London has always had two cities living inside it. There is the visible one: the cafés, restaurants, markets, railway arches, estate agents, late buses, school runs and steamed-up shopfronts. Then there is the city underneath: old grudges, cash economies, protection rackets, family loyalties, grudging debts, whispered names. Occasionally, with a gunshot outside a restaurant or a burned-out getaway car, the second city breaks through the pavement.
One of the most disturbing examples in modern London crime is the long-running feud between two rival Turkish/Kurdish organised-crime groups: the Hackney Turks, also known as the Hackney Bombers or Bombacilar, and the Tottenham Turks, sometimes called the Tottenham Boys. Their names sound almost parochial, as if they belong to some grim local derby. But the feud attached to them has stretched across north and east London, spilled into Europe, and left behind a trail of shootings, murders and damaged lives.
The two groups have been repeatedly described in court and media reports as rival organised-crime networks with roots in London’s Turkish and Kurdish communities. These are not shorthand labels for those communities, which are overwhelmingly ordinary Londoners running businesses, raising families and contributing to the city. Nor should every restaurant, café or social club in north London be viewed through a gangster lens. But within that wider world, police and prosecutors have identified a violent criminal feud which has persisted for more than 15 years.
Sky News reported in 2025 that police believe the conflict between the Tottenham Turks and Hackney Turks is linked to more than 20 murders over two decades. The same report traced a major escalation to an incident in January 2009, when Kemal Armagan, described as a leading figure in the Hackney Turks, was beaten up at the Manor Club snooker hall in north London and allegedly swore revenge.
That is how these wars often begin in the public record: not with some grand criminal strategy, but with humiliation. A beating. A slight. A man losing face in front of other men. Then the strange, medieval machinery of revenge starts turning.
Who are the Hackney Turks?
The Hackney side has been referred to by several names: Hackney Turks, Hackney Bombers, and Bombacilar, which means “bombers” in Turkish. Reporting generally places their centre of gravity around Hackney, Dalston and parts of east and north-east London, although organised-crime networks rarely obey borough boundaries with the neatness of a council map.
The group has often been linked in reporting to the Baybassins in the early 2000s and more recently the Armagan family. One of the most significant names in the feud was Ali Armagan, who was shot dead outside Turnpike Lane station in 2012. Sky News described his murder as one of the revenge killings in the wider conflict.
The Hackney Turks appear in the public story as one side of a tit-for-tat war involving shootings, attempted assassinations and intimidation. Older reports from the early 2000s described a feud that had already become unusually violent by London standards. In 2014, when a hitman was jailed for murder connected to the conflict, Judge John Bevan QC described the use of London’s streets for “a medieval turf war using hired hands as hitmen” as intolerable. The judge said the feud had resulted in 26 separate violent episodes, many involving guns.
That phrase, “medieval turf war”, has stuck because it captures something essential. This is modern organised crime — cars, phones, international travel, CCTV — but the emotional architecture is ancient. Honour. Insult. Blood. Payment. Retaliation. Men killing men because another man was killed before.
Who are the Tottenham Turks?
The rival group, the Tottenham Turks or Tottenham Boys, is usually associated with Tottenham, Wood Green and north London. Reporting has often linked the group to the Eren family.
One of the most notorious figures was Izzet Eren, described by Sky News as the head of the Tottenham Turks organised-crime group. He was shot dead in Chișinău, Moldova, on 10 July 2024, a killing that made clear how far the London feud had travelled.
Eren’s death did not come from nowhere. Sky has reported that his brother, Zafer Eren, then leader of the Tottenham Turks, was shot dead in Southgate in 2013, after which Izzet Eren took over. The Standard, in a 2025 account of the feud, described the 2010s as the period when simmering tensions turned into outright bloodshed: Ali Armagan of the Hackney Bombers killed in 2012; Zafer Eren of the Tottenham Turks killed the following year; new figures rising, then being targeted in turn.
Once a feud reaches that stage, it no longer behaves like a rational business dispute. Revenge becomes its own economy. The dead become arguments. The living become targets.
Drugs, guns and protection
The background to the feud is usually reported as a struggle over organised crime: drugs, firearms, territory and influence. Turkish and Kurdish organised-crime networks have long been associated in law-enforcement reporting with the heroin trade into western Europe, particularly through routes connected to Turkey and the Balkans. More recent reporting has suggested that disruption to heroin supply may have intensified competition between rival networks. The Guardian reported in 2024 that violent incidents across Europe had been linked to an escalating conflict between Turkish and Kurdish drug gangs, with law-enforcement agencies concerned about a wider battle for control of the heroin market.
Protection and extortion are another recurring theme. In May 2026, Sky News reported allegations from the Old Bailey that Onur Guzel, 38, was shot outside his family’s restaurant, Umut 2000 in Dalston, after his family allegedly refused to pay £100,000 to the Hackney Turks. Prosecutors alleged that the gang suspected the family of financially supporting the Tottenham Turks. Beytullah Gunduz, described by prosecutors as an alleged member of the Hackney Turks, denies conspiracy to murder and an alternative charge of conspiracy to cause grievous bodily harm.
