The Washington Post reports:

As abduction teams fanned out across neighborhoods in Nairobi in October, their targets — members of a Turkish religious movement — seemed to have few worries beyond the hassles of a hectic weekday.

One was returning from a visa appointment with his family; a second was at the motor vehicle office for a driving test; still others were trying to beat traffic during the early Friday commute.

By morning’s end, seven Turkish nationals had been abducted at gunpoint, hooded and handcuffed by masked agents traveling in unmarked vehicles, according to Western security officials, witnesses and relatives of the victims. While three were later released, four were taken to a remote airstrip outside the Kenyan capital, officials said, and forced aboard a plane waiting to take them to a Turkish prison near here.

The abductions were the latest of more than 118 “renditions” that Turkey’s intelligence service, MIT, has orchestrated over the past decade, according to the spy agency’s website, making it one of the most aggressive practitioners of such extralegal operations. In Nairobi, MIT relied on Kenyan government operatives to carry out the abductions and was able to bypass Kenyan courts, according to the Western security officials who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive operation.

Turkey has branded this global campaign its own “war on terror” in an echo of the phrase that came to define the period after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. Turkey has also drawn extensively from the U.S. counterterrorism playbook. Beyond renditions, it has used secret detentions, terrorism watch lists, asset seizures and torture — including at least one reported case of waterboarding — against exiles, according to U.N. documents, human rights groups, Western security officials and public records in Turkey. [Continue reading…]