The Jihadi Highway

The ISIS had sunk its tendrils deep into Turkey after the nation was named as part of a Nato alliance to combat the jihadis group. US President Barack Obama said Turkey was part of a “core coalition” to fight Isis at the NATO sunmit in Wales. Stories shared with Newsweek in recent days by Deniz Sahin revealed this finding. Deniz ex-husband was a former alcoholic who had kicked his addiction and turned instead to fundamentalist Islam. Her ex-husband, Sadik, sent her photos a week after taking their children to Isis-controlled Raqqa province. Many fear ISIS would wreak havoc in a nation that attracts 35 million tourists a year. Deniz and other victims of Isis speak of their frustration at police inaction and of their powerlessness to retrieve their loved ones. In her extended family alone, Deniz says, 15 people – including five children – have gone to live under Isis rule or fight in its ranks in recent months.

Other had echoed Deniz's story. They describe an organized recruiting network operating online and through religious study groups. They are targeting young men from Sunni Muslim districts plagued by poverty and drug addiction. One family, whose son joined Isis, says that he was among 19 young men from their neighborhood alone who left for Syria recently, with at least four others planning to join them soon. In June, Turkey’s Milliyet newspaper reported that as many as 3,000 Turks have joined the group. "No other NATO country is as exposed to the threat of Isis jihadism as Turkey is," says Sinan Ulgen, a former diplomat and head of Edam, an Istanbul-based foreign policy think tank.

Dilovasi has long been notorious in Turkey as an industrial dystopia. A town of 45,000, it hosts some 150 factories focused around dirty industries such as scrap metal smelting and paint manufacturing. The air is thick with an acrid chemical stench, and a study by a local university in 2004 found that cancer rates here are two and half times higher than the national average. Meanwhile, Kenan says, it is a haven for cemaats and tarikats – conservative religious movements, which were suppressed by Turkey’s secularist governments but have flourished under the Islamist-rooted administration of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.