Anti-Israel Flotilla Group Busted in al Qaeda Terror Raid

Turkish police on Tuesday raided the offices of an al Qaeda-linked charity group responsible for organizing the 2010 Gaza flotilla that caused a deadly international incident.

The main offices of the Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), a Turkish charity that claims to support humanitarian causes, were raided by Turkish anti-terror forces in connection with a larger bust on al Qaeda militants, according to Turkish media reports.

IHH has long been suspected of having ties to terror organizations, including Hamas and al Qaeda.

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“It is puzzling that IHH has not already been designated,” the Foundation for Defense of Democracy’s (FDD) Schanzer wrote in 2010. “The group advertises the fact that it is a participating member of the Saudi-based umbrella organization Union of Good (Ittilaf al-Kheir in Arabic). On Nov. 12, 2008, Treasury listed the Union as a terrorist entity, stating that the group was ‘created by Hamas leadership to transfer funds to the terrorist organization.’”

The IHH has been tied to the top terrorists in these organizations and further accused of playing a key role in terror attacks.

“French magistrate Jean-Louis Brougière testified in 2001 that IHH had an ‘important role’ in Ahmed Ressam’s failed ‘millennium plot’ to bomb the Los Angeles airport in late 1999,” according to Schanzer. “Brougiere added that the Turkish IHH was ‘basically helping al Qaeda when [Osama] bin Laden started to want to target U.S. soil.’”

Germany additionally banned IHH in 2010, while the Israelis banned it in 2002 and then again in 2008.

Schanzer told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview that IHH’s ties to terror have become clearer over the years.

“There are these ties that have been hard to ignore and they come up one after the next,” he said.

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