Most coups resolve within hours—the junta either prevails or collapses. Turkey’s July 15, 2016, episode was different. Nearly a decade on, the dispute is not about the outcome but about authorship. Recent statements from figures close to Fethullah Gülen strengthen previous claims from day one that the operation was orchestrated by then–Chief of the General Staff, Hulusi Akar, with only a small circle within the Gülen movement drawn in as a result. These accounts may not be 100% definitive, but they echo claims voiced since 2016 by both Gülenist and non-Gülenist commentators—many of whom have not felt free to speak openly amid the climate of fear that followed the coup.
The official state line is fixed: the Gülen movement was behind it. Yet supporters of Hizmet (the Gülen movement)—along with segments of the wider public—argue that the episode was a deliberate trap in which then–Chief of the General Staff Hulusi Akar played a central role in a scenario scripted by Hakan Fidan, then Turkey’s intelligence chief.
July 15, 2016 stands as one of the most consequential dates in modern Turkish history. The failed coup reshaped the political order, entrenching a hyper-presidential system and, in the view of many observers, ushering in de facto one-man rule. In the early hours of the crisis, President Erdoğan himself described the attempt as “a gift from God.” It remains a source of deep trauma for the Gülen/Hizmet movement and, according to opponents of the government, a pretext to pursue not only alleged Gülenists but a broad spectrum of Erdoğan’s critics. Across this discourse, a central claim recurs: Hulusi Akar deceived the movement. Accounts from imprisoned officers and insiders like Osman Şimşek converge on this point; many of those closest to Gülen now accept this view.
Fethullah Gülen passed away in October 2024 after several years of serious illness. In that context, insider testimony has taken on particular significance. Osman Şimşek—a long-time confidant of Gülen (“Hocaefendi”)—has in recent months spoken publicly about his recollections of the coup night and the surrounding years.
According to Şimşek—who served as Gülen’s personal secretary until his dismissal from the Pennsylvania residence’s inner circle in January 2019—Hulusi Akar, then Land Forces Commander and later Chief of the General Staff (from August 2015), opened a private channel to Gülen as early as December 2014. Şimşek says he personally read Akar’s letters and messages and drafted Gülen’s replies. In a series of YouTube statements (July 2023, June 2025, and August 2025), he alleges that Akar signaled an intent to move against President Erdoğan and sought Gülen’s support—reinforcing a view, inside and outside Hizmet, that Akar played a pivotal role in misleading Gülen ahead of July 15, 2016.
When Şimşek recounts the months before the coup, one theme dominates: deception. According to his testimony, Gülen and the wider Hizmet movement were deliberately misled by intermediaries invoking Akar’s name. Ten letters and at least fifty messages allegedly presented Akar—whom Şimşek says was at times portrayed as a “second Hulusi”—as sympathetic, even divinely inspired. Şimşek contends these communications softened suspicions and lulled the movement into trusting voices that later proved false.
In his last YouTube interview in August, he also claims that Hulusi Akar sent Gülen a special uniform he used to wear. He also says Gülen summoned him to his room, showed him the uniform, and then broke down in tears. The existence of this gift has neither been confirmed nor denied by Gülen’s other closest aides, including Cevdet Türkyolu
Şimşek adds that Gülen’s replies to Akar—especially after the first letter—were unambiguous on three points: he rejected any resort to force; warned against allowing Turkey to “become another Egypt”; and urged convening a council of “wise men” to defuse tensions through dialogue. Akar, Şimşek says, signaled assent, even inviting the proposed intermediaries to General Staff headquarters—an invitation read as confirmation that the letters were received and that Gülen’s posture was de-escalatory.
Taken together, Şimşek’s account depicts Akar as cultivating and later instrumentalizing a backchannel, sustaining the façade of dialogue while steering events toward an outcome that discredited Hizmet and facilitated the post-coup entrenchment of personalist rule. Crucially, it underscores Gülen’s categorical rejection of military intervention and the absence of any approval—explicit or tacit.
At minimum, our conclusion rests on the first letter and Gülen’s initial response; whether he maintained the same line in subsequent correspondence is unknown, as those later letters and Gülen’s replies have not been recovered. That said, Osman Şimşek has repeatedly asserted that this de-escalatory stance—rejecting force, warning against “another Egypt,” and calling for a council of wise men—was maintained throughout the entire process.
According to Osman Şimşek, Fethullah Gülen replied to Hulusi Akar’s letter by urging him to convene respected, level-headed political scientists, opinion leaders, and jurists at General Staff headquarters. Gülen’s message read: “Invite these individuals—or others you deem appropriate. Sit down and talk. How can Turkey move forward? How can it become a star of democracy? How can we emerge from this poor state? Discuss these things.” Şimşek adds that, if the General Staff’s records from that day have not been erased, they should list many of these figures. He says he knows the participants’ names but cannot disclose them publicly for safety and security reasons.
“Those individuals were not from the Hizmet movement. They were people in Turkey known as balanced and reasonable voices: some from the left, some from the AKP, even one who had just recently switched parties. There were jurists and social scientists among them. In short, Hocaefendi was calling on the General Staff to speak with them—effectively inviting them into a framework of military legality.” Şimşek stated.
However, the absence of the later letters—and of Gülen’s replies—inevitably invites suspicion. Inside the movement, Akar’s tone and timing were widely read as sincere; as Osman Şimşek and others recount, some Gülenists trusted him so deeply that they expected an imminent move against Erdoğan.
But in our assessment, the more plausible scenario is this: if those letters and replies were ever made public—whether in full or via selective leaks—they would be instrumentalized by the Turkish state as both a legal and political tool. Domestically, Ankara could cite them to validate prosecutions, justify continuing arrests and detentions, and frame extended emergency-style measures as necessary. Internationally, they could be used to intensify pressure for Fethullah Gülen’s removal from the United States and to bolster extradition requests—even where the legal threshold is not met. The government would likely deny Hulusi Akar’s authorship—pointing to the absence of signatures, named senders, or other formal markers—while still presenting the documents as indicative communications, purportedly corroborated by timing, delivery patterns, device metadata, or witness testimony. In short, such correspondence would be weaponized to harden the post-coup narrative and sustain the purge.
