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In September 2019, a few hundred Russian mercenaries joined the front-line effort near Tripoli in support of Haftar’s forces

forced a desperate GNA to sign a controversial maritime accord that granted Ankara notional gas-drilling rights in the eastern Mediterranean in return for Turkey launching a full-blown military intervention in support of the anti-Haftar camp

According to open-source data analyzed by aircraft-tracking specialist Gerjon, the Emiratis, since mid-January, have flown more than 100 cargo planes to Libya (or western Egypt, near the Libyan border). These planes likely carried with them thousands of tons of military hardware. Other clues suggest that the number of Emirati personnel on Libyan soil has also increased. All of this indicates that Haftar’s coalition and its allies are going to try, once again, to achieve total victory by force.

Few international actors are willing to contradict the UAE, and while the GNA’s isolation grows, no Western government wants to exert any meaningful pressure on Haftar

During January and February, at least three cargo ships from Turkey delivered about 3,500 tons’ worth of equipment and ammunition each. The Turkish presence on Libyan soil currently comprises several hundred men. They train Libyan fighters on urban warfare with an emphasis on tactics to fend off armored vehicles. Against attacks from the sky, Ankara relies on electronic-warfare technology and a combination of U.S.– and indigenously developed air defense systems. Similar protection has been set up at the air base of Misrata, a powerful anti-Haftar city to the west of Sirte, which the LNA took on Jan. 6.

since late December, more than 4,000 Turkish-backed Syrian mercenaries have arrived in Tripoli and its surrounding area. Most of them are battle-hardened Islamist fighters who belong to three large anti-government militias. Turkey is also busy upgrading its fleet of combat drones scattered across northwest Libya

To counter Turkey’s new intervention, the pro-Haftar government in eastern Libya formalized its alignment with the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, allowing the LNA to purchase technical advice from Damascus using material and diplomatic rewards. A few hundred Syrian contractors hired from pro-Assad militias are now reportedly in Libya, on Haftar’s side

Because Turkey’s presence and its arsenal have made it difficult for the UAE to fly its combat drones anymore, the LNA and its allies have begun a relentless shelling campaign using Grad rockets and other projectiles. Such salvos on Tripoli don’t just hit legitimate military targets—they also hit civilians. Unguided rockets are inherently indiscriminate, and the pro-GNA camp can do almost nothing to prevent this kind of attack

a philosophy of collective punishment

the pro-Haftar camp has been imposing a $1.5 billion-a-month oil blockade on Libya since mid-January. Fuel shortages may soon become more widespread as a result. Suppression of the nation’s only dollar-generating activity is also a means of cutting off the internationally recognized Central Bank in Tripoli and potentially supplanting it with an LNA-friendly alternative where all oil-export proceeds would be captured going forward

Moscow’s intervention in Libya is far more mercurial. In the last three months of 2019, Kremlin-linked paramilitary company Wagner shifted the balance of the conflict by joining the fight alongside Haftar. Then, in early January, several days before President Vladimir Putin took part in a request for a Libyan ceasefire, the Russian contingent on the Tripoli front line suddenly became less active.

The dynamic between Ankara and Moscow is as much rooted in their common disdain for Europe as it is in mutual animosity. That means Russia could tolerate Turkey a while longer if it feels its interests would be better served by doing so. Such an ebb-and-flow approach amplifies Moscow’s influence and could eventually push the Europeans out of the Libyan theater altogether. Russia may just as easily change its mind and invest into helping the LNA deliver a resounding defeat to Erdogan

Notwithstanding its attempt to tap underwater hydrocarbons in the Mediterranean, Ankara has no intention of renouncing its commercial interests in Libya or its wider geopolitical aspirations in the rest of Africa.

the UAE has sought to bring about the emergence in Tripoli of a government that is void of any influence from political Islam writ large. Because of this, Abu Dhabi will not accept a negotiated settlement with Erdogan’s Islamist government. Making matters worse, neither the United States nor any EU country is willing to use its own regional clout to stand in the Emiratis’ way. Therefore, regardless of whether that endangers a great number of civilian lives, the Libyan war is likely to continue escalating before any political resolution is seriously explored.

In March, for example, two journalists were arrested on charges that they had been in contact with military officers who were plotting to overthrow the government. Soon afterward, several thousand people marched down Istanbul’s main street protesting the arrests. They held placards reading “Free Press, Free Society,” and “Turkey Rates 138 in Press Freedom”—a reference to a recent ranking by Reporters Without Borders.The next day, Erdogan delivered a speech in Istanbul. It was an ideal moment for him to reassure panicky citizens and foreigners worried about press freedom in Turkey. Instead he denounced defenders of the arrested journalists, accusing them of launching a “systematic defamation campaign against Turkey” shaped by “evil-minded intentions and prejudices.”This demagogic language disturbs many Turks, including some who admire what Erdogan has achieved. “I have never been as positive and enthusiastic as I am now,” one of the country’s visionary business leaders, the octogenarian Ishak Alaton, a lifelong human rights campaigner, told me in his office overlooking the Bosphorus. But he also lamented that Erdogan has begun to govern with “the sense that he’s invulnerable and omnipotent and all-powerful.”

None of the dozens of people I met during a recent visit suggested that Turkey is in danger of slipping toward Islamist rule. Turkish society has defenses that most Arab societies lack: generations of experience with secularism and democracy, a growing middle class, a booming export economy, a still-lively press, and a strong civil society based in universities, labor unions, business associations, and civic, human rights, and environmental groups. The emerging conflict in Turkey is not over religion, but styles of power.

Partly because the EU has slammed its door in Turkey’s face, Erdogan’s government has been looking elsewhere for friends. This has helped draw Turkey away from half a century of subservience to Western foreign policy. Its first act of defiance came in 2003, when parliament voted against allowing American troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil. Since then, Turkey has broken ranks with the West on two important issues. It favors negotiation with Iran and stronger pressure on Israel to change its policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

Banu Eligur, who has taught courses on political Islam at Brandeis University and is the author of The Mobilization of Political Islam in Turkey, believes that Erdogan’s government has “mobilized against the secular-democratic state” by naming pious Muslims to be “high-ranking civil servants in public administration” and by bullying the press, the judiciary, and universities. In fact, much of what Erdogan is doing seems popular. A recent opinion survey taken by an outside group found 62 percent of Turks in favor of Erdogan’s foreign policies. In another, when people were asked to rate their level of religious belief on a scale of one to ten, 71 percent rated themselves at seven or higher. In Turkey, Islam, Nationalism, and Modernity, the historian Carter Vaughn Findley observes that Erdogan’s government has surpassed the old secular establishment “both in recognizing the value of a religiously neutral government as a guarantee of pluralism and in espousing the reforms required to advance Turkey’s EU candidacy”

. The plot to destabilize the country, and the cases connected to it, are popularly known as “Ergenekon,” a reference to a mythic Turkic homeland and the name that plotters allegedly gave to their subversive plan. Mike King Many Turks greeted the opening of this case with both astonishment and jubilation. Investigating the military and its corrupt allies in the judiciary and bureaucracy was widely seen as a major step toward consolidating democracy. As the case has dragged on, however, it has taken on a different tinge. The authenticity of some incriminating documents has been challenged. Prosecutors have cast their net so widely that people have begun to wonder whether the true purpose of the case is to punish conspirators or to intimidate critics of the government. Since the government has been slowly replacing prosecutors with people it favors, there is suspicion that politics is once again intruding into the judiciary.

“I can no more believe these two guys were part of Ergenekon than I can believe Obama is part of the Ku Klux Klan,” said Hakan Altinay, a former director of the Open Society Foundation in Turkey, which is supported by George Soros. “It’s an important episode for left-liberal opinion, which has up to now been part of this government’s core support. It’s a tipping point.”If intimidation is a goal of this case, it may be working. “I wonder, is my phone tapped?” a young journalist told me at the end of an interview in Istanbul. “Should I censor myself?”

In Streets of Memory, a recent study of cultural attitudes in an Istanbul neighborhood that was a jumble of nationalities, Amy Mills writes:The price of belonging, in Turkey, comes at a cost—the forgetting of particular histories at the expense of the frequent retelling of others and the silencing of particular memories that cannot entirely be repressed. She finds troubling evidence of “polarization in thinking about national identities and minority histories.” People shy away from recalling, for example, the infamous pogrom in 1955 when rioters backed by police attacked homes and businesses owned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. But she also notes “an increasing curiosity and desire among Turkish citizens to learn more about places and pasts in Turkey.”

Attacking the government on sensitive issues like Kurdish rights, criticizing its handling of the Ergenekon case, and ridiculing Erdogan personally are not the only ways Turkish journalists can endanger themselves these days. There is another subject some fear to probe too deeply: the power of Fethullah Gulen, a shadowy but immensely influential Turkish religious leader. From a secluded estate in Pennsylvania, where he moved to escape possible prosecution for alleged antisecular remarks in the 1990s, Gulen directs a worldwide movement that is one of the most remarkable forces in modern Isla

This movement may be, as its sympathizers insist, a benign force that stabilizes Turkish life. But some Turks mistrust it, and their suspicion deepened when it turned out that one of the journalists arrested in March, Ahmet Sik, was about to publish a book about its rising influence called The Imam’s Army. Police confiscated advance copies. The text, which among other things alleges that Gulen sympathizers dominate the Turkish police, quickly appeared on the Internet, setting off what one blogger called “a frenzy of downloads.”

The mayor, Yilmaz Buyukersen, a former university rector, told me that while some other Turkish cities are not as open to pastimes like late-night drinking, he has no doubt that Eskishehir represents Turkey’s future. Like many Turks who are not part of the ruling party or the Gulen movement, though, he worries about what is happening in Ankara.“Reading the newspapers depresses me,” he said. “Everything is about accusing, arguing, fighting.”There is pressure on the press, on labor unions, on professional organizations, on NGOs, on universities. The justice system responds to the ruling party. All of this creates fear in people’s minds. But I’m still optimistic. The new generation is aware of everything, open to the world, and totally in favor of freedom and democracy. Journalists and others are resisting the pressure they’re under. There is absolutely no going back.

Erdogan’s party won 326 seats in the 550-member parliament. This was far short of the 367 that would have allowed him to push through whatever constitution he wished, and also shy of the 330 that would have allowed him to call a referendum on a draft of his own. So his triumph at the polls was mixed and his authority is not absolute.

Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency said at least 21 “Iranian-backed terrorists” were also “neutralized” in Idlib, in a reference to Afghan, Pakistani and other Iranian-backed Shiite militias that have been fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in Idlib

As war raged on in Idlib, a humanitarian drama was unfolding at Turkey’s border with Greece. On Thursday, Turkey announced that its borders were open for millions of Syrian and other refugees in Turkey to leave. It justified the move on the grounds that it could no longer cope with the burden, with up to a million civilians fleeing regime violence in Idlib remaining massed along Syria's border with Turkey. Thousands of migrants have gathered near Greece's Kastanies border crossing, some getting there by taking free rides on buses organized by the Turkish government. Turkey’s state-owned Arabic-language broadcasting channel, TRT Arabi, provided maps for migrants showing various routes to reach the border.

Erdogan lashed out at the EU for failing to fulfill a 2016 deal under which Turkey undertook to care for nearly 4 million mostly Syrian refugees in exchange for 6 billion euros ($6.6 billion) in financial support

the effect of this new blackmail is a complete disaster. One because the Turkish leadership is officially misleading migrants, telling them that ‘borders are open.’ Two because this is now an additional state-organized humanitarian disaster. There is total bewilderment in Europe at what the Turkish leadership can do when finding itself in a total, self-inflicted dead end

“The term that best characterizes Turkey’s current foreign and security policy is kakistrocracy, that is, government by the least qualified,” he told Al-Monitor. “The only silver lining in the Idlib crisis is that now [the Turkish government] can blame Turkey’s looming economic crisis on exogenous factors, allowing Erdogan to deny that his son-in-law Berat Albayrak, who is in charge of the economy, is to blame for his incompetence and mismanagement.”

“Aleppo is ours and so is Hatay,” declared Ibrahim Karagul, a fellow Erdoganist scribe on his Twitter feed. He was responding to an article by Russia’s state-run Sputnik news agency, which opened to debate Turkey’s 1939 acquisition of Hatay — also known as Alexandretta — in a disputed referendum following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire by the allied powers. The article is believed to have spurred today’s detention of the editor-in-chief of the Turkish version of Sputnik. Mahir Boztepe was released following a phone call between Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov.

the consensus among military experts is that Feb. 27 airstrikes were likely carried out by Russian jets. “Russia flies at night, the regime can’t. The Turks were bombed at night,” said Aaron Stein, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Middle East Program. Both sides have chosen to blame the regime for the attack, presumably to avert a direct confrontation that neither side wants.

Did Putin underestimate Erdogan when the pugnacious Turkish leader set a Feb. 29 deadline for Syrian forces to move out of Idlib? Is he merely letting Erdogan save face? Or does Ankara have more agency in its relations with Moscow than it is credited for? It’s probably a bit of everything, said Kevork Oskanian, an honorary research fellow at Birmingham University who is writing a book titled “Russian Empire.” He told Al-Monitor, "Russia’s reluctance to intervene in the regime’s favor does appear to be designed to allow Erdogan to save face while also softening Assad up for compromise.”

The third sector — the new rising stars of the defense industry — are led by the president's men. They and their companies are tied to Erdogan: Baykar Makina, owned by the family of Erdogan’s son-in-law, Selcuk Bayraktar; BMC, owned by the Ozturk family and Ethem Sancak, a member of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its Executive Council; and the Tumosan unit of Albayrak Group.

