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Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front (Turkey)

İslami Büyükdoǧu Akıncılar Cephesi - IBDA-C

Flag of IBDA-C - Image by Klaus-Michael Schneider, 17 February 2009

Presentation of IBDA-C
Flag of IBDA-C

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Presentation of IBDA-C

The Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front (IBDA-C) is comprised of Turkish Sunni Salafists, a branch of islam acknowledging only the authority and traditions of the old ancestors (in Arabic, السلفية‎, as-salafiyya). The only relevant sources date back to the very first times of Islam, that is the Quran and the Sunna. Other sources and traditions either don't play any role or have a bad connotation.
Considering Turkey's secular regime as illegal, IBDA-C wishes to destroy the Turkish state and constitutional system and replace it with religious rule and law, first in Turkey, and then throughout the world. The group's self-proclaimed goal is to create a Sunni Islamic federate state in the Middle East and to re-establish the Caliphate. They are notably hostile to Shia, Alevi, Christian and Jewish interests. The group has gone about asserting these goals by inflicting armed terror primarily on civilian targets and committing acts of terrorism. The group moved from rhetoric to violence in the 1990s, culminating in a series of 90 bombings and attacks in 1994.

IBDA-C was founded in 1985, others say already in 1970, by "Commander" Salih Izzet Erdiš, as a breakaway faction of the National Salvation Party, at that time headed by Islamic fundamentalist Necmettin Erbakan, who would become Turkey's first Islamist Prime Minister in 1995. Despite Erbakan's success, his more recent Welfare Party was banned by Turkey's courts in 1997, and Erbakan was forced to step down after violating Turkey's constitution.
IBDA-C borrows its ideology from Turkish poet and historian Necip Fazıl Kısakürek (1905-1983), who claimed a return to "pure Islamic values" and the restoration of a universal Islamic caliphate in the Muslim world. He adopted a system of thought called Büyük Doǧu (lit: the Great East), an absolutist ideology promising to bring Muslims closer to success and salvation, with the central idea that truth is only accessible through the practice of Islam. He also argued that the secular nature of Turkey was responsible for the state's inability to ward off what he saw as Western Imperialism. Kısakürek was seen as the pioneer of "ideal Islamic society" by the founders of IBDA-C.

Still today, IBDA-C's leader is "Commander" Salih Izzet Erdiš, a spiritual follower of Kısakürek. Captured on 31 December 1998, Erdiš was sentenced to death in April 2001 for "attempting to overthrow Turkey's secular state by force". Erdiš' death sentence was later changed into captivity, after Ankara had abolished the death penalty in August 2002.

Klaus-Michael Schneider, 17 February 2009

Flag of IBDA-C

The flag of IBDA-C is blue with three white crescents arranged in a triangular pattern at hoist. The inner crescent is accompanied by a white 5-pointed star.

Klaus-Michael Schneider, 17 February 2009