Every year in early March, the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir's branch in Turkey holds an international conference to commemorate the Ottoman caliphate, which was abolished in 1924.
This year’s conference, set for March 5 in Istanbul, was to be titled “Why Does the World Need the Caliphate?” Mahmut Kar, media bureau chief of Hizb ut-Tahrir Turkey, had applied for permission from local authorities to hold the conference under the standard procedure. Yet on March 1, news broke that Kar and one of his colleagues, Osman Yildiz, were taken into custody.