BMC is the leading producer of buses, trucks, rail systems, Kirpi armored vehicles and Amazon mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles. The ambitious joint venture aspires to become Turkey’s monopoly over diesel engine production for land vehicles and jet engines. Sancak holds 25% of the venture's shares, the Ozturks hold 25.1%, and the remaining 49.9% is owned by the Qatar Armed Forces Industry Committee.

In 2018, BMC became Turkey's first private defense industry company to reach the Defense News “Top 100 List,” ranking No. 85, with $554.18 million in defense revenues.

In early 2019, Erdogan offered generous incentives to BMC, such as the opportunity to lease Turkey’s largest tank maintenance factory to produce the indigenous Altay main battle tank under a 25-year contract for only $50 million. This transfer of a tank factory in Sakarya province to BMC is still highly controversial in Turkey, with the main opposition party criticizing it at nationwide rallies because of transparency and accountability issues. Also, factory workers organized several protests against the decision.

a big cooperative deal in the defense industry helps strengthen Qatar’s ties with Turkey, guarantees Turkey's continued military-political shield against the Saudi-led bloc and blockade, and helps Doha diversify its defense sources.

BMC wants to penetrate jet engine production as well. After securing Erdogan's political backing, BMC’s TRMotor went to a joint venture with TAI to develop the jet engine for Turkey’s indigenous TFX aircraft project with the help of the UK’s Rolls-Royce. In March, however, Rolls-Royce​ announced it was withdrawing from TRMotor because of an irreconcilable difference over intellectual property caused by Qatar’s involvement with BMC.

BMC is trying to establish a monopoly in military diesel and jet engines, and also seeks to monopolize the raw material production field of boron mining it recently entered. 

Joint ventures are having a rough time. TSKGV, now under the jurisdiction of the presidential palace, is struggling to evade Erdogan’s attempts to take full charge. Meanwhile, Erdogan's favorites are rising quickly to the top.

Turkey has breezily denied any wrongdoing, branding the protesters as “terrorists” and the actions of its security forces as “self-defense.” Its reaction to the legal case so far has been to act as if it doesn’t exist. Turkey’s toothless media, which is almost fully controlled by Erdogan’s business cronies, has followed suit.

In November 2017, federal prosecutors dismissed charges against seven members of Erdogan’s security detail who had been indicted by a federal grand jury that July on a slew of charges, including aggravated assault, conspiracy and hate crimes. Although the men had already left the country, the warrants seemed to carry a powerful message that foreign agents could not act with impunity on US soil. Then in February 2018, the cases against four others were quietly dropped, leaving only four guards on the hook.

a strong whiff of diplomatic appeasement hung in the air. The Trump administration was trying to secure the release of North Carolina pastor Andrew Brunson and to calm Turkish fury over its continued support for the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG)

The first hearing of what will be a bench trial could be held as early as June depending on when the US Embassy in Ankara formally relays the summons. A State Department official speaking on condition of anonymity declined to confirm whether that had happened yet, but acknowledged that US law requires it. “The US government makes no judgment on the merits of the litigation in question, or whether Turkey enjoys immunity from suit, which is a question to be decided by the courts,”

if the Turkish government does not acknowledge service within 60 days of the delivery of the summons by a US diplomat, “a federal judge will proceed without Turkey at that moment.”

Turkey has allegedly resorted to bullying relatives of the plaintiffs who are in Turkey in hopes of getting them to drop the lawsuits. Several have filed as “John Does” precisely to avoid such harassment. One of them told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that police had hauled in family members for interrogation, but declined to provide details for fear their identity may be revealed. Three other victims approached by Al-Monitor declined to speak, even off the record.

Clobbering dissidents in foreign countries is not a uniquely Turkish habit. In January 2018, a federal judge ruled that the Democratic Republic of Congo had to fork over more than $500,000 to three protesters who were savagely attacked by the security detail of President Joseph Kabila Kabange outside the luxury Georgetown hotel where he was staying. Much like Erdogan’s security detail, the Congolese security officers flew out of the United States within hours of the incident. One of the protesters, Jacques Miango, who was kicked in the throat, the face and the spine, shared Yasa’s disbelief that such violence could unfold in the heart of Washington. “You imagine that those kinds of things can’t happen in America,” Miango told The Washington Post. “But after it happened to me, I know nothing is impossible.”

In the unlikely event that Erdogan were to resume peace talks with imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, Yasa said he would withdraw the case “without a second thought.”

“Peace is what we were demonstrating for in Sheridan Circle,” Yasa said. “And if peace were the outcome, our suffering will not have been in vain.”

the Syrian refugee problem has proved increasingly costly for the AKP in terms of domestic politics

Across Turkey and in big cities in particular, most of the Syrian refugees live in close proximity to AKP voters, either in the same neighborhoods or adjoining ones. Under the impact of the economic crisis, tensions between locals and refugees have grown, contributing to a gradual disenchantment with the government among AKP voters

While announcing the launch of Operation Peace Spring, Erdogan said the campaign would “lead to the establishment of a safe zone, facilitating the return of Syrian refugees to their homes.” The political motive underlying this pledge rests on the fact that the Syrian refugee problem is becoming unbearable for the government.

Syrians who could be forced to flee Idlib in the near future could perhaps be placed in tent cities in this “security belt” without being let into Turkey at all and instead transferred via Afrin and al-Bab, which are already under Turkish control.

the web editor of the left-leaning BirGun daily, Hakan Demir, and the editor of the Diken news portal, Fatih Gokhan Diler, were detained on the grounds that their coverage of the operation amounted to “inciting hatred and enmity” among the people. The two journalists were released on probation later in the day.

The intensive employment of a nationalist narrative, in which the operation is depicted as a struggle of “national survival” against terrorism and quitting the AKP is equated to treason, would not be a surprise. 

already omens that this state-of-emergency climate, nurtured through the operation, will be used to further suppress the opposition, free speech and media freedoms. 

Ali Babacan, the AKP’s former economy czar who has already quit the party, is expected to create a new party and join the opposition ranks by the end of the year. Ahmet Davutoglu — the former premier and foreign minister who, together with Erdogan, designed and implemented the failed policies that spawned the grave “Syria crisis” that Turkey is experiencing today, both domestically and in its foreign policy — is gearing up to get ahead of Babacan and announce his own party in November. These political dynamics have already triggered a spate of resignations from the AKP, and the formal establishment of the new parties could further accelerate the unraveling

prosecutors launched an investigation into the co-chairs of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Pervin Buldan and Sezai Temelli, on charges that their critical comments about the operation constituted “spreading terrorist propaganda” and “openly insulting” the government. 

Erdogan already lacks any political ground to try to win over the Kurds, but Kurdish voters are likely to develop resentment against the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) as well over its support for the military campaign. This, of course, could be one of the side objectives the government seeks from the operation, given that the backing of HDP voters was instrumental in CHP victories in big cities such as Ankara, Istanbul and Adana in the local polls after the HDP opted to sit out those races.

