Al-Qaeda's Tracks?

As Turkey reels from last month's suicide bombings in Istanbul--which killed 61 and seemed to open a new front in the war on terrorism--Turkish police are homing in on several obscure Islamic militant groups, notably Turkish Hizballah, a senior police official tells TIME. Security analysts say Hizballah, not to be confused with the radical Lebanese organization that shares its name, is a loose association of some 20,000 extremists based in Bingol, an impoverished province bordering Iraq. Turkish officials say three of the four suicide bombers, and many of their accomplices, called Bingol home.

If Turkish authorities are right, Hizballah may be among the latest groups to have joined al-Qaeda's roster of terrorist associates. A decentralized organization, al-Qaeda has traditionally outsourced its global operations to local groups, which is partly why it poses such a challenge to the world's terrorist hunters. Turkish analysts say many of the 21 suspected militants charged so far in the bombings trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan before 2001--and perhaps with Ansar al-Islam, an al-Qaeda-linked group that was based in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq before the U.S. invasion. Mehmet Farac, an expert on Turkey's Islamic militants, says Hizballah may have linked up with al-Qaeda planners over the past year to regain ground it lost after its leader, Huseyin Velioglu, was killed in a police shoot-out in 2000. "Mutual interest is key to this partnership," says Farac. "Al-Qaeda wants to hit U.S., British and Israeli interests; Hizballah wants to prove it is back."

Hizballah's involvement could prove embarrassing to Turkey's security forces, which once cultivated the group as a proxy militia in their 15-year war against Kurdish separatists. That old association probably accounts for the astonishing speed with which police rounded up their suspects. "These men were known to [the police]," says Emin Sirin, a former minister in Turkey's Parliament. "They are no strangers."

--By Andrew Purvis and Pelin Turgut