FETO terror group threat to world peace: Report

By Cankut Tasdan

ANKARA

Fetullah Terrorist Organization (FETO) is "a new generation terror group" which besides being a threat to Turkey is a potential danger to international peace and security, according to a Turkish Police Academy report.

The terrorist group also has the potential to affect inter-state relations, said the report, providing a detailed account on its ties to foreign intelligence services and its activities in various parts of the world.

The report included information about the organization's history, basic characteristics and objectives and its links with the media and education sector as well as its structure in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Focusing on the terror group's ties with the U.S., which hosts headquarters of the group, the report said FETO has a strong infiltration in European countries and stressed that an international fight against the group was needed.

FETO and its U.S.-based leader Fetullah Gulen orchestrated the defeated coup on July 15, 2016, which left 251 people martyred and nearly 2,200 injured.

Ankara also accuses FETO of being behind a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police, and judiciary.

The report pointed to the group's similarity with leftist ethnic terrorist organizations and said: "The organization is destroying its targets, which it cannot eliminate through legal political and civil society activities, through assassination and threats."

The terror group disguises its true intentions to mingle with its sympathizers in Turkey and western powers, the report read.

It also described FETO as "an illegal organization which poses itself as a religious or a civil society movement".

"The structure of FETO constitutes the latest, bloodiest and most global structure of modern cultist radicalization."

The terrorist group, the report said, had been infiltrating in the judicial and educational system, media, intelligence, security institutions as well as the army.

FETO-linked Turkish judges and prosecutors, who at first appear to be unaware of each other, were revealed to have talked to the same overseas phone numbers.

The report underlined the group's strong ties with media organizations, which were used as a platform to infiltrate data and information for their own purposes.

The group through its schools and associations hid their illegal activities around the world. The report revealed that the group was running their schools and associations in the name of westerners or residents of foreign countries.

Through their network of educational institutes the group was also getting a pool of human resource, it added.