The physical “caliphate” of the Islamic State (ISIS), the most barbaric terrorist organization of our time, may lie in ruins across the blood-soaked lands of Syria and Iraq, but its ghosts refuse to be exorcised. And now, one of those ghosts has returned to deliver a confession that threatens to implicate the highest office of a NATO member state in a pact with the devil.
In an explosive testimony obtained by researchers from the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE), a high-ranking ISIS militant, described as the group’s “ambassador to Turkey,” has laid bare the details of a secret, mutually beneficial alliance between the terrorist group and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government. The militant, Abu Mansour al Maghrebi, whose mission was direct negotiation with Turkish intelligence (MİT), makes a claim so startling it demands global attention: President Erdoğan himself sought a private, one-on-one meeting with him.
“One of his intelligence officers said Erdoğan wants to see you privately,” Abu Mansour revealed, adding that the meeting ultimately did not materialize. But the request alone confirms what many have long suspected and what brave journalists like Can Dündar have risked their lives to expose: the relationship between Ankara and ISIS was not one of adversaries, but of collaborators engaged in a dark and cynical realpolitik.
For years, Erdoğan’s government has vehemently denied any connection to the jihadist scourge. Yet, Abu Mansour’s testimony, corroborated by a mountain of evidence from other defectors, official reports, and on-the-ground journalism, paints a damning picture of calculated duplicity. Turkey, according to the ISIS negotiator, was the Caliphate’s lifeline.
“Turkey is considered a road for us for medications, food – so many things enter in the name of aid. The gates were open,” he stated, confirming that Turkish hospitals were used to treat wounded ISIS fighters. While he claims Turkey did not provide weapons directly, he exposes an even more insidious truth: weapons were easily acquired from Turkish-backed Syrian opposition groups, sometimes for as little as a pack of cigarettes.
This open border policy, the infamous “Jihadi Highway,” allowed tens of thousands of foreign fighters from across the globe to flood into Syria, transforming a regional conflict into a global catastrophe. Ankara could have sealed its border. It chose not to.
The benefits of this unholy alliance, as detailed by Abu Mansour, were twofold. For ISIS, it provided a secure 300-kilometer rear flank and an indispensable logistical supply chain. For Erdoğan, it offered a proxy army to pursue two of his primary obsessions: crushing the burgeoning Kurdish autonomy in Syria and advancing a neo-Ottoman foreign policy. “They wanted all of the north of Syria,” Abu Mansour says of Ankara’s ambitions. “They cannot deal directly with the situation, but they want to destroy the Kurdish ummah, so they deal with the situation [via ISIS] and get benefits from the Islamic State.”
This was a “double game” played on Turkey’s NATO allies, who were led to believe that Ankara was a partner in the fight against terror. All the while, the testimony suggests, Erdoğan’s government was enabling that very terror.
The partnership extended to the financial realm. Abu Mansour confirms that ISIS oil was “mostly sold to Turkey through middlemen,” a multi-million-dollar-a-day enterprise that fueled the Caliphate’s war machine and, according to numerous reports, enriched circles close to the presidential palace.
Perhaps the most chilling revelation from Abu Mansour’s confession concerns the wave of horrific ISIS attacks on Turkish soil, including the 2015 Ankara train station bombing that killed over 100 civilians and the 2016 Istanbul airport attack. He asserts that the orders for these massacres did not come from the ISIS headquarters in Raqqa. Instead, he claims, they were orchestrated by Turkish intelligence agents who had infiltrated ISIS. The goal? To create a public outcry and a pretext for Erdoğan to “use his army to attack Syria.” If this claim holds true, it represents a betrayal so profound, so monstrous, that it amounts to the state sacrificing its own citizens for geopolitical gain.
The evidence of this dark relationship is undeniable. Can Dündar is in exile for proving that MİT trucks ferried weapons to jihadists. Western intelligence reports have documented how Turkey became the primary source for ISIS’s bomb-making materials. And now, we have a detailed confession from an insider.
Abu Mansour’s testimony is more than just another news story. It is a vital piece of evidence in a case against a regime that, for years, appears to have aided and abetted a genocidal terror group for its own political ends. The blood of countless innocent victims—in Syria, Iraq, and across Europe—is a stain that cannot be washed away by political denial. The question is no longer if Ankara collaborated with ISIS, but when the world, and the Turkish people, will hold Erdoğan accountable for it.
