Turkey military coup: news and updates

In the chaos of the attempted coup perpetrated by elements of the Turkish military in July, the nation’s president and incipient strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pointed the finger squarely at one source: the Gülen Movement.

In an address to the nation via web video stream, Erdoğan explained that the coup attempt came from “a faction in the military, the parallels,“ which Turkey observers understood as a reference to followers of Fethullah Gülen, a moderate Sunni cleric whose movement claims millions of followers in Turkey and around the world. Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag repeated the accusations in a TV interview, claiming the coup plotters were tied to Gülen.

It is not yet clear why a faction of the Turkish military recently attempted to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But since surviving the coup, the increasingly authoritarian president has wasted no time in purging Turkey of elements that he has perceived as threats to his rule. To date, more than 6,000 members of the military and the judiciary have been arrested.

Although the coup attempt was unexpected, military coups are not entirely strange affairs to Turkey. Since 1960, the military has moved four times to overthrow sitting governments. The Turkish military has done this, in part, because it has long seen itself as the defender of Kemalism: the secular and democratic principles of the nation’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

The apparently failed coup against President Erdoğan of Turkey continued to unfold Saturday morning, in what remains a very uncertain and fluid situation. Friday night, during the most chaotic sequence of events, Erdoğan gave an interview via a video chat service on his iPhone, where he asserted the legitimacy of his government’s authority and called on the Turkish people to take to the streets against the coup. The picture of him talking via Facetime is already one of the iconic images of the night.

Meanwhile, around the country, Facebook’s real-time map of its live video streams showed large numbers of users in Turkey, mostly streaming either the events of the moment or showing people out on the street protesting the military takeover.

Friday night’s military coup against Turkey’s civilian leadership appears to have failed. By Saturday morning, the New York Times reports, Turkey’s security services had detained “thousands of military personnel” who had participated in the coup.

“There were few signs that those who had taken part in the coup attempt were still able to challenge the government, and many declared the uprising a failure,” the Times’s Tim Arango and Ceylan Yeginsu write.

Late Friday afternoon, a faction of the Turkish military launched an attempt to overthrow the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This is far from the first time Turkey’s military (or at least a part of it) has done something like this — indeed, the military has overthrown Turkey’s civilian government four times since 1960.

Ömer Taşpınar is a nonresident senior fellow in Brookings Center on 21st Century Security and Intelligence and an expert on Turkey. I spoke to him on Friday evening about the attempted coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Ezra Klein: I know very little about Turkish politics. So how should I understand what is going on in the country right now?

Late on Friday afternoon, military vehicles and troops swarmed the Turkish capital of Ankara and its most populous city, Istanbul. The country’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim, has gone on television to announce that this is a coup attempt by at least some portion of the military against the current government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

A statement claiming to represent the Turkish armed forces claims to have seized control of the government. However, several hours later, a government spokesperson said the coup had been defeated. Emerging evidence suggests the government is telling the truth — among other things, Erdogan has landed in Istanbul, a thing he wouldn’t do unless the security situation there is stable and in his favor.

On Friday afternoon, an as-yet-unidentified faction of the Turkish military launched a coup attempt aimed at toppling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

The coup leaders, claiming to speak for the entire Turkish Armed Forces, said they’d done so in the name of protecting democracy — despite the fact that Erdogan and his party were democratically elected.

Amid news of the coup attempt in Turkey, I reached Dani Rodrik, a Turkish economist and international development expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He was traveling in Spain but emailed answers to some of my (very basic) questions on the crisis. Here’s our exchange.

Ezra Klein: How, as someone who doesn’t follow Turkish politics closely, should I understand what’s going here?

Could the coup attempt in Turkey against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government end up empowering ... Erdogan? Some analysts think so:

To see why, go back to this excellent July 5 New York Times story by Sabrina Tavernise outlining the growing fears that Erdogan was moving toward “seizing the title of president for life.”

Friday evening’s news of a coup attempt in Turkey has stunned the world. Almost nobody thought the Turkish military, or at least part of it, would attempt to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — and yet, it’s happening.

With such surprising news unfolding, and confusing and often conflicting information coming in real time, it can be hard to understand what’s really happening. That’s true on a factual level, which is why we’re sorting through the latest developments over on our “what we know” post.