Turkish authorities have detained 77 people in nationwide operations in the past two weeks over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Turkish Minute reported.
In a statement posted on X, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said 43 of the 77 detainees had been jailed pending trial.
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. Gülen and his followers have strongly denied any involvement in the coup or any terrorist activity but have been the subject of a harsh crackdown for a decade.
According to the minister, the latest operations were carried out by gendarmerie units across dozens of provinces, including İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Antalya, Bursa and Diyarbakır.
The people taken into custody are accused of operating within the movement’s so-called “current structure,” maintaining contact through public pay phones and providing financial support through businesses linked to the network as well as disseminating propaganda for the Gülen movement on social media.
The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors allege that a member of the Gülen movement used a single payphone to call all his contacts consecutively. Based on that assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that other numbers called right before or after that call also belong to people with Gülen links. The authorities do not possess the content of the calls in question. The supposition of guilt is solely based on the order of the calls made from the phone.
Minister Yerlikaya vowed to continue the fight against Gülen followers.
Although Gülen and his followers have strongly denied any involvement in the coup or terrorist activities, the government crackdown on the movement’s members continues today in Turkey and abroad, with detentions, arrests and deportations or extraditions of followers from foreign countries.
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.
