaf Khalil also confirmed the movement of fighters into Syria.

Some 600 fighters from the Kurdistan Workers' Party also crossed from Iraq into Syria, heading toward Kobani, said a military official in Iraq's northern Kurdish region. That official spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to journalists.

Ethnic Kurds dominate a mountainous region that straddles Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

Turkey's next move

Once back in Turkey, the 49 freed hostages were flown to Ankara to be reunited with their families. They were advised not to talk immediately to the news media.

Hundreds of people showed up at Esenboga Airport in Ankara, waving flags as they waited to welcome the freed diplomats, television reports showed.

Families rushed to the aircraft to greet their returning loved ones. The ex-hostages emerged wearing clean dresses and suits and showed little sign of having been held captive for more than three months.

"We as a strong state brought our nationals back home, but how about millions of others that expect to return home?" said Davutoglu, addressing the cheerful crowd and underlining the growing refugee crisis along Turkey's southern borders.

The prime minister on Saturday praised Turkish news outlets that abode by the media ban that the government almost immediately imposed in June on the hostage situation, and officials refrained from making any statements except assurances on the well-being of the nationals.

Turkey, a predominantly Sunni Muslim country and a NATO ally, had been reluctant to join a coalition to defeat the militant group, citing the safety of its 49 kidnapped citizens, but it was unclear if the release of the hostages would change Turkey's policy toward the militants.

So far, it has agreed to contribute to an international alliance against the group, which has been gaining ground across Turkey's southern borders.

Ankara agreed to open its Incirlik air base in the southern Adana province for logistical and humanitarian support and pledged to strengthen border security, especially in the south. Its goal there is to stop trafficking of foreign fighters that have long used Turkey's porous borders to join the militant group's front lines.

Turkey has a no-entry list of 6,000 potential jihadist suspects and last year deported 1,000 foreigners on the basis of suspected links to jihadist groups in the region, a government official said in a recent interview.

While Ankara will no doubt remain concerned about the Islamic State's possible retaliation throughout Turkey if it contributes effectively to a military operation against it, analysts said, the hostages' release still might be a game changer.

"One of the main hurdles for Turkey's strategy was the hostage crisis and therefore the release of the hostages will no doubt give Turkey more freedom with respect to its own strategy to resist the Islamic State," said Mensur Akgun, director of the Global Political Trends Center in Istanbul.

In Washington, one U.S. official said Saturday that while the Obama administration was pleased with Turkey's contributions so far, it hoped that the change in circumstances of the hostages would allow Turkey to take on a more robust role. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about diplomatic matters.

The U.S. has yet to launch any airstrikes in Syria to stem advances by Islamic State fighters, but airstrikes in Iraq have helped Kurdish fighters there and the Iraqi army stem attacks by Islamic State forces.

U.S. Central Command reported five airstrikes against militants Friday and Saturday, including one southwest of Baghdad that destroyed an Islamic State boat carrying supplies across the Euphrates River. The four other strikes were northwest of Haditha, targeting armed vehicles, checkpoints and guard outposts.

Elsewhere, a renowned jihadi ideologue on Saturday urged the Islamic State group to release another hostage, British aid worker Alan Henning, saying Islam forbids harming non-Muslims who work with relief agencies.

Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi, who was released by Jordan in June after serving a five-year sentence on terror charges, said in a statement posted on his website that non-Muslims who aid needy Muslims should be protected.

The Islamic State group has threatened to kill Henning -- a British former taxi driver who was taken captive in December shortly after crossing into Syria from Turkey in an aid convoy -- in retaliation for U.S. and European military action against it.

Al-Maqdisi said Henning worked with a charitable organization led by Muslims that sent several aid convoys to help the Syrian people. "Is it reasonable that his reward is being kidnapped and slaughtered? ... He should be rewarded with thanks."

Information for this article was contributed by Sebnem Arsu, Ceylan Yeginsu and Michael R. Gordon of The New York Times and by Suzan Fraser, Raphael Satter, Qassim Abdul-Zahra, Matt Lee, Hamza Hendawi, Ian Phillips, Lee Keath, Diaa Hadid and Maamoun Youssef of The Associated Press.

A Section on 09/21/2014

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