Turkish authorities arrested 1,395 people in the first 10 months of 2025 as part of an ongoing crackdown on the faith-based Gülen movement, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya told a parliamentary committee on Monday.
During a parliamentary budget session Yerlikaya said that authorities had conducted 3,258 operations in the same period, during which another 1,347 suspects were released under judicial supervision, adding that the government’s crackdown would continue “with the same determination.”
Taking the floor during the session, Murat Bakan, a lawmaker from the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), said nearly 12,000 operations had been conducted against the movement since the current cabinet assumed office in June 2023. He questioned why only 3,760 arrests had been made despite the extensive operations, arguing that the figures showed the “operations were not yielding results.”
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated him as well as some members of his family and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and a conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan began to target the movement’s members. He designated the movement as a terrorist organization in May 2016 and intensified the crackdown on it following an abortive putsch in July of the same year that he accused Gülen of masterminding.
According to the latest figures from the Justice Ministry, more than 126,000 people have been convicted for alleged links to the movement since 2016, with 11,085 still in prison. Legal proceedings are ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under active investigation nearly a decade later.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.
