Abdullah Bozkurt/Stockholm
The Turkish president’s chief aide, Sefer Turan, who advises on Turkey’s relations with Arab and Muslim nations, was a speaker at an event organized by the Iranian Consulate General under the theme of “Israel must be wiped out,” a Nordic Monitor investigation has revealed.
According to a report published in the April 1994 issue of the Yeryüzü magazine, funded by Iran, Turan hailed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in a speech delivered at the Iranian Consulate General in Istanbul, joining the main theme of the event that Israel must be wiped from the face of the earth.
At the time the event was organized, on March 11, 1994, Turan was the managing editor of a weekly propaganda newspaper called Selam, a mouthpiece for the Iranian mullah regime that was also financed by Iranian intelligence. Selam was later shut down as part of a counterterrorism crackdown on IRGC Quds Force cells in Turkey with operatives indicted, tried and convicted in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Article published in an Iran-funded magazine showed that the Turkish president’s aide attended an event held by the Iranian Consulate General under the theme that Israel must be wiped out:
In his speech Turan also bashed Arab governments for what he claimed was the thwarting of the success of armed resistance movements against Israel. “Whenever the armed Islamic Resistance Movement [Hamas] approached victory in Palestine, it was confronted by puppet Arab regimes,” he said according to remarks quoted in the article.
Turan gave the 1994 Gaza–Jericho Agreement, also known as the Cairo Agreement, between the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin as an example. He pointed out that the deal was aimed at preventing Intifadah (Palestinian uprising).
The Turkish president’s aide further noted that Muslim communities must first be liberated in their own countries and then establish their own free rule to be able to later liberate Jerusalem. He concluded his speech by hailing Khomeini.
Cover of the Yeryüzü magazine, published in Turkish and a mouthpiece of the Iranian regime:
Nordic Monitor previously published confidential documents revealing that Turan was a suspect in an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force investigation that was launched in 2011. His phones were wiretapped under court order as the investigators were looking to uncover an Iranian intelligence network in Turkey and determine how they were plotting to attack Israeli, Jewish and Western targets.
Turan is a hard-core Islamist who was brought into the government by President Erdoğan and helps shape Turkish government policy with respect to Arab and Muslim countries. He was a staunch supporter of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, listed by the United Nations Security Council as an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, in the 1990s.
In a series of articles that appeared mainly in pro-Iran publications in Turkey in the ’90s, Turan defended the terrorist group, justified the murders of civilians and government officials in Egypt and leveled criticism against others who described the Islamic Jihad as a terrorist group and condemned the murders.
In February 2014 Erdoğan stepped in and hushed up the Quds Force investigation before prosecutors had time to bring charges and indict the suspects including Turan, saving his aide from criminal prosecution and helping Iranian spies to escape from Turkey.
