The Popular Front of India (PFI) has been maintaining close ties with a radical Turkish group accused of supplying arms to al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists in Syria and even two top leaders of the just-banned outfit were hosted by the group, officials said on Thursday. The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (Insan Hak ve Hurriyetleri ve Insani Yardım Vakfı, commonly known as IHH) projects itself as a Turkish human rights organisation involved in constructive work benefiting the society.

However, investigators have found that it is an al-Qaeda-linked Turkish charity organisation which was accused of smuggling arms to al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadists in Syria in January 2014.

Leaked emails of Berat Albayrak, a former finance minister of Turkey and the son-in-law of Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, also reportedly implicated the IHH in arming Libyan groups.

The IHH has been identified as an organisation that closely works with Turkish intelligence service MIT.

According to a Nordic Monitor report, E M Abdul Rahiman and Professor P Koya, members of the PFI's national executive council, were privately hosted in Istanbul by the IHH.

Stockholm-based Nordic Monitor works as an intelligence platform that tracks extremism, radical movements, xenophobia, terrorism, crime and other relevant issues that are critical for the security of the communities. Its main focus is on Turkey.

The meeting of a Turkish intelligence-linked jihadist charity group with an Indian extremist organisation bears significance as Erdogan is trying to reach out to Muslims in Southeast Asia as a global leader of the community.

The bonhomie between Turkey and PFI can be assessed by the fact that the organisation had issued a statement endorsing Erdogan after a 2016 coup attempt which was reportedly in fact a false flag orchestrated by Erdogan's intelligence and military chiefs to consolidate Islamists' power in the government and launch a purge of critics from government jobs, officials said.

The Turkish government reciprocated by promoting PFI on state-run Anadolu news agency as a civic and social group "whose members were abused by Indian police".

Officials said the PFI appears to be a perfect match for the IHH as both organisations have been advocating for the jihadist ideology.

The PFI also has uncanny similarity with another global radical group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in Egypt in 1928 by Hasan Al-Banna with the intention to unite the Muslims, overlooking differences for the sake of reaching a "greater goal" of acquiring political power in Egypt and then the rest of the Middle-East, North Africa and other parts of the world.

This principle has been adopted by many organisations globally including the PFI in India, which seeks to unite Muslims ignoring differences while focusing on the "end goal" as they see it, officials said.

This is a tactic of assimilation employed by the thinkers and ideologues of the PFI to infiltrate among moderate Muslims or followers of Sufi to recruit as many youths as it can.

The PFI works for the benefit of their own organisation and not for the 'Ummah'. Its end goal is to achieve political power by creating unrest amongst the masses.

The PFI has also devised a shrewd strategy to gain the support of the Christians to grab power. To lure the Christians, they used the word "faith" rather than any Muslim word, officials said.