Police Special Operation Department
military unit
The Police Special Operations Department (Turkish: Polis Özel Harekât Dairesi) or Police Special Action (Turkish: Polis Özel Harekât), abbreviated as PÖH, is a police tactical unit of the General Directorate of Security in Turkey.
History
The PÖH was founded in 1983 as "Special Operations Office" (Turkish: Özel Harekat Şube Müdürlüğü), under the command of Department of Public Security.
In larger cities like Ankara, Istanbul, and İzmir, "Special Operations Group Authorities "(Turkish: Özel Harekat Grup Amirlikleri) were organized in the same year.
As a result of changing conditions, in 1987, the office was transferred to the Anti-Terrorism and Operations Department under the name "Special Operations Branch" (Turkish: Özel Harekat Şubesi).
In 1993, the Special Operations Branch was promoted to a department and gained its current structuring.
İbrahim Şahin was head of the Department until being forced to resign in 1996 over the Susurluk scandal. Ayhan Çarkın was a notable member of the department in the 1990s.
Organisation
The force consists of 22,000 personnel, more than a thousand of whom are women.
It is also deployed as part of the Turkish occupation of northern Syria.
Training
To qualify for PÖH, an applicant must:
Run the 2500m designated area with a backpack weighing 10 kg, under 15 minutes
Have 50% minimum accuracy in pistol and rifle shooting
Swim 150 m without stopping
Be between ages 18 and 32
Have graduated from police high school or university
In addition, a training simulation called TAKSİS is conducted by TÜBİTAK.
After 6 months of training, the applicant will receive a certificate officially identifying himself as an operator of PÖH.
Tactics
Police Special Operation Department is one of a handful of security forces in the world which employs active front line female squad members in combat operations.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Police Special Operation Department” as military unit. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as military unit. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1164317. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1983, 1987, 1993 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Police Special Operation Department” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.