Members of HDP, Turkey’s third largest opposition party, and leftist organizations say they have increasingly becoming targets of abductions in the past two years. Almost all abductees said they were pressed to inform on their organizations, and some said they were heavily tortured. 

On Aug. 25, “Someone held me by the arm on the subway and told me that there was an arrest warrant for me," Celalettin Yalcin, a member of Turkey's pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), told Al-Monitor. "They handcuffed me behind my back and put me in a vehicle. I was taken to a house. They tortured me. They attempted to rape me. … They pressured me to become an informant.”

Yalcin's apparent abduction in Istanbul is far from the only case over the past years. Five days before Yalcin's accusation, Alev Sahin, an architect who was sacked from her job due to her opposition to the government, was approached by people who presented themselves as police when she was on her way to a grocery store on foot in Ankara. 

According to Sahin, the group wanted to take her to a police station in a black van, citing missing information in her previous police testimony.