Erdoğan poised fist to hit the blow to former ally Gülen

“Their plans to arrest me were ready,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in his speech on Dec. 12 while hosting the Turkish Union of Chambers of Commerce (TOBB) in the new presidential palace in Ankara.

“Dec. 17 [2013] was not a corruption operation,” Erdoğan said in the same speech. “It was a coup attempt. They had even prepared the list for the Cabinet to take over after us. We have all of the evidence in our hands now.”

If those words had been said seven years ago, one would have assumed that the target was the military, against which a number of investigations were under way, such as the “Ergenekon” and “Balyoz” cases. In those, not only ranking military officers, but academics, journalists, lawyers and NGO members were put in prisons and received heavy sentences.

Erdoğan’s target today is not the military, but the same police officers, prosecutors and judges who had spearheaded the probes to curb the military’s role in politics and, in the meantime, caused lot of collateral damage. In those days, Deniz Baykal, the former chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), labeled them the “F-Type structure.”

That “F-Type” labeling was in reference to the letter “F” of Fethullah Gülen, an Islamist scholar living in the U.S. with a lot of sympathizers in Turkey's police force, judiciary, education and media sectors, and who had been the closest ally of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) governments since 2002.

Gülen’s "Hizmet" (Service) Movement, also running thousands of schools in Turkey and more than 100 countries (previously with the diplomatic and political support of AK Parti governments), gave open political support to Erdoğan...