Turkish authorities detained 148 people in three separate operations on Tuesday, February 17, 2026, over alleged links to the faith-based Gülen movement.
In the largest of the day’s sweeps, prosecutors in İzmir issued detention warrants for 88 military personnel, including active-duty and retired officers, alleging ties to the movement. Police carried out coordinated raids across 33 provinces and detained 60 suspects, including several district-level gendarmerie commanders. Authorities said efforts to locate the remaining suspects were ongoing.
A second operation based in Kayseri resulted in the detention of 70 people in raids across four provinces, the reports said. Police seized religious books, digital materials and bank cards issued by the now-defunct Bank Asya, a lender long associated by Turkish authorities with the movement. Relatives of some detainees told local media that those taken into custody included a recently dismissed civil servant and his 20-year-old son, accused of attending religious discussion meetings and alleged “restructuring” activities.
Separately, in an Istanbul-based investigation, police detained 18 people—including 16 public employees—in raids conducted across eight provinces. Prosecutors said the suspects were accused of membership based on statements from cooperating suspects, information attributed to a confidential witness, and alleged “sequential” call patterns that investigators claim indicate covert communication methods.
The “payphone investigations” referenced by prosecutors rely on call records rather than the content of conversations. Investigators allege that a movement member used a single payphone to consecutively call contacts; when one number is linked to a suspect, other numbers dialed immediately before or after are treated as potential movement-linked contacts. The reporting notes that authorities do not claim to possess the content of the calls in these cases.
A separate case moved forward in court on Monday, February 16, 2026, when an Istanbul court ordered the pretrial detention of 52 tax inspectors who had been detained the previous week as part of a broader probe involving 93 current and former employees of the Treasury and Finance Ministry. Courts imposed judicial-supervision measures on 38 suspects and released four others after they cooperated with investigators, according to the same reports.
Pro-government media also reported on the earlier tax-inspector detentions on February 13, 2026, describing the operation as part of an investigation targeting what Ankara calls FETÖ, the label it uses for the Gülen movement.
The latest detentions come against the backdrop of a years-long crackdown that intensified after the failed July 2016 coup attempt, which the Turkish government blames on the Gülen movement and in which 251 people were killed, according to widely cited official accounts. The movement has denied involvement, and its late spiritual leader Fethullah Gülen—who died on October 20, 2024—rejected accusations that he masterminded the coup.
Turkey’s campaign against suspected Gülenists began well before 2016. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government say the movement sought to undermine the state after corruption investigations in December 2013 implicated figures close to Erdoğan; Ankara later formally designated the movement a terrorist organization and broadened prosecutions after the coup attempt.
According to figures attributed to Turkey’s Justice Ministry in the reporting, more than 126,000 people have been convicted since 2016 for alleged links to the movement, with 11,085 still in prison; proceedings are said to be ongoing for over 24,000 individuals, while another 58,000 remain under investigation.
International bodies have repeatedly scrutinized evidence standards used in some post-coup cases. In a landmark ruling on convictions based on the ByLock messaging app, for example, the European Court of Human Rights said Turkey must address “systemic” problems where convictions were based decisively on app-use evidence without adequate safeguards. Separately, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention has noted a pattern of targeting individuals with alleged Gülen links in opinions it reviewed and warned that, under certain circumstances, widespread or systematic imprisonment in violation of international law may amount to crimes against humanity.
In addition to those jailed, thousands of alleged Gülen movement followers have left Turkey in recent years to avoid detention and prosecution, according to rights groups and media reports.
