Turkish left-wing extremist organisations

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Turkish left-wing extremist organisations mainly direct their agitation against the existing social order in Turkey, where these groupings also carry out terrorist activities. In order to address the widest possible public, they endeavour to appear as representatives of immigrants' and workers' interests in Germany. This is how they discuss issues pertaining to German foreigner and social laws.

ZoomLogo of the „Marxistische Leninistische Kommunistische Partei“ (MLKP)

In Germany, Turkish left-wing extremist groupings have around 2,500 adherents, with c. 1,300 of them belonging to the Turkish Communist Party / Marxists-Leninists (TKP/ML), c. 650 to the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party – Front (DHKP-C), and almost 600 adherents to the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP).

ZoomLogo of the „Revolutionäre Volksbefreiungspartei-Front“ (DHKP-C)

Among the German-based organisations of the Turkish left-wing extremist spectrum, the DHKP-C, banned in Germany since August 1998, is the most important one. In Turkey, it claims responsibility for a large number of most serious terrorist attacks against members and facilities of security authorities and the judiciary. In 2015, DHKP-C activists have resumed the series of major terrorist attacks of 2012 and 2013, which they had discontinued in 2014. On 31 March 2015, a Turkish public prosecutor was taken hostage by two DHKP-C adherents in Istanbul/Turkey. When the police tried to free the hostage, the latter as well as the kidnappers were killed. As a response to the police action, the following day two DHKP-C activists carried out an armed attack on the police headquarters in Istanbul, with one female attacker killed, two police officers and another attacker injured.

Solidarity work in support of DHKP-C detainees in Germany is among the organisation's focal activities in the Federal Republic. In May and June 2015, the Anatolian Federation – a cover organisation of the DHKP-C – staged actions in solidarity with adherents imprisoned in Germany who were on hunger strike in protest against the prison conditions they consider discriminating.

On 6 May 2015, the Federal Minister of the Interior prohibited the dissemination of the DHKP-C weekly "Yürüyüş".