Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front

Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, left-wing Marxist-Leninist terrorist group in Turkey, formed in 1978 as an offshoot of the Turkish People’s Liberation Party/Front, that is strongly anti-United States and anti-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization). In the 1990s, Dev Sol (renamed the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front, or DHKP/C, in 1994) was the most active of the left-wing terrorist groups in Turkey.

Dev Sol members are believed to have assassinated many Turkish officials, including, in 1980, the country’s former prime minister, Nihat Erim. Later that decade the group attacked Turkish security and military officials. In 1990 it focused its attention on foreigners in or around Turkey, and in the ensuing two years Dev Sol murdered two U.S. military contractors, wounded a U.S. Air Force officer, and launched rockets at a U.S. consulate in Istanbul in retaliation for U.S. involvement in the Persian Gulf War.

On July 12, 1991, 11 Dev Sol terrorists were killed during a string of Turkish National Police raids in Istanbul. As a result, that date became a hostile Dev Sol anniversary. For the next two years the group attempted attacks on U.S. targets in Turkey on or near that date.

In the mid-1990s, after the group changed its name to DHKP/C, members murdered a prominent Turkish businessman. In response to the growing terrorism problem, the Turkish government conducted raids against DHKP/C safe houses and enacted new anti-terrorist legislation. Largely because of such raids, DHKP/C attacks decreased significantly thereafter. The group subsequently made a failed attempt at forming an alliance with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), another of Turkey’s active terrorist groups.

Nonetheless, the DHKP/C remained active. Turkish officials circumvented a DHKP/C-attempted assault on the U.S. Consulate during a presidential visit to Istanbul in June 1999. Two years later the DHKP/C used suicide bombings against the Turkish police. Beginning in 2003, attacks against American targets were thought to be undertaken in response to the Iraq War.

In March 2008 three DHKP/C members were arrested in Istanbul while preparing terrorist attacks, which were believed to be targeted at American commercial interests and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The group’s leader, Dursun Karataş, had been arrested and jailed after the events of 1980, though he escaped and fled to Europe a decade later. In the mid-1990s he served a minimal jail term in France, and he died in the Netherlands in August 2008. After Karataş died, the Turkish press reported the onset of a leadership struggle within the organization. By the second decade of the 21st century, the DHKP/C was operating in limited capacity against Turkish targets.