Pre–July 15 Context: From Tactical Alignment to Open War
In the AKP’s first decade (2002–2011), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the Gülen movement advanced largely in parallel. Both backed EU-oriented reforms and the demilitarization of Turkish politics, and their constituencies often overlapped in the judiciary, police, education, and media. The 2010 constitutional referendum, which reshaped the high judiciary, was widely seen as consolidating civilian authority and weakening the old secular-military tutelage. For a time, the arrangement functioned as a workable—if uneasy—tactical alignment.
Yet even amid this convergence, an earlier security reflex lingered inside the state. In 2004, the National Security Council (MGK) adopted a policy paper recommending measures to curb the Gülen movement’s influence in education, media, and business. The government later framed MGK decisions as advisory, but critics have long cited that document as proof that elements of the security establishment were intent on “finishing” or neutralizing the movement—an omen of the open conflict to come.
The first clean break surfaced on February 7, 2012, when a special prosecutor summoned intelligence chief Hakan Fidan and other MİT officials as suspects in the KCK probe. Erdoğan treated the move as an assault on the executive. Parliament quickly moved to shield MİT personnel from prosecution without top-level authorization. From that point, government rhetoric hardened: parts of the judiciary and police were recast as a politicized “parallel structure,” and the trust that had underpinned the earlier alignment unraveled in public.
The rupture widened in 2013. The Gezi Park protests (May–June) began as a local dispute over redevelopment but widened into a nationwide expression of anger at heavy-handed policing and Erdoğan’s increasingly majoritarian style. By autumn 2013—months before any statute took effect—Erdoğan was already vowing publicly to shutter the private prep schools (dershaneler), many linked to Hizmet, setting the stage for a legislative push. Then came the twin corruption investigations of December 17 and 25, targeting ministers, businessmen close to Erdoğan, and—by implication—his family. Three ministers resigned. Erdoğan denounced the probes as a “judicial coup,” purged thousands in the police and judiciary, and moved the “parallel state” framing of the Gülen movement to the center of his politics.
In 2014, the fight turned structural—and the timeline matters. On January 1, 2014 in Hatay and January 19, 2014 in Adana, security forces stopped trucks identified as belonging to Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MİT). Searches were carried out, and footage and reports purporting to show military munitions bound for Syria surfaced, turning the episode into a major political and legal crisis. The government insisted the cargo was a state secret tied to national security and prosecuted those who pursued or publicized the case. Then, in March 2014, Parliament enacted the law that legally ordered the closure/conversion of the dershaneler, striking at a key social and financial artery for Hizmet. In parallel, Ankara expanded MİT’s formal powers, narrowed external oversight, and stiffened penalties for leaks—rebalancing the legal order decisively toward the executive and the intelligence services. By August 2014, Erdoğan had moved to the presidency, and the consolidation continued.
Pressure intensified in 2015. Financial and media entities seen as close to the movement came under direct strain (Bank Asya’s regulatory blows and eventual takeover; trusteeships at opposition-leaning media). The AKP briefly lost its parliamentary majority in June, then regained single-party rule in the November snap election. Meanwhile, renewed conflict with the PKK after July 2015 deepened the securitized climate, giving the government a broader counterterrorism frame within which to pursue the “parallel state” narrative and reshape the media-legal environment.
By early 2016, confrontation with the Gülen movement was fully institutionalized. Ankara formally designated the network a terrorist organization (“FETÖ”), seized additional outlets (including the trusteeship of Zaman in March), and lifted parliamentary immunities in May—a move widely seen as targeting Kurdish MPs and signaling a broader readiness to use extraordinary measures. Rumors, back-channel intrigue, and elite mistrust thickened as the annual military promotions cycle (YAŞ) approached, sharpening anxieties within the officer corps and the political class alike.
In this same period, the government also began systematically profiling (fişleme) civil servants suspected of links to the movement—including military personnel up to general rank, as well as judges and prosecutors—via internal audits, security vetting, and large-scale reassignments. These measures prefigured the broader waves of administrative suspensions and dismissals that would follow.
By 2015–2016, the ordinary legal framework did not permit President Erdoğan to purge alleged Gülenists wholesale across state and society. Civil-service protections, administrative-court review, and standard disciplinary procedures created friction and delay; mass removals risked being overturned or bogged down in litigation. What the government lacked in legal latitude it sought to gain through emergency powers: only a shock large enough to justify extraordinary rule—state-of-emergency decrees or even martial-law-style measures—could clear the path for rapid, sweeping actions that normal law would not sustain. We contend that this shock was not accidental but scripted within the intelligence orbit—authored by Hakan Fidan—with the armed forces providing the stage. The objective was not a classic coup to seize and hold power, but a managed crisis severe enough to legitimize exceptional measures. In this framework, Hulusi Akar’s role is pivotal: as Chief of the General Staff, he sat at the junction where political intent meets military execution.
An Unusual Ascent: Akar’s Path to Power
To understand Hulusi Akar’s pivotal manipulative role in deceiving the Gülen movement in general and Fethullah Gülen in particular, we must first trace his rise to power.
Within the Turkish Armed Forces, Hulusi Akar is notable as only the second officer since Cevdet Sunay to become Commander of the Land Forces without ever commanding a field army. He served as Land Forces Commander (2013–2015); on 2 August 2015 he was appointed the 29th Chief of the General Staff and formally assumed the post on 18 August 2015. That atypical promotion track is the first clue to how Akar rose—not chiefly through classic command credentials, but through political navigation, bureaucratic timing, and an instinct for surviving institutional earthquakes.