Trump's threats to “obliterate” the Turkish economy if Ankara goes “off-limits” in the operation offers Erdogan the chance to blame the economy’s domestic woes on external reasons and portray the ongoing fragility of the Turkish lira as an American conspiracy.

Last month, the public prosecutor was finally ready to submit his indictment, which meant the family’s legal team would get their first opportunity to question Yumaç on the record. He had told them he was ready to reveal everything. He never got the chance. Days later Yumaç reportedly committed suicide in a high-security prison where he had been moved for his safety. Guards claimed he hung himself in a toilet with elastic from his clothing. Many find this incredible.

For Turkey’s environmental campaigners, this is part of a broader alarming trend.

The attack on the environment now is the biggest in our country’s history.

Erdoğan refutes such claims. He says his pro-business policies are in the national interest and accuses those who try to impede development as traitors and terrorists.

Eight people died and thousands were injured in clashes between the riot police. “For what?” a scornful Erdoğan asked afterwards. “For 12 trees!” Since then, he has pushed ahead with several massive infrastructure projects – a third airport, a third bridge over the Bosphorus and a new canal – that environmentalists say has led to the felling of 100 million trees.

“To be an activist in Turkey is to be constantly worried. We have to protect ourselves as well as the environment.”

With forest conservation now such a sensitive political subject, supporters of Ali and Aysin are in a difficult position. They plan to turn the dead couple’s home into a eco-residency, to establish a memorial park in Antalya, and to continue the campaign against the quarries and to get justice for the killings. “This is the first time two people have died trying to protect nature in Turkey. If we win, it will set a precedent that will help others in a similar position,” said one of those close to the campaign. “It would be a big step for Turkey. Ali and Aysin may be dead but they can still help the living.”

Inside Turkey, the Ülkücü movement (the name “Gray Wolves” is rarely used in Turkish political discourse) is splintered into subgroups that are connected by a binding ethos of loyalty to the Turkish nation and state. Many identify as the dutiful “soldiers” of Atatürk commanded by duty to flag and country. A subset still draws upon the outdated “Turkish History Thesis,” a pseudoscientific doctrine designed during the early republican years of the 1930s to sever the new secular Turkey from its Ottoman and Islamic past. Instead, the ideology claimed that Turks were racially superior, Central Asia was the cradle of humanity, and that the origins of global civilization lay within Central Asiatic and Turkic prehistory. Others are more overtly concerned with Islamic referents and take a hybrid Turkish Muslim identity as their compass.

Since the rise of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002, Ülkücü groups have rallied around Islamic nationalism, fusing religious scripture with an ethnic ideal of Turkishness

For years, the Ülkücü groups have been on the radar of the German national intelligence service and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, flagged as a potential threat to the German constitution. Authorities decry how Ülkücü leaders and members promote pan-Turkish ideologies marinated in racial superiority theories, antisemitism, and hatred of multiple “enemies,” such as the Kurds, Alevis, and Armenians, and pose a threat to the principle of equality

The Ülkücü network is organized under two main civil society organizations in Germany. In a 2019 report on the protection of the constitution, the German Federal Ministry of Interior describes the Federation of Turkish Democratic Idealist Associations in Germany (ADÜTDF) as the largest Ülkücü umbrella organization. Established in Frankfurt in 1978, the organization is believed to be represented by 170 local associations and has 7,000 members. This is the figure frequently used by lawmakers to argue that the Gray Wolves constitute the largest far-right movement in Europe. The Union of Turkish Islamic Cultural Associations in Europe (ATIB), based in Cologne, is also accused of being linked to the movement.

a sprawling and often amorphous network of clubs, charities, coffee houses, and neighborhood associations

Puncturing their professed self-image as legitimate civil society groups, over the years, various Ülkücü groups have been implicated in violent acts in Germany that expose the dark, criminal underbelly of many of its members. For example, Turkish ultranationalists cropped up as a subculture of renegade biker gangs, most famously known as Osmanen Germania BC (Germania Ottomans). With around 300 members, the group was banned in Germany in 2018, amid raids in the states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden Württemberg, Bavaria, and Hesse. Members were prosecuted for carrying out violent crimes, including attempted murder, extortion, drug trafficking, deprivation of liberty, and forced prostitution.

Diaspora communities globally tend to cling to idealized stereotypes of their homeland that give them a larger-than-life sense of self. The Turks in Germany are no different, long preoccupied with reifying the soul of the nation that they left behind. Feelings of longing and remorse mingle with uncertainty as the ever-present question looms large for many — to return to Turkey or to stay?

the kind of nationalism embodied by the Ülkücü movement offers a positive identity at a time when many young people still feel like second-class citizens in Germany.

Regardless of the pull of identity politics, the majority of Turks shun antagonistic Ülkücü ideas. For many Turkish Germans, the Ülkücü movement is synonymous with a warped, dysfunctional, mafia-esque distortion of Turkish nationalism that has no place in Germany’s democracy. Many who have long called Germany home speak about a different kind of Turkish nationalism, one more akin to civic patriotism and cultural-linguistic pride, than the harsher, all-or-nothing Turkishness that far-right Turks champion. “It does generations of Turks toiling in this country as laborers, teachers, doctors, a disservice when the media caricaturizes us all as Gray Wolves,”

Turkish activists argue that media attention on the Gray Wolves seems to be missing the real danger as German prosecutors turn a blind eye to the neo-Nazi or far-right perpetrators of violence against Turkish and other immigrant groups.

It is difficult to untangle the proposed terror listing of the Gray Wolves from the rapidly deteriorating relations between Turkey and the EU over the past few years. Talk of a ban in places like Germany sends a message to Turkey that its aggressive foreign policies against EU member states will not go unchecked. Meanwhile, Erdoğan recently railed against the spreading “virus of Islamophobia” across Europe, likening it to the threat of COVID-19.Stuck in the crosshairs are members of the Turkish diaspora, seemingly reduced to pawns in the political fallout between Turkey and the EU. But ban or no ban, the long-standing debate around radicalization among disaffected Turks in Germany and the limitations of inclusive politics is far from over and requires a resolution within Germany’s deliberative public sphere.

the government first needs to contain the spread of the left

the People’s Republican Party (CHP), Turkey’s founding and currently main opposition party, has tried to contain this “patriot-terrorist” polarity. Its umbrella candidates for the presidency, ranging from the soporific Ekmeleddin Ihsanoğlu in 2014, to the firebrand Muharrem Ince in 2018, have failed. In the 2019 municipal elections, however, the CHP’s mayoral candidates did well, uniting the Kemalist-nationalist camp, Islamists, liberal cosmopolitans, as well as leftists and even some sympathizers of the Kurdish movement. These candidates won against Erdoğan’s men in all major cities, including Ankara and (in a repeat election) Istanbul. This was the first, and so far only, time Erdoğan’s containment of the left had been breached.

Many in the urban middle class, who are fairly indifferent about Kurdish rights, wanted to see Demirtas grow the HDP into a Turkish-Kurdish version of the European Greens. The idea at the time was to also expand into a grand center-left coalition that would prevent Erdoğan from establishing his hyper-centralized presidential system. Their momentum was cut short when months after the coup attempt, in December 2016, the government detained Demirtas on charges of terrorism and began a ruthless crackdown on the HDP’s activities that has since only gained in intensity.

The second part of the government’s strategy is to keep the left — crippled and branded as terrorists — within the political system. While Turkey’s politics is polarized between the government and the opposition, this creates a second polarization, this time within the opposition camp. It is this second polarity where the vast majority of political discourse takes place. From the perspective of a nationalistic system of valuation, in which being “local and national” reigns supreme, this is a fatal flaw. On the one hand, the various factions of the opposition can’t win a national vote unless they partner with the HDP to form a 50 percent bloc against Erdoğan. On the other, the nationalists within the opposition cannot be seen working with the “terrorists” of the pro-Kurdish left.

The left, however, puts up genuine systemic resistance: They reject the idea that the Turkish nation is pure and infallible. Like leftists elsewhere, they deconstruct official history, focusing on massacres of minorities and exploitation of the working classes. There is also an inextricable tie to the Kurdish movement, which in turn is linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) — an insurgency that has been waging war on the Turkish state for over four decades. The connection between the non-Kurdish left and the Kurdish movement is complicated and has gone through various stages in the recent past. For the Turkish right, there is little difference between leftist subversion and Kurdish insurrection. “I joined the police to beat up Communists” a crescent-mustached officer once told me, and he was talking about arresting Kurdish protesters.

the Erdoğan government finally seeks to pull the entire bloc to the right. This means focusing on liberal-minded urbanites whose nationalism has lapsed, and rekindling their faith in the national mythos. This is the most challenging aspect of its effort, and where it has done most poorly.

restructuring of the media. For the past few years, the government has been taking over media channels that centrist voters traditionally follow, then gradually shifting their tone to favor the government. The Dogan Media Group, owner of Hurriyet (Turkey’s former newspaper of record) and CNN Turk (a 24-hour TV news channel) used to cater to a secular, urban, and increasingly progressive audience. The group’s main audience overlapped with the centrist-opposition CHP’s voter base, whose older members are secularist-nationalists and younger members (often their children) are leftist-progressives. In March 2018, the media group was sold to an Erdoğan-friendly conglomerate, which fired many of its veteran journalists and changed editorial guidelines. The result has been a desensitized, less colorful version of the jingoist carnival running across Erdoğan’s formal channels. CNN Turk, especially, became a tool for the government to enter the living rooms of CHP voters and tell them that they were voting for terrorist collaborators. So insidious were these attacks that the CHP had to ban its members from getting on the channel, and call upon its electorate to boycott it.

 Erdoğan said “We have 18 martyrs and close to 200 wounded. In our country, we have the terror group’s so-called political organism. Aside from that, our nation is now in a state of Yekvücut.” The term is a favorite of the president. It is a combination of the Farsi term “Yek” meaning “single” and the Arabic word “vücut” meaning “existence,” or in the Turkish use, “body.” Erdoğan was thinking of the nation as a single biological organism, with the leftists and the Kurdish movement as foreign bodies

The opposition media — largely relegated to the internet — was reporting on the plight of the working class and the brewing economic crisis. Like free media across the West, they also questioned the quality and veracity of their government’s COVID-19 data. In a speech delivered in May, Erdoğan was unusually angry. He had clearly expected a Yekvücut moment and was struggling to understand why it hadn’t come about. His strategy to create a “local and national” opposition wasn’t working, and the frustration of it seemed to hit him head on. “I want to warn once again the media and other representatives who are in league with the CHP’s leaders,” he said, before launching into what was — even for him — an unusually vituperative attack: “You are not national, and your localness is in question,” he said, “you have always sided with whoever was treacherous [bozguncu], whoever was perverted, whoever was depraved” adding, “you are like the creatures in mythology that only feed on enmity, hate, fear, confusion and pain.”

The absurd accusations of fraud and coup-abetting aside, there is something to the idea that the opposition wants things to get worse. The Erdoğan government’s consolidation over the past decade has been so suffocating for opposition voters that many do look for deliverance in economic or natural disaster.

The Erdoğan government may have cut short the HDP’s rise, but it hasn’t been able to prevent leftist ideas from spreading. The CHP’s youth wings today are highly class-conscious and hostile to militant nationalism. Figures like the CHP’s Istanbul provincial head Canan Kaftancıoğlu , who campaign on a mix of feminism, workers’ rights, and anti-fascist slogans, are gaining a national following. The polarization within the opposition is likely deepening, with part of the 30 million become more “national,” while another part is becoming more leftist. This means that the great mass of right-wing sentiment is growing, but so is the left-wing minority. The “problem,” in the government’s view, may no longer be 30 million strong, but it is more acute, and perhaps more vexing, than before.

(gun ownership has soared since the 2016 coup attempt)

To Turkey’s governing class, the military coup of their imagination is not a matter of defending against an armed force trying to take over the government. Rather, it is a night of free-for-all, in which politics is stripped down to its violent core, and a majority at the height of its powers can finally put down the enemy within: the haters, the doubters, the creatures of mythology.

“Turkey will not only reach its 2023 goals [the centennial of the Republic], it will also be rid of the representatives of this diseased politics,” he said in May, hinting that he might cut the left out of the political system entirely. If this should happen, politics would be an uneven contest between Islamist, pan-Turkic, and secularist hues of Turkish nationalism. Far off, in the back streets of the big cities and in the Kurdish provinces, in second-hand bookshops and hidden corners of the internet, there would be a progressive left, weathering out what is surely going to be a violent storm.

Erdogan frequently tells the public that Turkey is engaged in a war of survival. For example, at a Republic Day ceremony Oct. 29, Erdogan made live phone calls to military officers stationed inside and outside Turkey

Pro-AKP columnists still write pieces bragging about “Erdogan’s revolution of civilianization.” The AKP Youth rigorously campaigned to find alternative ways to boost military conscription of males.

In 2002, Erdogan promised to minimize, if not end, the role of the military in Turkish politics. Turkey has suffered several military coups, so this bold promise garnered support from liberals, Kurds, Islamists and even those who were eager for Turkey to gain full EU membership. Up until the 2010 constitutional referendum, Erdogan garnered the support of a wide swath of the country with his promise to end military tutelage.

Erdogan is no longer struggling for civilian control of politics. Rather, he is encouraging an expansive role for the military in Turkish politics. But why?

Scholars and military officials Al-Monitor interviewed agreed that Turkey managed to enact demilitarization but not civilianization. Indeed, the visibility of military symbols and images has become lucrative for the government as failed policies accumulate and the Kurdish problem becomes an international matter.

sales of military uniforms for civilians, particularly kids, have skyrocketed. We do not know if every Turk is born a soldier, but many more today are dressing up in camouflage.

