Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, increasingly embracing the role of a paranoid dictator, is conducting a large-scale purge of dissidents under the pretext of national security.
The operation is taking place in the city of Izmir and 26 Turkish provinces, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Turkish authorities have issued an arrest warrant for 110 people, 100 of whom are members of the Turkish army.
Officially, these people are suspected of organizing a coup attempt, which, however, occurred in 2016, and of being supporters of the theologian Fethullah Gulen living in the United States.
Gülen himself, a champion of peace-loving, humanistic Islam, has repeatedly stated that he had nothing to do with the coup. It can be assumed that for the champion of Erdogan’s concept of aggressive neo-Ottomanism, liberal theologian Gülen is, first of all, an ideological opponent from whom it is very convenient to create the image of an enemy.
The coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016 killed about 250 people. After which the Erdogan regime arrested and convicted about 80 thousand people, more than 150 thousand civil servants, military and other officials were dismissed or removed from office, including more than 20 thousand from the armed forces.
At the same time, Ankara is pursuing its citizens, allegedly related to “Gulenism” and the coup, around the world, seeking their arrest and extradition to Turkey.
In turn, international human rights organizations believe that the Erdogan regime has been using the threat of a coup for many years now to combat dissent, both within the country and abroad – in the Turkish diaspora.