Turkish President and Prime Minister offer different explanations for the release of the 49 Turkish hostages held by ISIL near Modul

Turkish President and Prime Minister offer different explanations for the release of the 49 Turkish hostages held by ISIL near Mosul. While Erdoğan claimed that the hostages were "freed", his prime minister released a statement earlier suggesting that they were handed over.

When ISIL is killing hostages from U.S., U.K., and Lebanon, it stands to reason why only Turkey and Qatar are managing to have hostages "handed over". 

The role of Turkey in at least shielding ISIL and Nusra in Syria and Iraq, if not providing them with support, become more credible. Minimally, Turkey's intelligence must have infiltrated the two groups for them to be able to "free" or "secure the "release" of hostages without paying any price.

News reports:
Nearly 50 hostages being held by Islamic State (Isis) militants in Iraq have been freed after more than three months in captivity and are now in Turkey.

The 46 Turks and three local Iraqis were seized in Mosul on 11 June, when the Isis overran the region and stormed the Turkish Consulate. They included diplomatic staff and children.

The exact details of their rescue are still unclear, but President Tayyip Erdogan described the mission to free them as a covert rescue operation. All of the hostages are believed to be in good health

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, who cut short an official visit to Azerbaijan to travel to Sanliurfa, hugged the freed hostages before boarding a plane with them to the capital Ankara.

"After intense efforts that lasted days and weeks, in the early hours, our citizens were handed over to us and we brought them back to our country," he said after their release.

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Turkey's President, PM differ in defining the rescue of hostages

Turkey’s top two leaders, the president and the prime minister, differed in describing the release process of 49 hostages with the former calling it “an operation” while the latter stressed “it was a result of contacts.”

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s written statement about the release of the hostages, points at an operation conducted by the National Intelligence Organization (MİT). “Our consul in Mosul, his family and Turkish citizens at the consulate who had been abducted have been freed by a successful operation,” Erdoğan said.
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Mosul hostages freed in ‘entirely Turkish operation'
Forty-six Turkish hostages, who were brought to Turkey on Saturday, were rescued from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants as a result of an "entirely national" operation conducted by the foreign operations department of National Intelligence Organization (MİT), according to state-run news agency Anadolu.

The hostages seized by ISIL militants in June were brought back to Turkey on Saturday after more than three months in captivity. The hostages, including Turkey's consul-general, diplomats' children and special forces soldiers, were brought to the southern Turkish city of Şanlıurfa in the early hours of the morning.

The hostages, according to a Reuters report, were released at the town of Tel Abyad on the Syrian side of the border with Turkey after traveling from the eastern Syrian city of Raqqa, ISIL's stronghold.
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Exclusive: Isis Starts Recruiting in Istanbul’s Vulnerable Suburbs
When Deniz Sahin’s ex-husband phoned out of the blue to say he wanted to see their two young children, the call came as a welcome surprise. The father, a former alcoholic, who had kicked his addiction and turned instead to fundamentalist Islam, had shown little interest in his children for the past year, but she thought they missed him.

“I told him not to be more than two hours,” says 28-year-old Deniz, who weeps silently as she pores over photographs of Halil Ibrahim, 4, and Esma Sena, 10. After their father, Sadik, picked them up from their home in Kazan, near Turkey’s capital Ankara, in April, she never saw them again.

In one of the pictures, which were sent by Sadik a week after their disappearance, a smiling Halil Ibrahim clutches a pistol. The index finger of his other hand is held skyward in a gesture associated with the Middle East’s most feared armed group: the so-called Islamic State, also known by its former acronym Isis. The children now live with their jihadist father in Syria’s Isis-controlled Raqqa province. They are among an unknown number of Turks – potentially in the thousands – being abducted or lured into Syria and Iraq either to populate Isis’ self-declared caliphate or to fight in its bloody sectarian war.

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