Prime Minister Erdogan has achieved a great deal for Turkey, and he deserves applause and support; however, if he continues to listen only to his faithful supporters, he risks obstructing Turkey’s progress, by aggravating the tense polarization that is currently pervading the country. In fact, by failing to provide a true liberal Islamic model, he can also indirectly doom the wider Middle East to a new form of illicit autocracy, which emerges through the ballot boxes.

The way for Turkey to achieve a sustainable growth rate by financing its current deficit is to make the country attractive for direct foreign investment. That in turn requires Turkey to have a properly functioning legal system, properly and justly operating independent institutions, good governance, a stable democracy and a free market — in short, to be predictable. Authoritarian and arbitrarily governed countries first lose their predictability.

The same situation has emerged concerning the Koc Group, which has been subjected to one tax penalty after another. The Koc Group, the largest capital group of Turkey, attracted the ire of Erdogan during the June 2013 Gezi Park protests when the nearby Divan Hotel it owns opened its doors to those escaping the pepper gas and brutality of the police. Erdogan perceived that as a challenge and accused the Koc Group of being accomplices to the protesters. Alluding to the group June 17, he actually said, "We know those who cooperate with terrorists and accommodate them in their hotels. We will settle accounts on this. Now we have an interest lobby emerging.” We all discovered how that account was be settled when tax audit teams from the Ministry of Finance accompanied by police raided the Koc companies.

Mustafa Boydak, the president of the Chamber of Industry of the Anatolian industrial city of Kayseri and a well-known conservative industrialist, denounced the tax audit of the Koc Group and called on the government "not to become party to the business world and not to treat the companies that carry Turkey as an enemy.” The government clearly didn’t appreciate Boydak’s call and responded with a tax audit of the Boydak Holding group of companies.

Some public corporations led by Turkish Airlines and private companies with ties to the government withdrew 900 million lira ($391 million) of deposits from Bank Asya, recognized as the Gulen movement's bank, on the same day without waiting for the deposits to mature, and put the bank in a tough bind. Bank Asya was saved from going under when companies and businessmen affiliated with Gulen deposited the same amount of money.

The first allegations of the AKP government using tax penalties as a political weapon came out in 2008, when the Dogan Media Group was openly targeted by Erdogan and fined $1.6 billion

in Syria, other former rebels, dealing with the same deprivation, were being enticed to join the same war—but on the side of the commander Khalifa Haftar, the GNA’s main rival backed by Russia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.

In March, Russia turned to Syria for reinforcements. It roped in its Syrian ally Assad to back its preferred Libyan warlord and began scouting for men willing to render services in a foreign conflict in exchange for cash.

Syrian rebels say the man tasked with leading this recruitment drive was Col. Alexander Zorin, who in 2016 served as the Russian defense ministry’s envoy at the Geneva-based task force on cessation of hostilities in Syria. Zorin is better known in Syria as “the godfather” of reconciliation deals between the regime and rebels in Ghouta, Daraa, and Quneitra.

In cooperation with Assad’s intelligence officials, Zorin is believed to have initiated negotiations with a number of rebel groups to send them to fight in Libya. Abu Tareq (his name has been changed for this article), the leader of a rebel group that fought the Islamic State in Quneitra in southern Syria, told Foreign Policy he met Zorin and agreed to go to Libya along with his fighters. “We met him, and he told us we were going to Libya with the security company [Wagner],” said Tareq from Syria. “He made a generous offer, $5,000 per month for a commander and $1,000 for a fighter. Of course, we agreed, because the financial situation is horrible in our area.”

amnesty for those who fled the draft and those against whom the regime kept a file for payback later.

Tareq and Mamtineh, and the men fighting for them, soon discovered they had been misled. They were lured with the assurance that they would merely guard oil installations in Haftar-controlled eastern Libya, but upon arrival at their training center in Homs, they found out that they were expected to fight and die for Haftar—and that the monthly salary would be much lower, only about $200. “Another Russian general at the base in Homs, I didn’t know his name, read out the terms of the contract before all of us. It wasn’t what Zorin promised. We refused and asked to be sent back home,”

Libyan analysts say Syrians are already in eastern Libya strengthening Haftar’s defenses. Anas El Gomati, the founder and director of the first public policy think tank established in Tripoli, Libya, said that, while Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group led the offensive in Haftar’s yearlong attempt to conquer Tripoli, Syrians had been sent to back up the warlord in eastern Libya.

Mercenaries come at a cost, they don’t know the lay of the land, and are struggling to make ground in urban terrain

In 2011, Turkey only had the dated Piri Reis seismic survey vessel; today it has five large and advanced ships working in the Black and Mediterranean Seas. Two are seismic survey ships — the Oruc Reis and the RV Barbaros — with three drilling ships: Fatih, Yavuz and Kanuni. While the Fatih is operating in the Black Sea, the others are in the Mediterranean

Turkey’s lack of energy resources has been a weak point for the economy

The formal justification for the raid was based on a decree issued on Sept. 3, 2019. It authorizes the government to assume control of local plants and seeds and to regulate their production and sales.

Turkey’s first lady Emine Erdogan, a passionate advocate of herbal and organic food products, introduced the so-called “Ata Tohum” or “Ancestral Seed” project that envisages “agriculture as the key to our national sovereignty.” The scheme is aimed at collecting and storing genetically unmodified seeds from local farmers and to reproduce and plant them so as to grow “fully indigenous” aliments.

Ata Tohum is thought to be the brainchild of Ibrahim Adnan Saracoglu, an Austrian-trained biochemist.  He is among Erdogan’s ever expanding legion of advisers. The 71-year old has written academic tracts about how broccoli consumption can prevent prostatitis. He was with the first lady at the Sept. 5 Ata Tohum event.

The professor railed against assorted Westerners who had plundered Anatolia’s botanical wealth and carried it back home.

“Seeds” he intoned, “are the foundation of our national security.”

a “classic nationalist move to dig deeper and deeper into the past for justification of the [nationalist] policies that you are currently putting in place.”

parallels with the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who “connected Turkish civilization back to the Phrygians and the Hittites” as part of his nation-building project.

“You have these genetic ties to the land through these seeds as proof that our civilization belongs here and has been here since time immemorial. To want to have these [seeds] in the first place is part of the nationalist framework.”

The ultimate fate of the British Institute’s seeds remains a mystery. It’s just as unclear what practical purpose they will serve.

“the archaeology seeds are essentially charcoal, dead and inert.” As for the modern reference collection “we are talking about stuff that was collected 25 to 50 years ago and is not going to be able to germinate.”

“But in order to get genomic information you only need one or two grains, not the whole collection. What [Turkish authorities] have done is they’ve removed this research resource from the wider Turkish and international community of researchers. It was a nice, small research facility, open to anyone who wanted to use it. Now it’s all gone,”

Among the 1930s cultural and intellectual figures given place of pride are Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and John Steinbeck. Guernica is reproduced in an inset about Picasso, illustrating the artist’s hatred of war. (47) A lengthy excerpt from the Grapes of Wrath concludes with Steinbeck’s denunciation of depression-era America: “And money that might have gone to wages went for gas, for guns, for agents and spies, for blacklists, for drilling. On the highways the people moved like ants and searched for work, for food. And the anger began to ferment.”

The book places added emphasis on the harsh terms imposed on Germany at Versailles. Prefiguring the later treatment of Al Qaeda terrorism, the intention appears not so much to justify Nazism, but rather to present injustice as the causal force behind violence and cruelty in world politics.

Early Cold War era decolonization also provides an opportunity to celebrate Atatürk’s role as an anti-imperialist hero for Muslims and the entire Third World. (122-123) “Turkey’s national struggle against imperialism in Anatolia struck the first great blow against imperialism in the 20th century,” the authors write. “Mustafa Kemal, with his role in the War of Independence and his political, economic, social and cultural revolutions after it, served as an example for underdeveloped and colonized nations.” Atatürk himself is quoted as saying, in 1922, that “what we are defending is the cause of all Eastern nations, of all oppressed nations.” Thus, the book explains that “the success of the national struggle brought joy to the entire colonized Islamic world, and served as a source of inspiration to members of other faiths.” The section ends with quotes from leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and Habib Bourguiba about how Atatürk inspired them in their own anti-imperial struggles or was simply, in Nehru’s words, “my hero.” An accompanying graphic shows Atatürk’s image superimposed over a map with arrows pointing to all the countries, from Algeria to Indonesia, whose revolutions were supposedly influenced by Turkey’s War of Independence.

The foundation of the UN is immediately followed by a discussion of Israel under the heading “Imperial Powers in the Remaking of the Middle East.” (80-81) The Palestine problem, students learn, is the principal cause of conflict in the region. It began when the Ottoman Empire, “the biggest obstacle to the foundation of a Jewish state,” grew weak, leading to the creation of Israel.

Next comes a discussion of the post-war financial order and the International Monetary Fund. Students learn that “the IMF’s standard formula, which recommends austerity policies for countries in economic crises, generally results in failure, chaos and social unrest.” (81-83) An excerpt, which students are then asked to discuss, explains how the IMF prescribes different policies for developed and developing countries.

only in the context of the Cold War origins of the EU does the book engage in any explicitly religious clash-of-civilizations style rhetoric. The idea of European unity is traced back to the Crusades, while a quote about the centrality of Christianity to European identity appears under a dramatic picture of Pope Francis standing with European leaders. (112) The next page states that the EU’s treatment of Turkey’s candidacy, coupled with the fact that “all the countries within it were Christian” had “raised questions” about the EU’s identity.

the Holocaust instead appears here as one among several examples of Western barbarity

The authors also offer a balanced treatment of the fraught domestic politics during the period from 1945 to 1960 when Turkey held its first democratic election and experienced its first coup. (138-142, 144-146) They focus their criticism on the negative impact of U.S. aid, arguing that Washington intentionally sought to make Turkey economically and politically dependent, then sponsored a coup when these efforts were threatened.

Selçuk Bayraktar, the architect of Turkey’s drone program, said that as a student “I was obsessed with Noam Chomsky.” [16] During the 1980s and 90s, America sold Ankara F-16 jets and Sikorsky helicopters that were used to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign in southeast Anatolia. No one was more critical of this than left-wing scholars like Chomsky.[17] Now, Ankara is selling Bayraktar drones to Ethiopia, where they are being used to kill civilians and destroy schools in another violent civil war.

The narrative of national independence also helps smooth over Turkey’s Cold War domestic divides. Students are introduced to the ‘68 Generation and left-wing leaders likes Deniz Gezmiş as anti-imperialists protesting against the U.S. Sixth Fleet in support of a fully independent Turkey. (185-186)[9] In this context, Baskin Oran’s work is again cited, this time quoting Uğur Mumcu on the role of “dark forces,” presumably the CIA, in laying the groundwork for Turkey’s 1971 coup.

The book also offers a relatively neutral treatment of political activism during the ensuing decade, suggesting that rival ideological movements were all good faith responses to the country’s challenges. On this, the authors quote Kemal Karpat: “Both right and left wing ideologies sought to develop an explanation for social phenomena and a perspective on the future. A person’s choice of one of these ideologies was generally the result of chance or circumstance.” (202) Thus the authors imply that while foreign powers provoked or exploited these movements, the individual citizens who participated in them can be given the benefit of the doubt. Interestingly, the book takes a similar approach in discussing the 2013 Gezi protests: “If various financial interests and foreign intelligence agencies had a role in the Gezi Park events, a majority of the activists were unaware of it and joined these protests of their own will.”

Turkey’s real struggle in the 21st century, as in the 20th, is against dependence on foreign technology

a book which begins with a portrait of Atatürk ends with a photo of the Bayraktar TB2.

the book’s biases are less in the realm of wild distortion and more reminiscent of those that plague ideologically infused nationalistic history education in all too many countries

its exaggerated critique of European imperialism may be no more misleading than the whitewashing still found in some European textbooks

At moments, Contemporary Turkish and World History is better aligned with recent left-leaning scholarship than the patriotic accounts many Americans grew up reading as well

Throughout the 20th century, America defined itself as the world’s premier anti-imperialist power, all while gradually reproducing many of the elements that had defined previous empires.[11] Today, it often seems that Turkey’s aspirations for great power status reflect the facets of 20th century American power it has condemned most vigorously

Turkey’s marriage of power projection and anti-colonial critique have been particularly visible – and effective – in Africa. Ankara has presented itself as an “emancipatory actor,” while providing humanitarian aid, establishing military bases, selling weapons across the continent.[13] In doing so, Turkish leaders have faced some of the same contradictions as previous emancipatory actors. In August 2020, for example, members of Mali’s military overthrew a president with whom Erdoğan enjoyed good relations. Ankara expressed its “sorrow” and “deep concern.”[14] Then, a month later, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu became the first foreign official to meet with the country’s new military leaders. “Like a brother,” he “sincerely shared” his hopes for a smooth “transition process” back to democracy

Amidst the polarization of the Erdoğan era, what is striking in this book is the authors’ efforts to weave together the conflicting strands of Turkish political history into a coherent narrative. Illustrating Ernst Renan’s argument about the role of forgetting in nation-building, this account glosses over the depth of the divisions and hostility between rival historical actors, presenting them as all working side by side toward a common national goal

certain themes dominate Contemporary Turkish and World History. At the center of its narrative is the struggle for global hegemony, in military, economic, technological and artistic terms

The second purpose of the terrorists’ encampments was to form territorial beach-heads for their own statelet to be built upon the carcasses of Syria and Iraq on the areas vacated by Daesh. Olive Branch stops the descent into a broader war and soaring terrorism that would engulf Europe and the United States

It has been alleged that our operation impedes the fight against Daesh because the YPG terrorists are now focused on resisting the Turkish military’s advances. I think that this choice by the YPG demonstrates the folly of any strategy that involved relying on the group in the first place. But, rest assured, Turkey will not allow Daesh to regroup one way or the other

Turkey wants all Kurds to live in peace and prosperity in all the countries they straddle.

is the foreign minister of Turkey.

