Rebel speaker blames Mukhabarat for attack

ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News

Khoja says Syrians in camps should avoid reacting against provocations.

The Syrian secret police, known as the Mukhabarat, is cooperating with some groups in Turkey, according to a Syrian opposition official who said the May 11 attacks in the southern province of Hatay’s Reyhanlı district resulted from this cooperation.

The explosions in Hatay’s Reyhanlı in which 49 people were killed, were planned by Mukhabarat and carried out by an armed leftist group with the nickname “Acilciler” – the hasty ones – in the late 1970s, Khalid Khoja, Turkey Representative of the Syrian National Coalition told Hürriyet Daily News on May 13.

One of the founders of the “Acilciler,” Mihraç Ural, a Turkish citizen, is known to have been in Syria for the past five years and working with the Syrian state, said Khoja. He claimed that a previous explosion at the Cilvegözü border gate with Syria was revealed to be organized by the same group. He accused the Syrian secret police of using this group in such attacks in order to influence public opinion in Turkey by using the nationalist feelings of people.

Khoja said that similar attacks might have come from similar local groups which have links to Iran and drew attention to the fact Iran was close to the Syrian regime and also to discontent with the withdrawal of outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from Turkish soil.

“Around 15 percent of Syrians in Turkey are in contact with Mukhabarat. They are in the camps, they are in the city. It is very difficult to differentiate those people from Syrian refugees who left the country to escape from violence,” Khoja said. He also said that the rumors that Syrians burnt a Turkish flag in Reyhanlı were not true and were made up by Mukhabarat members in the city a few days before the explosions.