Have Russian hitmen been killing with impunity in Turkey?

Ruslan Israpilov knew the Russians might come for him.

"They've been preparing something," he said in a message left on a friend's voicemail in late April. "Those two men they came here and hid their car among the trees and did surveillance. They've been seen here."

Israpilov was a refugee from the conflict in Chechnya, one of a number who had moved to the tiny Turkish town of Ilimtepe, where perhaps they thought they could protect each other.

"I told those who claimed to have seen them, 'If you saw them and knew they were definitely Russians, why didn't you catch them?'" he said on the voicemail.

But two weeks later they caught him. At the age of 46, Ruslan Israpilov was shot in cold blood at the front door of his flat.

"I was terrified when I heard the gunfire and as I ran out of the kitchen I saw my son shouting, 'Oh daddy!'" says Israpilov's wife, Petima.

"There was blood everywhere… He was shot in the head, the neck and heart. They opened fire as soon as he opened the door. It is all in the hands of Allah. May he take his revenge!"

As a young man in the 1990s, Israpilov had fought with thousands of other Chechens to repel Russian forces from their land – for many Chechens it was a war of independence, though Russia ultimately crushed the Chechen fighters, and made one of them, Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the republic.

To judge from his Facebook page, Israpilov may have had links to the continuing Chechen resistance movement. One photograph shows him at Istanbul airport holding a passport issued by the non-existent independent state of Chechnya.

Exactly why Israpilov was killed is not known. What is known is that this was just the latest in a string of 12 assassinations of men from the former Soviet Union – Chechens, Uzbeks and Tajiks – who had taken refuge in Turkey.

Approximately six months earlier, on 1 November 2015, another Chechen, Abdulwahid Edelgiriev, was about to take his niece shopping in the Istanbul suburb of Keyesehir.

As he set off for the mall another car blocked his path. A man then leaped out and shot through the window of Edelgiriev's car, but missed.

Edelgiriev ran down a path back towards his home, pursued by the attackers. They felled him with a shot, and then stabbed him in the neck, leaving him to bleed to death.

Edelgiriev had been one of those Chechens who continued to fight for an independent, and Islamic, Chechnya, even after most Chechen rebel units had been destroyed, or turned and recruited by the notoriously brutal Kadyrov.

He remained holed up in the mountains until 2008 when he stepped on a trip wire, triggering an explosion that left his foot badly wounded. Then, after treatment in Turkey, he joined thousands of other Islamist militants from the former USSR in Syria, allying himself with the local affiliate of al-Qaeda, Jabhat al-Nusra.

While many died in Syria, Edelgiriev returned to Turkey and is known to have been part of a group that had plotted to resume jihad on Russian territory.

Kaynak: BBC