Those details are allegations in an ongoing trial, not proven facts. But the claimed pattern is chillingly familiar: a family business, accusations of loyalty to the wrong side, an “eye-watering” demand for money, then violence outside a restaurant. The visible city — a popular place to eat, a pavement, a phone call — suddenly invaded by the hidden one.
The shooting of a nine-year-old girl
For many Londoners, the feud became newly visible after the Evin restaurant shooting in Dalston on 29 May 2024. A gunman on a motorcycle opened fire outside the restaurant, targeting three men. A nine-year-old girl, who was inside eating with her family, was shot in the head. She survived but suffered catastrophic, life-changing injuries.
In September 2025, Javon Riley was jailed for life with a minimum term of 34 years for his role in the attack. The Guardian reported that Riley was linked to the Tottenham Turks and was convicted of three counts of attempted murder and grievous bodily harm with intent. The gunman remained at large.
Sky News reported that the intended targets were members of the Hackney Turks and that the attack had been organised by their rivals, the Tottenham Turks.
This was not some cinematic underworld scene safely sealed off from ordinary life. It happened outside a restaurant, in a busy part of London, with a child caught in the crossfire. That is the great lie of gangland violence: that it belongs only to those who choose it. Bullets, unlike villains in films, have no sense of narrative justice.
A London feud goes international
The killing of Izzet Eren in Moldova showed that this was no longer just a north London story. OCCRP reported that Eren was shot in a café in Chișinău in July 2024, six weeks after the Dalston restaurant shooting, and described the killing as part of an escalating conflict in the Turkish criminal underworld.
Sky later reported that a former lawyer could be extradited to Moldova to face trial over the alleged plot to murder Eren. According to the same report, Eren had been described as the head of the Tottenham Turks organised-crime group.
This international dimension matters. London has always been porous: money, people, goods and grudges move through it. The same networks that operate in Tottenham, Hackney or Wood Green can have connections in Turkey, Moldova, Spain, the Netherlands and beyond. The city is not an island, however much it sometimes pretends otherwise. It is a port, a marketplace, a hiding place, a stage.
Why restaurants appear in the story
One of the striking features of this feud is how often restaurants and social spaces appear in reports: Evin, Umut 2000, snooker halls, cafés, public streets. There are several reasons for this. Restaurants are visible. They are community meeting points. They are places where people gather predictably. They are also cash businesses, which can make them vulnerable to pressure, suspicion or extortion.
But there is another, darker symbolic layer. To attack someone outside a restaurant is not merely to attack a person. It is to send a message into the community. It says: we can reach you where you are known, where your family works, where children eat, where the lights are warm and everyone thought they were safe.
That is why these crimes send a shudder beyond the immediate victims. They turn familiar London places into crime scenes.
The problem with the word “gang”
The word “gang” can be misleading. It can make these groups sound like loose collections of young men hanging around estates. Some London gangs are like that. These networks appear to be something else: more organised, more transnational, more embedded in older criminal economies.
They also seem to use outsiders when useful. Reporting around the Evin shooting noted that Javon Riley was not himself a member of the Tottenham Turks but was linked to them. This is common in organised crime. People are hired, pressured, rewarded or used at arm’s length. The structure becomes harder to prosecute because the person holding the gun may not be the person who wanted the target dead.
The result is a criminal ecosystem rather than a simple gang. Families, associates, fixers, drivers, lookouts, gunmen, money men, frightened business owners, international contacts. A web, not a queue.
London’s hidden geography
The feud gives an alternative map of London. Not the Tube map, not the estate agent’s map, not the soft-focus map of sourdough and new-build flats. This map has different landmarks: Manor Club snooker hall, Turnpike Lane, Southgate, Dalston restaurants, Wood Green, Hackney streets, burned-out vehicles, courtrooms at the Old Bailey.
Many of these places are ordinary to the point of invisibility. That is what makes the story so unsettling. The underworld is not underneath. It is next door, sometimes. Across the road. At the table outside. In the car waiting too long at the kerb.
The human cost
The danger of writing about gang feuds is that the names and nicknames can develop a dreadful glamour. Bombers. Tottenham Boys. Hitmen. Revenge. International assassinations. It can start to sound like a Netflix treatment.
But the real story is uglier and smaller. A nine-year-old girl with lifelong injuries. Families traumatised. Restaurants turned into crime scenes. Communities made wary. Parents wondering whether the next loud bang is a car backfiring or history arriving with a gun.
London has absorbed many criminal eras: the Victorian rookeries, the Sabini racecourse gangs, the Krays, the Yardies, the armed robbers of the 1980s, the postcode gangs of the 2000s. The feud between the Hackney Turks and Tottenham Turks belongs in that longer history, but with a modern twist. It is local and international at once. It is about old masculine codes and global drug markets. It is about family names and supply chains. It is about London streets being used as the theatre for conflicts that began in pride, profit and revenge.
And as the latest court cases show, the story has not yet settled into history. It is still moving. Still muttering. Still dangerous.