Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isil) has publicly called on its supporters to attack Turkey for the first time, after Ankara allied itself with Washington against the jihadist group.
In a video issued on Monday, an Isil spokesman calls Turkish president Recep Tayep Erdogan a "tyrant traitor" and exhorts its followers inside the country to rise up “wherever they are and however they can” against the government. In the video, entitled “A Message to Turkey”, Isil accuses Mr Erdogan of being allied to the “American Crusaders, the caretakers of the Jews,” and the “criminal atheists” of the Kurdish militant faction the Kurdistan Workers’ Union, or PKK.
"People of Turkey, you must rise and fight those Crusaders and atheists and tyrants who tricked you and made you slaves of the Crusders, you must fight them before it is too late," it said.
The call to arms comes after the Turkish government began a wide-scale campaign to destroy Isil following a suicide bombing last July in Suruc, near the Syrian border, that killed 32 people and was blamed on Isil.
