Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP-C). Also known as Devrimci Sol, Dev Sol ("The Revolutionary Way") or the Revolutionary Front.

Dev Sol mainly operates in Turkey. Its most recent activities have occurred in Adana, Ankara, Istanbul and Izmir.

Dev Sol's stated goal is to rid Turkey of Western influences and transform it into an independent socialist state.

Exact numbers are unknown. Arrests and raids by the Turkish police, as well as factional infighting, have weakened the group. An estimated 900 members are in Turkish prisons.

Dev Sol conducts fundraising activities in Western Europe. The group is believed to have training facilities or offices in Lebanon and Syria.

Dev Sol initially focused its attacks on retired and current members of Turkey's national security establishment. In the 1980s, Turkish police arrested several key members of the group, forcing Dev Sol to decentralize temporarily.

By the late 1980s, Dev Sol regrouped and began targeting Turkish security and military officials, as well as Western interests. It conducted three simultaneous bombings in 1989 against U.S. economic interests in Istanbul and Ankara. It protested the 1991 Gulf War by assassinating two U.S. defense contractors, wounding a U.S. Air Force officer and bombing more than 20 U.S. and NATO military, commercial and cultural facilities.

Dev Sol was accused of detonating a pipe bomb in January 2001 that injured 10 people during a New Year's celebration in Istanbul.

Since the end of 2001, Dev Sol has used improvised explosive devices against official Turkish targets and soft U.S. targets of opportunity. The attacks against U.S. targets beginning in 2003 apparently were responses to Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Dev Sol is a revolutionary Marxist group vehemently opposed to NATO and the U.S. It condemns what it perceives as American imperialism and the U.S.-led international war against terrorism.

It was founded in 1978 as splinter faction of the Turkish People's Liberation Party. Dev Sol began as a national political organization, then transformed itself into a regional terrorist network.

The group split into two factions in the early 1990s. The Yagan wing, led by Bedri Yagan, has assumed the name Devrimci Sol, which has antagonized the Karatas faction. The Karatas wing, with its headquarters in Germany, is led by Dursun Karatas and claims to be the rightful heir to the Dev Sol name.

The main faction changed its name in 1994 to the Revolutionary People's Liberation Party/Front (DHKP-C). The Revolutionary People's Liberation Party is the group's political wing, while the Revolutionary People's Liberation Front is the military branch. The military wing normally operates through three-person cells, known as armed propaganda units.

Most of the group's recruits come from the Arabic-speaking Alevi ethno-religious minority group in central Turkey.

A long-term campaign against all terrorist groups has resulted in a weakening of DHKP-C. The 2008 death of Dursun Karatas, the group's leader, also represented a major psychological blow to the organization.

August: Dev Sol claimed responsibility for the fatal shooting of a British businessman in Istanbul.

June 24: An explosive device detonated, apparently prematurely, aboard a passenger bus in Istanbul while a Dev Sol operative was transporting it to another location. That killed the agent and three other people. The explosion took place just days before a NATO summit.

July: German authorities indicted a DKHP-C senior leader.

Aug. 9: Cypriot officials apprehended Aslan Tayfun Ozkok, a DHKP-C member on Interpol's wanted list, as he was passing through Cyprus from Syria. Cyprus sentenced Ozkok to eight months in prison for traveling on false documentation.

Aug. 11: Dursun Karatas, the founding leader of DHKP-C, died of cancer at a hospital in the Netherlands.

November: Germany arrested several suspected high-ranking DHKP-C functionaries.