Ali Kemal, who held staunchly liberal views, supporting diminishing the state's control in many areas, was a strong ally of Sultan Abdulhamid, the last sultan to exert any real control over the Ottoman domain. Like the sultan, Ali Kemal had disagreed with and mistrusted the revolutionary Young Turks. Ali Kemal publicly expressed strong criticism of the movement for the atrocities against the Armenians and generally during the War of Independence (1919-23). He also opposed Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his war against the European forces that invaded and then occupied the Ottoman Empire at the conclusion of World War I.

How Ali Kemal's life came to an end is horrific. While he was being transferred to Ankara to be tried by an Independence Tribunal, he was seized from a train and lynched by a mob organized by Gen. Nurettin Pasha, commander of the First Army. It is said that he was lynched because of his opposition to the independence war. It is also a well-known fact that during the attack, the mob called him Artin Kemal, Artin being a popular Armenian name.

It is said that prominent figures of the newly established Turkish Republic, among them Ismet Inonu and Ataturk, abhorred Nurettin Pasha for what he did. He was never, however, punished for that deed or the other atrocities in which he was allegedly involved as he escaped arrest. Nurettin Pasha also organized the lynching of Chrysostomos Kalafatis, the metropolit of Smyrana, today's Izmir.

on the one hand we need to give him credit for his being in favor of putting perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and war crimes on trial, but on the other hand we need to criticize him for his rigid opposition to the War of Independence and his unconditional support of the British back then

Some of the most significant gains came in Europe where the bulk of Turkey’s 2,929,389-stong diaspora lives. Voting from abroad has only been possible since 2013 and the low turnout among diasporic citizens in 2014 suggests that politicians had not yet worked to mobilize them. In Holland, for example, where 8.6% of diasporic voters were registered at the time of the referendum, turnout was only 7.2% in 2014, but rose to 46.7% and 46.8% in November 1, 2015 and April 16, 2017, respectively. Though Erdoğan’s share of the vote in 2014 (78%) was higher than in either the AKP (69.7%) or the YES vote (70.9) received, the difference in turnouts makes comparison difficult. Moreover, Holland was part of a larger trend in 2017: of European countries with more than 10,000 diasporic voters only voters in Switzerland registered a decline in support for Erdoğan’s priorities.

a fractional number of voters who were willing to vote for the AKP over other parties and Erdoğan over other candidates were unwilling to give him sweeping powers.

Overall, the YES vote was 3.7 percentage points higher than the vote for the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in its November 2014 election. At the same time, the YES vote was 0.4 points lower than in the 2014 presidential election. Though Erdoğan achieved his goal of winning the election and securing additional powers, this feat may be pyrrhic: it was achieved with the help of an MHP leadership that has been shown to be out of touch with its own voters; it was achieved with diminished support in key regions like the Black Sea; it was achieved with increased support in southeast regions where tens of thousands of citizens did not reach the voting booth. President Erdoğan has successfully cobbled together a coalition of voters sizeable enough to win, but governing will be the greater challenge.

Under Kaftancioglu’s guidance, Imamoglu and other mayors took a new tack, dubbed the “Radical Love” strategy, which is the antithesis of Erdogan’s ferocious style of polarization and antagonism. This involved making overtures to marginalized groups, using positive, inclusive language (extremely rare in the vicious world of Turkish politics), and trying to heal the cultural fault lines that Erdogan has taken a jackhammer to. Imamoglu’s positive slogan was “Everything’s going to be OK,” and he recited a prayer at a mosque—a rare move for a CHP politician—as a form of outreach to pious Muslims.

“This is the first time I’ve seen the CHP this organized,” said Nevsin Mengu, a columnist from a CHP background. “Kaftancioglu has played an important role in this.”

She has expressed opinions that are extremely controversial within the party and indeed the country, acknowledging the Armenian genocide, calling the state a “serial killer,” and criticizing a popular Kemalist slogan for its militant language, tweeting “I refuse to say we are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal, but we are his comrades.”

Within 48 hours of Kaftancioglu being elected the party head for Istanbul in 2018, a prosecutor opened a terrorism investigation into her (she’s now appealing a 10-year jail sentence) and Erdogan himself devoted 10 minutes to slamming her during an AKP meeting the next day, reading each of her tweets that he took issue with.

the government’s wider antagonistic strategy of treating any and all opposition as an existential threat

More recently, a criminal complaint and investigation were opened against Kaftancioglu after the CHP Istanbul municipality lodged a complaint against Erdogan’s powerful Communications Director Fahrettin Altun for allegedly building illegal constructions in Istanbul.

“I’ve been subjected to hundreds of sexist, nationalist, ultrareligious groups’ threats, and it still goes on. I knew that as a woman I was going to face this, but I never thought of taking a step back,”

“If [the government] can’t identify an enemy outsider, they create abstract enemies and pretend to be in a fight with them. Sometimes they call it foreign powers, sometimes terrorism, sometimes secular people.”

“What really makes her a juicy target is her flagrant absence of the ‘yerli ve milli’ [local and national, a favorite phrase of the government], the national spirit. She and the people around her … don’t just exist outside of the national spirit type of thing, they deny that kind of nationalism,” Koru said. “Erdogan can get up and say, ‘Look, this is being disrespectful on purpose. She hates you, she hates what you are, and she wants to change you in the way that Kemalists wanted to change you, in the worst possible way.’”

just as Kaftancioglu’s approach turns many people off, it also caters to others who previously may have felt excluded, such as younger people, leftists, liberals, and religious and ethnic minorities. “A certain segment of the party … didn’t like her iconoclastic approach to politics,” he said. “But it may also be that some other people who previously [felt] alienated from the party are now more interested for the same reason.”

the CHP’s increasingly national ambitions. The party hasn’t won an election since 1977, but its most popular figure, Imamoglu, polls almost as high as Erdogan. It’s far too early for the party to announce a presidential candidate, but two of the main contenders would likely be Imamoglu or Mansur Yavas, the popular mayor of the capital, Ankara. Kaftancioglu will likely continue her behind-the-scenes role.

Some governance experts no longer consider the country a democracy, but rather a competitive authoritarian system, especially after Erdogan was left with few limits on his power when the government was transformed into an “executive presidential” system following a referendum in 2017, which Kaftancioglu describes as “one-party rule transformed into one-man rule.”

“For the first time in a long time people are talking about the CHP like it can realistically win national elections.”