ISTANBUL, Sept. 23 (Xinhua) -- Turkey has been "successfully" continuing its fight against the Islamic State (IS), which has targeted the country with a series of deadly terror attacks since 2015, "amid high potential threat," a security expert told Xinhua on Thursday.
"At present, the threat of radicalism conceptually exists in this geography," Abdullah Agar, a security specialist and writer of a series of books on Turkey's fight against terror organizations, told Xinhua in an exclusive interview.
"In this sense, Turkey could probably face the IS menace again on its soil," he noted, adding that the signs of the threat have become apparent in several latest incidents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
ISIS-K, a local affiliate of the IS in Afghanistan, launched a bloody attack on the Kabul airport at the end of August, leaving more than 180 deaths. At another IS siege in Iraq's northern province of Kirkuk in earlier September, at least 13 security members were killed.
The IS has conducted numerous attacks across Turkey since 2015, including on a nightclub in Istanbul on New Year's Eve on Jan. 1, 2017, killing 39 people. Turkey's counter-terrorism units in response have been conducting operations against the group's members in the country.
Agar stressed that the IS had declared "Turkey as one of its provinces" and the group continues to impose a significant threat, having many cell structures across the country.
"We also see that they (IS militants) keep trying to infiltrate Turkey, especially from the neighboring country Syria," he continued.
Meanwhile, Turkish anti-terror teams detained 14 suspected IS members in operations conducted in Turkey's biggest city Istanbul and the southern province of Adana earlier in the day, the state-run Anadolu agency reported on Thursday.
The Adana Chief Public Prosecutor's Office issued detention warrants for the suspects with alleged links to the Yamacli group, a Salafi group operating under the IS structure in Turkey.
Turkish authorities have recently determined that the IS has been exerting efforts to make the Yamacli group, which had been dissolved by the intense raids of the Turkish security forces, operational again, according to Anadolu.
"We can say that Turkey successfully continues its struggle against the IS to eliminate the threat... and many of its militants are getting caught thanks to the Turkish security forces' frequent operations," Agar noted. Enditem