ISTANBUL—Last month, the first edition of the Islamic State group’s Turkish-language magazine contained not a word of criticism of the Turkish government. This week, the second edition calls Istanbul occupied territory and blasts President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a tyrant.
The difference? Turkey has started to crack down on the group under Western pressure and Islamic State now sees Turkey as the enemy, raising the stakes in the struggle against the extremist network. And Turkey’s decisive response on Friday — airstrikes on Islamic State targets and 290 arrests nationwide — show how seriously the nation is now taking a threat it had long downplayed.
The abrupt shift in Islamic State’s Turkish propaganda magazine shows just how quickly a tacit truce has come apart.
But the underlying changes have not happened overnight. Islamic State — also known by acronyms ISIS and ISIL — has spent years building its network inside Turkey, even as Turkish security services monitored the group to glean valuable intelligence.
“There is significant evidence that ISIS has built a network and an infrastructure in Turkey to support its operations in both Syria and Iraq,” said Andreas Krieg, an analyst at King’s College London. “Turkey has never thought that these jihadists would ever become a problem for Turkey itself. Quite on the contrary, they were under the impression that jihadists who wanted to go to Syria are embarking on a local — not a global — jihad.”
