Turkish men who once sported fashionable beards have begun chopping them off and maintaining a more clean-shaven look in a bid to disassociate themselves with the militant group, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, according to Turkish news agency Dogan.
According to the head of a barber's association in the Aegean province of Manisa, men have begun flocking to their local barbershops to get rid of their beards so they do not look like ISIS members or sympathizers.
Ali Batu, head of Manisa's Chamber of Barbers and Hairdressers told Dogan, "It had become fashionable for men to grow their beards and everyone was growing one. This situation led to a decrease in barbers' work." However, now Batu says, "Citizens no longer want to look like people who commit such atrocities after seeing members of the ISIL terrorist organization."
Kurdish fighters have been fighting ISIS over the border in Syria since the group seized large parts of Syria and Iraq last summer. Turkey recently started bombing ISIS after a suicide bomb killed 32 young activists in the border town of Suruc.
Turkish warplanes began bombing ISIS strongholds in Syria in late July, after the group was blamed for various attacks in the country and firefights with Turkish security services.
on the Syrian/Turkish border. One attack that Turkish authorities have said ISIS are responsible for is a suicide bombing which killed 30 people gathered outside a cultural centre in the Turkish border town of Suruc in mid-July.
One local man told Dogan that he had decided to get his beard trimmed after he saw ISIS members in the media. "I saw ISIL members everywhere in the news. I had grown my beard longer but now I'm getting it cut. I don't want to look like a member of ISIL," he said.
In October last year the BBC reported that the same phenomenon was occurring in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbaki, after male citizens became worried they would be mistaken for jihadists following violent clashes in the city between members of the Kurdish community and Islamists. Christian Science Monitor also reported last summer on barbers cutting the beards of fighters returning to Syria so that they could either blend in with the civilian population or join ISIS.
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