By Metin Turcan, Contributor for Al-Monitor - Turkey admitted to an exchange with the Islamic State for their hostages, but questions remain on what Turkey promised in return.
The circumstances of the release of the 49 Turkish hostages in Mosul by the Islamic State (IS) are widely questioned. So, how was their release accomplished?
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York attracted much attention, especially when he said, “It is of course not possible to reach this result without having discussions. You do have contacts, but who does it, or how does it work? When we say the word "operation," people only think of airstrikes, bombs, aircraft, weaponry. But an operation isn't only that. Operations are political sometimes, or diplomatic, or civilian. And they involve discussions, contacts.”
Erdogan's remarks reinforced suppositions of an exchange of hostages. According to a report by daily Hurriyet’s Deniz Zeyrek — citing reliable sources — in exchange for Turkish hostages, a group that included the wife and children of Abdulhamed al-Abidi al-Deilimi, a senior commander of the al-Qaeda-Iraq wing of Abu Musab Zarqawi who was killed in Aleppo last January, was released to the Islamic State (IS).
The Syrian outfit that released this group of IS prisoners was the Liwa al-Tawhid Brigades, a leading proponent of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria that operated under the banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Liwa al-Tawhid first made a name for itself by claiming responsibility for the July 18, 2012, bomb attack in Damascus that killed relatives of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and senior Syrian officials.
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