Salih Mirzabeyoğlu


Salih Mirzabeyoğlu was a Turkish Islamic fundamentalist with Sayyid origin. His family were close to both the Naqshabandi and Nurcu Islamic brotherhoods, and were involved with the Kurdish Sheyh Seit rebellion in 1925 against the newly founded Turkish Republic. Like most IBDA-C members, he was of Kurdish ethnicity.
In 1975, he and his friends published a political magazine called Gölge. Mirzabeyoğlu was influenced by the Islamist poet Necip Fāzıl Kısakürek who published a magazine called Büyük Doğu.
He is the ideologue and alleged leader of the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front, a militant Islamist group present in Turkey. He was arrested on 29 December 1998 for allegedly trying to overthrow the constitutional order by force. Subsequently, following the IBDA-C concept of 'leaderless resistance', further attacks on banks, synagogues, churches places serving alcohol and TV stations were claimed by groups who said they were part of IBDA-C. The bombings in Istanbul claimed 65 lives including that of the British consul general Roger Short. Mirzabeyoğlu was sentenced to life imprisonment.
On July 23, 2014 he was released from prison, and on November 29, 2014 consulted with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan