Turkish authorities have over the past week detained 85 individuals due to alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement, Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing Turkish media.
On Tuesday, Turkish police detained 29 people in coordinated operations across seven provinces. The subjects include former military officers dismissed after a failed coup in 2016, as well as public servants who worked in various agencies.
The accusations against the detainees include secretly communicating with contacts within the movement via payphones and studying together for the entrance exams for public agencies.
On Wednesday, Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya announced on the social media platform X that an additional 41 people had been detained in nine provinces, including individuals accused of being involved in the movement’s alleged infiltration of the police and military. Yerlikaya said the detainees were identified through their use of ByLock, a mobile messaging application, which Turkish officials have said was a secret communication tool for Gülen supporters.
On Thursday, 15 more people were detained in İzmir. The detainees were accused of using ByLock to communicate with members of the movement.
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who passed away in exile in October, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-Prime Minister Erdoğan as well as some members of his family and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement a terrorist organization and began to target its members. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following a failed coup in 2016, which the government accuses Gülen of masterminding.
The movement denies involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
ByLock, once widely available to the public online, has been considered a secret tool of communication among supporters of the Gülen movement, despite a lack of evidence of any terrorism-related purpose.
Turkish authorities continue to detain and prosecute people for the use of ByLock, despite a landmark European Court of Human Rights decision in late 2023 which concluded that a charge of the use of the app as evidence of terrorism activity was overly broad and arbitrary.
Following the abortive putsch, 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. More than 130,000 public servants as well as 24,706 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.
In recent years, more than 705,172 people have been investigated on terrorism or coup-related charges due to their alleged links to the movement. There are at least 13,251 people in prison who are in pre-trial detention or convicted of terrorism charges in Gülen-linked trials.
Between June 2023 and June 2024 alone, Turkish authorities carried out a total of 5,543 police operations and arrested 1,595 people linked to the movement.
In addition to the thousands who were jailed, scores of other Gülen movement followers had to flee Turkey to avoid the government crackdown.