15 Jul 2016: Attempted Coup in Turkey + Aftermath

[tomahawk6]

The coup has failed and it gives Erdogan more fuel to purge the military.The fence sitters may soon wish that they had joined the coup faction.It looks to me like the police were instrumental in thwarting the coup.

 

[The Bread Guy]

A few tidbits this morning ...

• "194 killed in quashed Gülenist coup attempt: Military" (Hurriyet Daily News - TUR private-sector media) - "At least 161 killed, scores wounded as Turkish military attempts coup" (FOX News) - "Turkey coup attempt leaves 181 dead and 1,110 wounded after military try to take control" (Mirror - UK) - "Military chief says 104 plotters killed in attempted overthrow as total death toll reaches 161" (The Independent - UK)
  
• Round up the usual suspects ... "Turkey: Mass arrests after coup bid quashed, says PM" (BBC) -- "Erdogan vows 'heavy price' for coup plotters" (Associated Press <AP>)
• "Turkish Helicopter With Alleged Coup Supporters Lands in Greece - Reports" (RIA Novosti, Russian State Media)
• "Turkey's failed coup hands Erdoğan the pretext for further repression" (New Statesman)
• "Gaza's Hamas rulers congratulate Erdogan" (AP)
• "What We Know About the Attempted Military Coup in Turkey" (Wall Street Journal)

 

[tomahawk6]

Arrests continue.The article states that several high ranking officers were being held by coup elements.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36813924

Some 2,839 soldiers, including high-ranking officers, have been arrested over an attempted coup that is now over, says Turkey's PM Binali Yildirim.

In a night he called a "black stain on Turkish democracy", he said 161 people had been killed and 1,440 wounded.
Explosions and gunfire were heard in Ankara, Istanbul and elsewhere overnight and thousands of Turks heeded President Erdogan's call to rise up against the coup-plotters.
It is unclear who was behind the coup.

 

[tomahawk6]

The Turks have cut off access to Incirlik AFB.

http://turkey.usembassy.gov/sm-071616.html

Emergency Message for U.S. Citizens: Incirlik Air Base and Adana Airport Information, July 16

July 16, 2016

Be advised that local authorities are denying movements on to and off of Incirlik Air Base. The power there has also been cut. Please avoid the air base until normal operations have been restored.

In addition, the Adana airport has re-opened but flights to and from Istanbul and Ankara remain suspended. Please check the website of your airline for up to date flight information before going to the airport.

 

[Journeyman]

Me too. Not the sort of fellow we should count amongst our "friends".

Yes, once people like him.....and Saddam Hussein....and Muammar Gaddafi are removed, the sooner peace will reign.  :nod:

 

[Kirkhill]

Yes, once people like him.....and Saddam Hussein....and Muammar Gaddafi are removed, the sooner peace will reign.  :nod:

You old, pragmatic, realist, you!  [

 

[CougarKing]

Mopping up operations after the coup fails: some of the coup faction officers fled to Greece in a helicopter. Other sources also say the coup was reportedly orchestrated by a cleric exiled in the US:

Reuters

Turkish forces try to crush last remnants of coup after Erdogan returns
[By Orhan Coskun and Gulsen Solaker]
July 16, 2016


ISTANBUL/ANKARA (Reuters) - Forces loyal to Turkey's government fought on Saturday to crush the last remnants of a military coup attempt which collapsed after crowds answered President Tayyip Erdogan's call to take to the streets and dozens of rebels abandoned their tanks.

One hundred and sixty-one people were killed, including many civilians, after a faction of the armed forces tried to seize power using tanks and attack helicopters. Some strafed the headquarters of Turkish intelligence and parliament in the capital, Ankara, and others seized a major bridge in Istanbul.
(...SNIPPED)

 

[The Bread Guy]

You old, pragmatic, realist, you!  [

You forgot starry-eyed  ;D

 

[cupper]

You old, pragmatic, realist, you!  [

You forgot starry-eyed  ;D

Yes, once people like him.....and Saddam Hussein....and Muammar Gaddafi are removed, the sooner peace will reign.  :nod:

It's good to have dreams.

 

[brihard]

Incur like airbase is closed to military operations. Problematic; the US has been flying a lot of anti-Daesh Ops out of there. It's also estimated to house around 50 forward deployed B61 nuclear gravity bombs. Erdogan has a potent bargaining chip at hand with which the demand the extradition of his political rival.

 

[tomahawk6]

I hope Gulen has slipped across our border into Canada.

 

[Oldgateboatdriver]

Well, at least there's no wall to stop him  [.

And no plan to build one, 

 

[The Bread Guy]

... Erdogan has a potent bargaining chip at hand with which the demand the extradition of his political rival.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand sure enough ...

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, newly emboldened after crushing a coup attempt, is testing his country’s key defense relationship by demanding the U.S. turn over a cleric he accuses of inspiring the uprising.

Erdogan on Saturday challenged President Barack Obama directly to extradite Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic preacher who lives in exile in rural Pennsylvania, saying the U.S. needs to do what is necessary “if we are truly strategic partners.” That came hours after the U.S. and other NATO allies threw their support behind Turkey’s democratically elected government.

Erdogan’s demand, the mention of the two countries’ alliance and Saturday’s closing of a strategic air base used by the U.S. in the fight against Islamic State hinted he may be willing to use Turkey’s role as a key NATO member as leverage to exact revenge after the failed coup ...

 

[The Bread Guy]

A few tidbits ...

• "Turkey - AVOID ALL TRAVEL" (Canadian gov't travel advisory)
• "(Turkish) Incirlik commander among those detained over Turkish coup plot: government official" (Reuters) - "US Anti-Islamic State Mission at Incirlik in Limbo after Coup Attempt" (Stars & Stripes)
• "Turkish Govt Cracks Down After Coup Try; 6000 Detained" (New York Times)
• "Turkey to write to U.S., Western governments to demand Gulenists return -Erdogan" (Reuters)
• "8 Turkish officers who landed in Greece charged (with illegal entry)" (Washington Post)

 

[a_majoor]

It is rather disturbing to see both:

a. How ineptly the coup was planed and executed, and;

b. Just who came out to oppose the coup.

This bodes rather ill for both Turkey, the region and relations with both the West, Russia and other regional powers:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/07/16/why-turkeys-coup-detat-failed-erdogan/?utm_content=buffer59acc&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Why Turkey’s Coup d’État Failed
And why Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s craven excesses made it so inevitable.
BY EDWARD LUTTWAKJULY 16, 2016

Rule No. 2 in planning a successful military coup is that any mobile forces that are not part of the plot — and that certainly includes any fighter jet squadrons — must be immobilized or too remote to intervene. (Which is why Saudi army units, for example, are based far from the capital.) But the Turkish coup plotters failed to ensure these loyal tanks, helicopters, and jets were rendered inert, so instead of being reinforced as events unfolded, the putschists were increasingly opposed. But perhaps that scarcely mattered because they had already violated Rule No. 1, which is to seize the head of the government before doing anything else, or at least to kill him.

The country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was left free to call out his followers to resist the attempted military coup, first by iPhone and then in something resembling a televised press conference at Istanbul’s airport. It was richly ironic that he was speaking under the official portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey’s modern secular state, because Erdogan’s overriding aim since entering politics has been to replace it with an Islamic republic by measures across the board: from closing secular high schools so as to drive pupils into Islamic schools to creeping alcohol prohibitions to a frenzied program of mosque-building everywhere — including major ex-church museums and university campuses, where, until recently, headscarves were prohibited.

Televised scenes of the crowds that came out to oppose the coup were extremely revealing: There were only men with mustaches (secular Turks rigorously avoid them) with not one woman in sight. Moreover, their slogans were not patriotic, but Islamic — they kept shouting “Allahu ekber” (the local pronunciation of “akbar”) and breaking out into the Shahada, the declaration of faith.

Richly ironic, too, was the prompt and total support of U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and the European Union’s hapless would-be foreign minister, Federica Mogherini, in the name of “democracy.” Erdogan has been doing everything possible to dismantle Turkey’s fragile democracy: from ordering the arrest of journalists who criticized him, including the outright seizure and closure of the country’s largest newspaper, Zaman, to the very exercise of presidential power, since Turkey is not a presidential republic like the United States or France, but rather a parliamentary republic like Germany or Italy, with a mostly ceremonial president and the real power left to the prime minister. Unable to change the constitution because his Justice and Development Party (AKP) does not have enough votes in parliament, Erdogan instead installed the slavishly obedient (and mustachioed) Binali Yildirim as prime minister — his predecessor, Ahmet Davutoglu, had been very loyal, but not quite a slave — and further subverted the constitutional order by convening cabinet meetings under his own chairmanship in his new 1,000-room palace: a multibillion-dollar, 3.2 million-square-foot monstrosity (the White House is approximately 55,000 square feet), which was built without authorized funding or legal permits in a nature reserve.

That is just normal operating procedure for Erdogan, who started as a penniless youth in a slum and is now allegedly a billionaire. When prosecutors found millions of dollars in cash while investigating his associates and sons, Bilal and Burak, for bribery, corruption, fraud, money laundering, and gold smuggling, 350 police officers and all the prosecutors involved were simply removed from their jobs. Only interested in his relentless Islamization of Turkey, Erdogan’s core party followers evidently attach no value to democratic principles or legality as such and think it only natural that he and his sons should have enriched themselves on such a huge scale.

When Erdogan foists the blame for anything that goes wrong — including his very own decision to restart the war against the country’s Kurds — on foreigners, the United States, and you-know-who (the “Saturday people“), his followers readily believe him. That is also true of his wild accusations of terrorism against the U.S.-based Turkish religious leader Fethullah Gulen, once his staunch ally. Having previously blamed Gulen for an aborted corruption investigation, which he had described as a “judicial coup,” Erdogan is now blaming Gulen and his followers for the attempted military coup as well. That could be true to some extent, but Turkish military officers scarcely needed Gulen to egg them on: They blame Erdogan and his AKP followers for dismantling Ataturk’s secular republic; for having built up the murderous Sunni extremists of Syria who are now spilling back into Turkey to conduct suicide bombings; and for deliberately restarting the war against the country’s Kurds in 2015 for crass political reasons — a war that is costing soldiers’ lives every day and threatens the survival of Turkey itself within its present borders. (Kurds are a net majority in the eastern provinces.)

Coup planners need not enroll very many soldiers or airmen to win, so long as uncooperative chiefs are apprehended, and their initial success induces more to join in. But Turkey’s top military chiefs neither planned the coup nor joined it, and only a few (including the supremo Gen. Hulusi Akar) were detained. Indeed, the principal force commanders stayed out so that the coup activists (fewer than 2,000 in all, it seems), including some fighter pilots, were hopelessly outnumbered once Erdogan’s followers came out by the tens of thousands in the streets of Istanbul.

Opposition parties all very loyally opposed the coup, but they should not count on Erdogan’s gratitude. The drift to authoritarian rule is likely to continue, even accelerate: As in other Islamic countries, elections are well understood and greatly valued, but not democracy itself.

 

[tomahawk6]

Now the USAF personnel at Incirlik are hostages on the base.No flights in or out.No power it seems.Then we have the nuke situation...

 

[The Bread Guy]

Now the USAF personnel at Incirlik are hostages on the base.No flights in or out.No power it seems. Then we have the nuke situation...

Power's reportedly been out since the Turks sealed off the base yesterday. (source)

At least one media outlet now says TUR's allowing anti-ISIS strikes from Incirlik again ...

Turkey has allowed US warplanes to resume airstrikes in Syria and Iraq from the Incirlik airbase, the Pentagon announced on Sunday, after a failed coup and arrests shut down the base and shook the already fragile relations between the countries.

“After close coordination with our Turkish allies, they have reopened their airspace to military aircraft,” the Pentagon spokesperson Peter Cook said. Airstrikes against targets in Syria and Iraq have resumed “at all air bases in Turkey”, he added.

( ... )

Kerry added that he had spoken with his Turkish counterpart.

“They have absolutely assured us of their commitment to the fight against Daesh,” he said, using another name for Isis.

But Kerry also offered an unusually harsh rebuke of Turkish officials who have made a slew of demands and insinuations about the US and the coup.

“It’s irresponsible to have accusations of American involvement when we’re simply waiting for their request,” Kerry told CNN’s State of the Union. “The United States is not harboring anybody. We’re not preventing anything from happening.”

In the aftermath of the failed putsch, Erdoğan demanded that the US arrest or deport one of his oldest political enemies, Fethullah Gülen, a cleric who left Turkey in 1999. “I say if we are strategic partners then you should bring about our request,” he said  ...

 

[The Bread Guy]

Interesting interpretation of a quote here ...

U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose followers Turkey blames for a failed coup, said on Sunday that he would obey any extradition ruling from the United States but said that President Tayyip Erdogan had staged the putsch.

"I am not really worried about the extradition request," Gulen told reporters, speaking through a translator in Pennsylvania where he lives.

Turkey has said it is putting together an extradition request for the cleric. The U.S. government has said it would consider any formal request.

Although the headline says "Turkish cleric Gulen says Erdogan behind coup, willing to be extradited," that could just as easily be read as, "like they're ever going to extradite me." 

 

[tomahawk6]

This article discusses the nuclear weapons stored at Incirlik.I am on record that these weapons need to be withdrawn ASAP.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-h-bombs-in-turkey

Among the many questions still unanswered following Friday’s coup attempt in Turkey is one that has national-security implications for the United States and for the rest of the world: How secure are the American hydrogen bombs stored at a Turkish airbase?

The Incirlik Airbase, in southeast Turkey, houses nato’s largest nuclear-weapons storage facility. On Saturday morning, the American Embassy in Ankara issued an “Emergency Message for U.S. Citizens,” warning that power had been cut to Incirlik and that “local authorities are denying movements on to and off of” the base. Incirlik was forced to rely on backup generators; U.S. Air Force planes stationed there were prohibited from taking off or landing; and the security-threat level was raised to fpcon Delta, the highest state of alert, declared when a terrorist attack has occurred or may be imminent. On Sunday, the base commander, General Bekir Ercan Van, and nine other Turkish officers at Incirlik were detained for allegedly supporting the coup. As of this writing, American flights have resumed at the base, but the power is still cut off.

 

[The Bread Guy]

An interesting tidbit about the Turkish commander of Incirlik ...

The commander of the Incirlik airbase arrested for plotting the failed military coup in Turkey has sought asylum from the United States but was denied, the New York Times reported Sunday.

According to the report, General Bekir Ercan Van approached American officials seeking asylum but was refused, a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke anonymously because of the sensitive nature of the subject said.

Air force brigadier general Bekir Ercan Van was detained at the key Incirlik air base used by US forces for raids in Syria, along with a dozen lower-ranked officers.

The suspects are being charged with "membership in an armed terrorist organization" and "attempting to overthrow the government of the Turkish Republic using force and violence or attempting to completely or partially hinder its function." ...