“Water sleeps, Hulusi flows.” (In Turkish, Akar—Hulusi’s surname means “flows.”). The nickname—said to date to his academy years—captures the pattern. Even when the system seemed still, Akar moved: quietly, steadily, with purpose. His route was never standard. He entered the Military Academy out of Kayseri Sümer High School rather than a military high school; classmates recall a disciplinary expulsion in his final year that ordinarily would have blocked his path, yet it did not.
Later on, he cultivated the image of a “civilian” or “academic” soldier—reading at Ankara University’s Faculty of Political Science, later earning a PhD at Boğaziçi University under historian Zafer Toprak, and staging high-visibility conferences as an academy commander. On paper, he looked like a reformist officer; in practice, he proved a deft political actor in uniform, fluent in the language of both barracks and cabinet rooms.
By 2011, amid the Ergenekon/Balyoz turmoil, doors that had been shut for a generation swung open. Shock resignations on the eve of the Supreme Military Council (YAŞ) created sudden lanes for promotion, and Akar jumped to full general and Deputy Chief of the General Staff. The 2013 YAŞ then broke precedent: despite three more-senior officers ahead of him—and without the usual field-army command—Akar was named Commander of the Land Forces. Contemporaries point to three aligned pushes behind the move: Abdullah Gül’s personal backing; Erdoğan’s distrust of Bekir Kalyoncu and preference for the more pliable Akar; and Necdet Özel’s support, later regretted by those close to him. Rivals were eased into early retirement or parked in decorous but powerless posts. By 2015, Akar’s route to the top was effectively locked in; only the timing was uncertain.
What made Akar different was not just who backed him, but how he moved through a system in crisis. Where classic careerists accumulate field commands and staff billets in a predictable arc, Akar accrued political capital: he learned the rhythms of YAŞ bargaining, cultivated cross-factional trust (or at least non-hostility), and kept his public profile studiously non-ideological. To the reformists of the period he could present as modern, outward-looking—the general with a Mülkiye and Boğaziçi pedigree; to conservatives in power he read as disciplined, controllable, safe. The effect was to make him the least objectionable option at every fork where the system needed a consensus.
Akar’s academic stops weren’t about teaching or ideas; they were cosmetic—credential polish for the résumé. The aim wasn’t scholarship but access: a stage to craft a civilian-friendly persona and collect titles that suggested policy fluency.Within this framework, a tension sits at the core of Akar’s academic credential: despite his dislike of writing, he is credited with producing a dissertation that would ordinarily require months or years of iterative drafting and line-by-line revision.His doctoral thesis was on the political and military currents of 1919—bringing Turkish-American relations to the fore through U.S. archival sources.
As an academy figurehead, he convened conferences less to debate than to choreograph images, mastering optics and scripting the Armed Forces’ story for politicians, media, and allies. In a decade when narratives made or broke careers, that dramaturgy—not doctrine—was his real edge.
The August 2015 elevation to Genelkurmay Başkanı (Chief of Staff) crystallized the pattern. Akar arrived at the apex not as the most seasoned field commander, but as the best-placed broker between a skittish political leadership and a demoralized high command. He understood how to wait, absorb, and outlast—to let rough currents pass while maintaining a steady public surface. The sobriquet returned: su uyur, Hulusi akar .
Critics argue this rise came with a price. An officer who ascends primarily through political calibration will tend to prioritize stability over candor, ambiguity over confrontation. Admirers counter that this very trait was what the moment demanded: a shock absorber who could keep the institution intact as the state lurched from one crisis to the next. Both readings help explain Akar’s posture in the fraught 2015–2016 window: cultivating NATO ties while projecting domestic loyalty, sending soothing signals to foreign capitals even as palace politics in Ankara hardened, and positioning himself as the indispensable hinge in a system where hinges were snapping weekly.
Seen in this light, Akar’s “unorthodox” path looks less like an anomaly than a symptom of the era. The Turkish military was being remade by political trials, negotiated promotions, and emergency bargains. In such an environment, the general who advances without a field army on his résumé is not simply lucky; he is exactly matched to the system’s demands—a translator-in-chief between a ruling party that feared the barracks and a barracks that no longer trusted the old rules.
Whether one sees that as statecraft or caution elevated into doctrine is the question the coming book will take up. What is indisputable is the record: 2013–2015, Commander of the Land Forces; in 2015, Chief of the General Staff—a rise built less on battlefield legend than on patience, positioning, and the quiet art of outlasting storms.
Signaling to Hizmet: How Akar Manipulated the Movement
The groundwork for manipulation began with signaling and myth-making. As he rose to the top posts, Hulusi Akar salted his speeches with lines that resonated in Hizmet—above all Said Nursi’s “I can live without bread, but I cannot live without freedom.” In a climate of closures, seizures, and arrests, such phrasing sounded like reassurance. Around him a soft aura formed—Hulusi-i Sânî, the “Second Hulusi”—a deliberate allusion to Hulusi Yahyagil (Hulusi Bey), one of Nursi’s earliest and most trusted disciples, a career military officer whose correspondence with Nursi anchors the Lâhika letters and who, in Nurcu tradition, embodies the archetype of the devout military ally. The label cast Akar as a sympathetic insider—even a providential figure—and the mood music mattered: it primed people to hear what they wanted to hear.
There is a possibility that the letters were not written personally by Hulusi Akar. His well-known aversion to writing, combined with his limited command of the sophisticated, Ottoman-inflected vocabulary one would expect in correspondence meant to impress Hizmet’s literati, casts immediate doubt on their authorship. Yet whether Akar drafted them personally or they were manufactured in his name, the letters served the same strategic purpose: to set up Pennsylvania—to elicit either passive acquiescence or tacit endorsement from Gülen—while Ankara prepared the groundwork to portray the Gülen movement as the architect of the coup and Fethullah Gülen as its mastermind.
