Turkish authorities have detained 223 people in nationwide police operations in the past 20 days over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, with 87 of the detainees arrested, Turkish Minute reported.
In a statement posted on X, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya said 50 of the 223 detainees were released under judicial supervision, while procedures are ongoing for the remaining people in custody.
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. The movement strongly denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
According to the minister, the latest police operations were carried out across dozens of provinces, including İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir, Antalya, Konya, Bursa and Gaziantep, under the coordination of chief public prosecutors’ offices and counterterrorism, organized crime and intelligence units.
Those taken into custody are accused of operating within the movement’s so-called “clandestine structures,” using the encrypted messaging app ByLock, maintaining contact through public payphones and providing financial support through businesses linked to the network.
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.
ByLock, once widely available online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the movement since the coup attempt on July 15, 2016, despite the lack of any evidence that ByLock messages were related to the abortive putsch.
The latest detentions come despite a landmark ruling from the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in September 2023 that found the use of ByLock not to constitute a criminal offense. The Grand Chamber ruled in the case of former teacher Yüksel Yalçınkaya that the use of the ByLock application was not an offense in itself and did not constitute sufficient evidence for an arrest.
Minister Yerlikaya vowed to continue the fight against Gülen followers.
Although the movement has 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.
