ANKARA, July 24 (RIA Novosti) - Turkish special forces detained some 200 suspected members of the banned Hizb ut-Tahrir group on Friday in simultaneous raids spread across 23 provinces in the country, Ankara's security forces said.
Hizb ut-Tahrir, created in 1953 in Palestine, says it promotes nonviolent political Islam with the aim of uniting Muslims into a pan-Islamic state. The group insists it does not support terrorism, but is outlawed as a religious extremist group in Turkey and many other countries.
The United States does not consider Hizb ut-Tahrir a terrorist group and some 500 Hizb ut-Tahrir members gathered for a conference called "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam" near Chicago on Monday, causing much alarm in the area and sparking protests.
Walid Phares, director of the Future of Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told FOXNews.com that Hizb ut-Tahrir does not train members to carry out terrorist acts like Al Qaeda but focuses on indoctrinating young people in an ideology that calls for the formation of an empire governed according to Islamic law and condones any means to achieve it, including militant jihad.