In either scenario, the trail leads to the same place. If Akar authored the letters, this was a top-down influence operation blessed at the apex of the chain of command. If he did not, the invocation of his name and authority indicates a coordinated state effort—executed with his and Hakan Fidan’s knowledge or instruction—potentially routed through figures close to Gülen, such as Adil Öksüz (placing Mehmet Değerli at the compound) and Mustafa Özcan (Öksüz’s superior). Either way, the letters functioned as instruments of statecraft: immobilizing Pennsylvania at the decisive hour and pre-scripting a public narrative that cast the Gülen movement as the perpetrator of the coup.
No matter who wrote the letters, by late 2014, Akar was busy engineering trust. As Osman Şimşek recounts, a discreet backchannel opened between Akar and Fethullah Gülen: letters and dozens of messages casting Akar as ready to “move” against Erdoğan and seeking either explicit backing or, at minimum, a pledge of non-obstruction from Gülen-aligned officers. Gülen’s early replies—rejecting force, warning against “another Egypt,” and urging a council of wise men—were de-escalatory. Akar’s side, Şimşek says, acknowledged receipt and assent, even inviting intermediaries to General Staff headquarters. The net effect was expectation management: lowering the movement’s guard while normalizing the idea that “Hulusi is with us.”
Şimşek further claims that these letters and messages were physically presented to Gülen by Mehmet Değerli, who—placed in the compound with Adil Öksüz’s reference—began residing in Gülen’s circle in December 2014. Adil Öksüz—the theology lecturer who would later emerge as the most enigmatic civilian at Akıncı Air Base on the night of the coup. Öksüz vouched for Değerli, smoothing his entry into the cloistered community.
To those who knew him, Değerli was an odd fit for such a delicate mission. The son of Cahit Değerli, one of Bank Asya’s early figures, Mehmet had the profile of someone vulnerable to recruitment: a life marked by indulgence—“alcohol, women, a lifestyle that made him an easy target,” as one investigator put it—and enough loose ends to be compromised.
Değerli’s proximity granted him unusual access to Gülen during this period, serving as a courier and interpreter of the correspondence. For roughly a year and a half, he functioned as a trusted intermediary until his credibility unraveled. According to Şimşek, Gülen expelled him from both the inner circle and the Pennsylvania residence at the end of May 2016, only weeks before the coup attempt, after discovering that Değerli had been caught lying on numerous occasions.
It is also interesting to note that Degerli began residing in Gülen’s compound in December 2014, roughly a month before Hulusi Akar’s U.S. trip where he received a merit decoration from Gen. Raymond T. Odierno. Akar attached great importance to the ceremony and was determined to attend even amid adverse flying conditions and security warnings.
At the time, Odierno was the U.S. Army Chief of Staff and, in Turkey, widely remembered as the “çuvalcı general” for the July 4, 2003, Sulaymaniyah “hood” incident. The decoration, conferred during Akar’s late-January 2015 visit as Land Forces Commander, was officially justified by Washington on the grounds of his stance on Syria, tighter border security measures, and enhanced U.S.–Turkey military cooperation (including the train-and-equip framework). Turkish military sources later framed Odierno’s role as an “unfortunate coincidence” that should not eclipse the award’s significance, noting the visit was fully planned in advance and cleared with the civilian leadership—“states don’t act on emotion.”
What Değerli carried were letters purportedly from Hulusi Akar. They contained no signatures, no official seals, no identifiable handwriting. Yet they were dressed in the style of high Ottoman prose, heavy with archaic Arabicized vocabulary, as if designed to impress men steeped in the Risale-i Nur tradition.
According to Cevdet Türkyolu—one of Fethullah Gülen’s closest aides—he personally opened the first letter: a discreetly delivered, four-page note that another close aide, Barbaros Kocakurt, read aloud. Multiple internal accounts say its tone mixed flattery with foreboding: invocations of Gülen’s moral authority (“You are of immense importance… the path ahead is dark, but your prayers will guide us”) were paired with assurances that senior figures across the state—names like Abdullah Gül and Haşim Kılıç—were sympathetic, even hinting that “the EU and U.S. are with us; NATO is with us.” The implication was clear: intervention was a matter of when, not if. And the request drew a bright line: “Our only request is that you pray for us—do not cross over to the other side.”
According to individuals within the movement who claim to have seen and read the letter (December 2014), some versions go even further. The letter—purportedly linked to Hulusi Akar—allegedly includes a shocking threat that he would kill Erdoğan by “throwing him down the stairs” at his Ankara palace, with Gülen made to watch in real time.
By 2015 and 2016, Akar himself was leaving traces—deliberately or recklessly—that suggested hostility to Erdoğan. In closed meetings, he reportedly mocked the president: “If the Balyoz generals had been here, this would already be over. You (the Gulenists) lack the courage.” In Brussels, NATO contacts heard similar quips. Generals visiting his office recalled him muttering at the television, pointing at Erdoğan and saying: “I am dealing with this heretic.”
In April 2016, U.S. defence officials summoned Turkey’s military attaché in Washington. “What will Akar do about Erdoğan’s Islamist tendencies?” they asked. The attaché, Brigadier General Yavuz Çelik, reported back directly to Akar. Soon, daily briefings flowed between Akar’s office and the Pentagon through Colonel Orhan Yıkılkan.
And then came the “whistleblowing” Major Osman Karaca of the Army Aviation School, who reportedly walked into MIT 6 months before 15 July with CDs and notes detailing coup plans. MIT logged his report, videotaped him, and—rather than quietly investigating—allowed the documents to circulate. It was as if breadcrumbs were being strewn everywhere: in Washington, in Ankara, in NATO corridors, and finally in Pennsylvania.
All signs pointed in one direction: Akar was ‘serious’ about a coup. That was the impression to be cultivated. Whether or not he truly was, the performance served its purpose.
Set up in Slow Motion
During this time, Akar multiplied touchpoints. Civilian go-betweens—most prominently the tailor known as “Terzi Hasan”—created a low-friction conduit for greetings and messages, reinforcing the sense of a trusted line. Allegations in trial testimony and secret-witness accounts claimed Akar sometimes dismissed his security detail, departed in a civilian car, and held off-book meetings in Ankara’s Çukurambar with religious figures. Whatever the ultimate veracity, the perception of private access became a fact inside Hizmet—and perceptions drive decisions.
“Terzi (tailor) Hasan”(Hasan D.) was a civilian tailor who became close to Akar—supplying suits, shirts, shoes, even baklava, often gratis. Aides estimate at least 60 suits between 2011–2016. Meetings were off-ledger and often at Akar’s home. Multiple sources describe Hasan as a message carrier—conveying greetings between Gülen and Akar, reinforcing the sense of a trusted line. Late in 2015, Hasan was abruptly sidelined in what insiders call a Hizmet “field clean-up,” leaving the lane to Öksüz’s team.
Inside the movement, Adil Öksüz—the key responsible person for the armed forces—acted as an amplifier. By 2015, he had reshuffled cadres. In a July 2017 interview with France 24, Fethullah Gülen acknowledged meeting Öksüz and even said he was linked to Turkey’s intelligence service (MİT). Additionally, a leaked top-secret “engagement form”—reported by Turkish media showing that Öksüz was recruited by MİT as an agent around September 10, 2014, with the code name “Timsah” (alligator). Experts consider the document authentic, though MİT has dismissed it as fake.
As confidence grew, counter-signals were filtered out. Officers who knew Akar and warned, “this is not the man you think,” were sidelined by Adil Öksüz. A purported cautionary letter to Gülen may never have reached him. Meanwhile, those who had invested in Akar “tested” him with small, deniable checks of sincerity; by their own accounts, he passed. Confirmation bias did the rest. With trust banked, Akar’s role shifted from wooing to shaping behavior. The backchannel’s practical ask—“do not obstruct”—was modest on its face yet decisive in effect. It reframed passivity as prudence.
A Scripted Spectacle: From “Surgical” Plan to Public Theatre
The night was never supposed to unfold as it did—at least, not according to those who were inside the original design. Former Brigadier General Gökhan Şahin Sönmez Ateş, commander of the MAK (Combat Search and Rescue) detachment tasked with “retrieving” President Erdoğan in Marmaris, testified that the plan was narrow and surgical. Around 100–150 men would move at about 3:00 a.m., detain the president, fly him to Ankara, and place him in legal custody. And in total, 8–9 senior figures would be taken and immediately brought before a court, with NO tanks on the Bosphorus Bridge, no jets roaring low over the capital, no premature thunder. Just a controlled operation.
He recalled:
“From that day until now, I have been involved in a mission I was made to believe was within the chain of command. Whatever order was given to me, I carried it out. The order I was given was: ‘After the President is taken from Marmaris, he must be safely transported to Ankara.’ We were kept waiting at Çiğli Air Base for four hours. Our takeoff from Çiğli was around 02:25. The President had already left Marmaris at 00:30, and his plane had taken off from Dalaman at 01:40. While the whole world knew the President was in Istanbul—television and the internet shouting it everywhere—we were in isolation, focused only on our assigned duty. When I saw what was happening on the bridge, I said, ‘Who are these people?’ After all that noise and commotion, how were you going to take Erdoğan? Why were F-16s flying—what was the logic? In that form, the mission became impossible for me to accomplish. As per the order given, we were directed to Marmaris. Someone kept us waiting for four hours, and that ‘someone’ was not a civilian, but a soldier.”
On its own terms, such a plan—though unlawful—was at least militarily plausible. It did not demand closing the Bosphorus Bridge hours in advance or parading armor through Ankara neighborhoods. Those elements were added later, converting what might have remained a confined military action into a loud, clumsy spectacle. The sudden bridge closure, tanks moving into the streets, jets flying theatrically low—these were the fingerprints of a staged drama. The effect was to turn the night into a televised pageant of treason, ensuring the coup would be condemned from the outset and clearing the way for the purges and decree-laws that followed.
Others close to Hulusi Akar hinted at the same. His adviser Orhan Yıkılkan told the court: “Akar knew of everything. He was informed. But no one wants to hear that.” Testimonies like this were buried under indictments, but remain in the transcripts. Likewise, a colonel testified: “These were not our bombs. The fragments did not match inventory. We were blamed, but the weapons were not ours.” Judges ignored the claim, the press barely covered it, yet the words remain in the record.
At Akıncı Air Base, where bombs were dropped and pilots scrambled, one civilian appeared as the key enigma: Adil Öksüz. Detained, briefly processed, then released, his file vanished. Officers who protested were silenced. Osman Şimşek later stressed: “Without Öksüz, tying the coup to the movement would be impossible. He was the linchpin. And yet he was released. Why? Because that was his role: to connect the dots, to ensure the narrative pointed to us.”
Meanwhile, Akar himself became the center of a strange theater. Soldiers stormed the General Staff, overpowered his guards, and allegedly tried to force him to sign a coup declaration. In Levent Türkkan’s testimony: “We were told the Chief would support us. But when we entered his office, he resisted. He cursed, shouted, refused to sign. We were stunned. We thought he was with us.” Yet by morning, Akar appeared unharmed, calm enough to appear with Erdoğan on live television. Critics asked: if he resisted his own men, why was he untouched? Was the episode staged to cast him as the loyalist hero?
Taken together—the shift from surgical plan to public theatre, the ignored munitions mismatch, the release of the “civilian linchpin,” and the carefully staged peril of the Chief of Staff—the picture becomes clear. The coup was not merely mismanaged; it was made to begin badly, designed to fail, and scripted to provide maximum justification for OHAL, decree-laws, and purges that ordinary law could never have carried out. In short, the movement was set up, and the night was theatre.
Osman Şimşek and Ankara’s Divide-and-Co-opt Strategy
In the years that followed, tens of thousands were arrested and imprisoned, with rights monitors and UN bodies documenting persistent allegations of torture and ill-treatment. More than 100,000 public servants—academics, judges, police officers, soldiers, and other civil employees—were dismissed by emergency decree. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have described this as one of the largest political purges in contemporary Europe. Even today, detentions are announced with near-daily regularity, often on flimsy charges or tenuous indicators such as alleged ByLock use—an evidentiary basis the European Court of Human Rights, in its 2023 Yalçınkaya v. Türkiye judgment, found deficient and incompatible with due process.
But brute force was only half the playbook. As we at News About Turkey warned in a detailed social-media series in April 2025, a parallel psychological operation unfolded in tandem with the second Kurdish opening: a campaign to divide and co-opt the Gülen movement from within. After cleansing the bureaucracy, Ankara elevated select former insiders—academics, journalists, and exiled influencers—as “repentant” narrators. Their platforms were used to delegitimize the community, fracture loyalties, and promote the illusion that rehabilitation was available only through submission to Erdoğan. This was not reconciliation; it was managed fragmentation—engineered to prevent any unified opposition from re-forming and gaining strength, domestically or internationally.
In this context, Osman Şimşek’s statements—delivered across three YouTube interviews with Asım Yıldırım since July 2023, beginning with the first release and followed by two more in the past two months—warrant close scrutiny. On one level, they supply granular detail about the mechanics of a staged coup, echoing long-standing suspicions—including from both Gülenist and non-Gülenist commentators, as well as former Gülen-aligned journalists—that Hulusi Akar orchestrated key elements. On another, they showcase Şimşek’s personal ambitions—casting himself as the vigilant realist while portraying Gülen as overly trusting and easily deceived: an effort to reposition himself as a central voice, indeed a would-be leader, within a fractured Gülen movement. Throughout his videos, he adopts a humble tone and frequently invokes religious oaths, while also asserting that Gülen cross-checked the information presented to him through several channels—an emphasis that softens, but does not erase, the earlier image of naïveté.
For instance, in his second YouTube interview (June 14, 2025), Osman Şimşek asserts that Adil Öksüz, who installed Mehmet Değerli in the Pennsylvania compound, asked him to assist—on the grounds that Değerli struggled to articulate himself properly and required a gentler, more effective intermediary. Yet Şimşek provides no date for this alleged conversation, leaving it unclear whether he actually assisted Öksüz.
Moreover, in his latest YouTube interview (August 23, 2025), Şimşek claims that after Mehmet Değerli was expelled from the Pennsylvania compound by Gülen for lying, Adil Öksüz and Mustafa Özcan, along with Cevdet Türkyolu, stepped in to fill the gap—telling Gülen that, although Değerli may have lied about many things, his claims about Hulusi Akar were true. Şimşek offers this as evidence that these figures continued manipulating Gülen, a point he makes when the moderator asks whether the movement ever realized the setup.
But just minutes later, he pivots to praising Adil Öksüz—saying he has known him since his high-school years and describing him as a pious Muslim. When the moderator asks whether Öksüz was ‘bought,’ Şimşek replies that he doesn’t think so, suggesting instead that Öksüz may himself have been deceived. “He also says their acquaintance goes back to his own high-school years at a religious school in Ankara, when Adil Öksüz was a theology student at the university. According to Şimşek, Öksüz served as the ‘abi’—the senior mentor responsible for their high-school circle.
He then calls on Adil Öksüz to come forward and reveal everything he knows about the coup.This raises a further question: if Gülen was deceived by Değerli, then Şimşek was deceived as well—even though he publicly portrays himself as vigilant while casting others as naïve. While doing this he repeatedly invokes religious oaths and a humble tone to bolster credibility, even as he casts himself as the vigilant realist and others, including Gülen, as naïve.
One urgent question remains: why did Osman Şimşek stay silent until July 2023, as reports of Gülen’s declining health emerged, and speak freely only after Gülen’s death? Why wait until the one person most able to confirm or correct his claims could no longer respond? Şimşek presents himself as the vigilant aide who flagged Mehmet Değerli’s contradictions to Gülen—yet he, too, was deceived. In his own letter to Gülen following his removal from the inner circle, Şimşek admits he only began recognizing Değerli’s lies a few months before Değerli was expelled from the compound, around late May 2016.
His interventions also illustrate how the state’s divide-and-co-opt strategy opens space for ambitious insiders to rewrite the narrative, deepening fragmentation rather than healing it. All three of his video testimonies align with this strategy. In his second YouTube interview, he praises Mümtaz’er Türköne—who endorsed former Gülenist Gökhan Bacık’s call to dissolve the movement—for “seeing light at the end of the tunnel.” In his most recent appearance, he even describes those calls openly advocating the movement’s dissolution as “sincere.”
He further promotes dissolution’s arguments by citing the Prophet Muhammad’s dealings with enemies—positioning this against Gülen’s insistence on not bowing to or negotiating with oppressors and hypocrites (münafıklar). Şimşek says he accepts Gülen’s maxim—‘Devoted souls should not apologize to the oppressor’—but argues it applies to individuals, not to states; to justify this distinction, he cites the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah as a precedent for pragmatic agreements with adversaries.
But the analogy is flawed. Hudaybiyyah was not an apology, nor a dissolution of the Muslim position. Despite Quraysh arrogance, the treaty yielded strategic gains: freedom of movement across Arabia, the breaking of the embargo, and implicit recognition of Islam’s political legitimacy.
Crucially, activity did not stop after Hudaybiyyah—it expanded. More people embraced Islam in the period that followed than in all prior years. By contrast, today’s calls to dissolve or publicly stand down would halt activity altogether. Equating these positions is not prudence; it’s a misreading.
Invoking the Prophet’s treaty to justify capitulation functions less as piety than as politics: it reframes surrender as wisdom and, intentionally or not, tracks with the state’s divide-and-co-opt playbook—fragment the movement, marginalize its leadership, and launder self-liquidation as foresight.”
In other words, these inconsistencies align less with historical memory than with political timing: they mirror the Turkish government’s documented ‘divide-and-co-opt’ strategy. In effect, Şimşek’s narrative serves as a discursive bridge for the state—softening internal resistance while nudging the community toward a controlled transformation.”
The Blind Spot: A Fatal, Foolish Misread
The blind spot begins with Hulusi Akar and never really leaves him. From the first letter dated December 2014—attributed to Akar—the whole architecture of reassurance was built on his supposed resistance to Erdoğan’s crackdown. In that note, he points to the National Security Council (MGK) session of October 30, 2014, which he describes as the longest to that date (about ten hours), and claims it dragged on because he opposed measures “that would finish” the movement. The Council’s communiqué did not name Gülen/Hizmet, but it vowed to continue the struggle against “parallel structures” operating under a legal guise—the label then used for the movement. Akar’s letter added the lines that did the real work: “They intend to finish you,” and “Because I defended you, they’ve started calling me ‘parallel.’” (Gulenist).
That should have been the biggest warning sign. In practice, officials branded “parallel” were not promoted—they were sidelined, disciplined, or pushed into early retirement. Yet at the time, Akar was the Commander of the Land Forces, reporting to the Chief of the General Staff, and far from being purged, he was elevated: in August 2015, he was appointed Chief of the General Staff, just eleven months before the coup. The promotion flatly contradicts the idea that he was under genuine suspicion, and it should have cast immediate doubt on the letter’s premise.
Before he ever became Chief of the General Staff, Akar—then commanding the Land Forces—voiced sharp, even coarse, anti-Erdoğan lines that fellow generals still quote verbatim. In Ankara’s leak-prone ecosystem, such words would never escape the president’s notice—yet Akar was promoted, not punished. That contradiction alone should have flagged the letter’s premise as stagecraft, not treason.
Even in the late 1990s, while still in Istanbul, Gülen says he glimpsed Erdoğan’s governing instincts. As he told a TV interviewer in 2021, Erdoğan visited to solicit his views about founding a new party and, while descending in the elevator, turned to an aide and said, “First, we have to deal with these people.” The phrase hakkından gelmek is telling: it connotes subduing or neutralizing, not mere engagement—an aside Gülen read as an early preview of a politics oriented toward elimination rather than accommodation. Years later, the National Security Council (MGK) would formalize—over the signatures of Erdoğan and his ministers—a policy framework to “finish” or neutralize the Gülen movement. Yet that formalization did not immediately reshape perceptions within the movement: many continued to grant Erdoğan and his party support—or at least the benefit of the doubt—until the relationship fractured and open rifts emerged.
By 2015, the rumor climate in Ankara did the rest: “the army will act,” “the Americans know,” “the secularists are whispering.” It wasn’t merely backstage buzz. In the spring of 2016, mainstream Turkish columns ran explicit “coup is coming” warnings, and international commentary echoed the same question—normalizing the expectation that a military move was imminent. Public pieces and televised hints turned what should have been alarming into something ambient and almost routine. The effect was to make the Akar-as-ally storyline feel corroborated when, in reality, it was being amplified, not verified.
As we discussed above, by 2015–16, Akar was telegraphing hostility to Erdoğan—mocking him, calling him a “heretic,” and sharing similar quips with NATO contacts. In April 2016, the Pentagon queried Turkey’s attaché; daily updates then moved via Col. Orhan Yıkılkan, while MİT recorded Maj. Osman Karaca months and allowed his coup files to circulate. The breadcrumbs stretched from Ankara to Washington and Pennsylvania.
This brings us back to the core paradox. In Turkey’s power structure, even whispers against Erdoğan are ruthlessly punished; yet Akar was not punished—he advanced. The most plausible reading is that the lines attributed to him were either never uttered or delivered as part of a script known at the top. In that light, the “Akar letters,” the selective leaks, and the cultivated image of a sympathetic power center inside the state were not a shield for the movement but a stage prop—authorized disinformation meant to be overheard and carried back to Pennsylvania. By persuading people that “help is inside, timing is close,” the performance bred patience and non-obstruction, paving the way for the setup.
The Hand Behind July 15
According to accounts, Gülen’s first reply to Akar’s December 2014 letter was de-escalatory: he refused to endorse any coup and urged a peaceful path, even inviting Akar to seek a solution through a ‘council of wise men’ at General Staff headquarters. Beyond that initial exchange, the texts of subsequent letters—and Gülen’s replies—are unavailable, so we cannot say whether he later acceded to Akar’s request for neutrality, maintained his original stance, or shifted to support Akar.
What is clear is that the number of officers who actually moved on the night of July 15 was comparatively small, whereas the aftermath brought the dismissal and detention of tens of thousands of soldiers, police, and other security personnel—orders of magnitude beyond those who acted that night. Notably, pilots and aircrews involved in flying Erdoğan from Marmaris to Istanbul, as well as police who were allegedly in a gunfight with the MAK team (and, as Brig. Gen. Gökhan Şahin Sönmez Ateş has stated, other helicopters were already engaged before the team’s arrival), were nevertheless dismissed and jailed as alleged Gülenists.
On the other hand, notwithstanding court statements, visible inconsistencies, and commentary from both Gülenist and non-Gülenist circles implicating Akar, Erdoğan elevated him to defense minister—consolidating authority so that even the Chief of the General Staff and other generals were effectively answerable to him, a marked break from earlier norms.
According to some accounts, Hulusi Akar deceived the movement so thoroughly that even after the coup attempt they still expected him to move against Erdoğan. This is echoed in former Brig. Gen. Gökhan Şahin Sönmezateş’s sworn statement: in the early months after the coup, no one criticized Akar, prompting him to ask whether there had been an order to stay silent.
Those accounts also attribute the post-coup nondisclosure, the missing letters of the exchange, and verbal disclosure and approval of the first letter to that same context. Maybe—but we’ve offered better explanations above.
Whether the letters were written by Hulusi Akar himself or crafted by someone using his persona—with tacit or explicit sign-off from Akar and Hakan Fidan—their function was the same: manipulation. Over months, even years, those messages and the ecosystem around them (rumors, “open-source” op-eds, NATO-corridor chatter, curated intermediaries) conditioned the movement to believe a sympathetic power center existed inside the state and that “help was close.” The red flags were glaring—Akar’s promotion rather than punishment; the first letter’s claim that he was being labeled “parallel”; indiscreet anti-Erdoğan quips; contradictory testimonies; the exposure of Mehmet Değerli as a liar; and a staged trail of “breadcrumbs.” Yet the movement and Fethullah Gülen embraced this reassurance pipeline and made a catastrophic mistake: failing to see the Akar-centric blind spot—a chain of avoidable misreads that left the community exposed to the trap traced above.
This, however, does not mean the Gülen movement was behind the coup or that Fethullah Gülen masterminded it. As already noted, the cohort that actually moved on the night of July 15 was comparatively small, while the aftermath swept up tens of thousands of soldiers, police, and other security personnel—orders of magnitude beyond those who acted. By all available accounts, Gülen’s initial reply to Akar was de-escalatory: he refused to endorse any coup and invited Akar to pursue a peaceful path—proposing a meeting of respected academics, jurists, and “wise persons” at General Staff headquarters. With no verified texts of later letters or replies, nothing in the record constitutes a green light.
Our assessment aligns with the U.S. government’s formal posture. The State Department’s terrorism reports and the official list of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations do not classify the Gülen movement as a terrorist group, and Washington has repeatedly said Ankara failed to provide extradition-grade evidence against Fethullah Gülen.
For instance. John Bolton—hardly a dove on Turkey—has been consistent for years: in interviews and in his books, he says the claim that the Gülen movement orchestrated July 15 was part of Erdoğan’s bid for greater personal control. Bolton recounts that Washington repeatedly asked Ankara for evidence; what arrived was thin and unconvincing—insufficient even to open a credible U.S. case. Put plainly, there was no proof that would stand in an American court.
Mike Pompeo reinforces Bolton’s point in his memoir. In his book Never Give an Inch, Pompeo—former CIA director and U.S. secretary of state—referred to the events of July 15, 2016, as a “purported ‘coup,’” casting doubt on the Erdoğan government’s narrative.
Finally, the operation’s public face bore the hallmarks of a made-to-fail spectacle: municipal trucks loaded with cement barriers and construction vehicles staged in advance; the reported shift of H-hour from 3:00 a.m. Saturday to roughly 8–9 p.m. Friday—prime summer hours with crowds in the streets; early Bosphorus Bridge closures; tanks idling on city avenues; and low-flying jets intended to terrify civilians. Each choice maximized visibility and minimized strategic effect. Taken together, these elements reinforce the same verdict: the movement was manipulated for months and then caught in a setup engineered to fail in public.
Read against this arc, however, the 2024 MGK decision looks less like the culmination of a personal feud and more like the domestic ratification of a wider containment strategy: a multi-vector plan, from East to West and, crucially, the South, to throttle a Turkey-anchored soft/smart-power project judged destabilizing to the regional status quo. In this reading, Israel’s security establishment figures centrally—determined to pre-empt the consolidation of schools, SMEs, professional networks, and diaspora linkages into academic, commercial, scientific, and cultural leverage. A Turkey rising through civilian instruments—law, knowledge, trade—would, over time, present the most durable obstacle to Israel’s deterrence-first, fragmentation-tolerant design. The MGK framework did not ignite the conflict so much as codify a long-running counter-mobilization against a model of lawful influence that threatened to re-center the Islamic world around classrooms and laboratories rather than coercion.
Thus, the Gülen movement became the target of Erdoğan, a leader who cultivates the image of a devout Islamist. Read against the regional script, his role functioned less as an ideological counterweight than as a “coach” within the Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) project. In that framework, Ankara’s internal realignments advanced a containment agenda and, crucially, facilitated Israel’s deterrence-first regional design. What looked like a domestic feud was, in fact, the local execution of a wider plan. Had a secular figure led a purge of the Gülenists, it would likely have been far harder and provoked broader societal backlash; Erdoğan’s pious persona made him the ideal frontman for this project.
Israel, along with other established power centres, still sees the movement as a barrier to its regional strategy. The goal is not just to contain it but to eliminate it entirely—this includes dismantling its schools, civic networks, diaspora support, and moral authority. As such, a dual approach is implemented:
- Hard-edge tactics: This involves criminalization, blacklisting, extradition pressure, and creating theatrical scenarios that undermine the movement.
- “Dove” strategies: This includes selective outreach, co-opting narratives, and fostering divisions within the movement.
The aim is to wear down the movement and ultimately dissolve it over time.
This strategy, in fact, does not serve the West—and Israel in particular. A stronger Turkey—especially one projecting soft and smart power globally through the Gülen movement—serves Western interests, particularly those of Israel. As has been stated numerous times, Israel’s security is intertwined with the stability of the Anglo-American global order, which relies significantly on Turkey’s strength and its ideological alignment within that framework.
