A Turkish court in İstanbul on Monday ordered the arrest of 61 military officers accused of links to the faith-based Gülen movement, following their detention last week as part of a nationwide operation, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported.
The arrestees include active-duty personnel from the Turkish Armed Forces, including members of the air force, land forces and navy, as well as the gendarmerie. They were accused of maintaining contact with alleged movement affiliates through payphones.
They were among 65 military and police officers detained on Friday in a coordinated operation, launched in İstanbul and carried out across 36 provinces.
The detentions are part of a sweeping crackdown that has continued for nearly a decade against the Gülen movement, inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who died in exile in October 2024.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement since the corruption investigations of 2013, which implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan, his family members and inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began targeting its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following an abortive putsch in 2016, which he accused Gülen of masterminding.
Following the failed coup, the Turkish government declared a state of emergency and carried out a massive purge of state institutions under the pretext of an anti-coup fight. Over 130,000 public servants, including 4,156 judges and prosecutors, and more than 24,000 members of the armed forces were summarily removed from their jobs for alleged membership in or relationships with “terrorist organizations” by emergency decree-laws subject to neither judicial nor parliamentary scrutiny.
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.
According to a statement from Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç ahead of the eighth anniversary of the coup attempt last July, a total of 705,172 people have been investigated since the failed coup on terrorism or coup-related charges due to their alleged links to the movement. Tunç said at the time that there were 13,251 people in prison in pretrial detention or convicted of terrorism in Gülen-linked trials.
These figures are thought to have increased over the past 10 months since the operations targeting Gülen followers continue unabated. Erdoğan and several government ministers said on many occasions that there would be no “slackening” in the fight against the movement following the cleric’s death at 83.
