Hüseyin Adalan, a journalist working for a number of pro-government media outlets, has said it is a religious obligation to kill all followers of the faith-based Gülen movement and even their babies.
Writing from his Twitter account on Sunday, Adalan said it is “wajib,” an Islamic term meaning religious obligation, to kill those who show mercy to the followers of the Gülen movement and that even the babies of Gülen followers should be killed.
“The great Turkish state should demonstrate its enormous power,” he wrote in his controversial tweet, which attracted widespread criticism on social media.
Adalan writes columns for the pro-government Yeni Söz, Milat and İstiklal newspapers.
It is very common for pro-government journalists in Turkey to employ hate speech against followers of the Gülen movement, which is accused by the Turkish government of masterminding a failed coup attempt on July 15.
The failed military coup attempt killed over 240 people and wounded more than a thousand others. Immediately after the putsch, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government along with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pinned the blame on the Gülen movement despite the lack of any evidence to that effect.
Fethullah Gülen, who inspired the movement, strongly denied having any role in the failed coup and called for an international investigation into it, but President Erdoğan — calling the coup attempt “a gift from God” — and the government initiated a widespread purge aimed at cleansing sympathizers of the movement from within state institutions, dehumanizing its popular figures and putting them in custody.
According to a statement from Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ on May 6, 149,833 people have been investigated and 48,636 have been jailed as part of an investigation targeting the Gülen movement since the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey.