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At least 85 ISIL militants move to Turkey with their families: Syrian observatory

TM

An image grab taken from a video uploaded on YouTube on August 23, 2013 allegedly shows a member of Ussud Al-Anbar (Anbar Lions), a Jihadist group affiliated to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Al-Qaeda's front group in Iraq, holding up the trademark black and white Islamist flag at an undisclosed location in Iraq's Anbar province. Attacks in Iraq killed 14 people including six soldiers on August 25, Iraqi officials said, amid a surge in violence authorities have so far failed to stem despite wide-ranging operations targeting militants. Arabic writing on the flag reads: "There is not God but God and Mohammed is the prophet of God." AFP PHOTO

The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) claimed on Monday that at least 85 militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) have moved from Syria to Turkey with their families, the Diken news website reported.

According to SOHR, they paid money to smugglers to cross the Turkish-Syrian border and traveled through both Turkish and Kurdish-held territory in northern Syria.

SOHR also claimed that they had paid between $10,000 and $50,000 to the smugglers and were carrying huge amounts of cash themselves.

According to experts, as the fight against ISIL winds down, radical militants have begun to return to their home countries or at least move to other places such as Turkey.

Several international reports have predicted that Turkey would become a safe haven for ISIL militants after the Syrian civil war.

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