al-Qaeda: outsourcing in Turkey?

As Turkey tries to recover from the bombings in Istanbul, investigators 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 Lebanese organization that shares its name, is a loose association of some 20,000 Islamic extremists based in Bingol, an impoverished province on the Iraq border. Officials say three of the four bombers who carried out the suicide attacks — and many of their accomplices — called the province home.

If Turkish authorities are right, Hizballah may be the latest group to have joined al-Qaeda's roster of terrorist associates. A highly decentralized organization, al-Qaeda is increasingly outsourcing its global operations to local terrorists, which is partly why the group poses such a challenge to the world's terrorist hunters.

Turkish analysts say that several of the 21 suspected militants charged so far in the bombings trained in al-Qaeda camps before 2001 and perhaps with Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda-linked group that was based in Kurdish areas of northern Iraq before the U.S. invasion. Mehmet Farac, an expert on Turkey's Muslim militants, says the group may have linked up with al-Qaeda planners over the past year to help it regain ground lost since 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 potential 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 investigators rounded up their suspects. "These men were known to [the police]," says Emin Sirin, a former member of parliament for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. "They are no strangers."