The Turkish leader has blamed the movement led by Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish Islamic scholar living in the USA state of Pennsylvania, for the unsuccessful coup that started on Friday night.
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Kerry, who spoke about Gulen during a visit to Luxembourg, said that no extradition request had been received.
One day earlier, he issued a statement condemning, “in the strongest terms, the attempted military coup in Turkey”.
Erdogan has long accused Gulen, a former ally, of trying to overthrow the government. Washington has never found any evidence particularly compelling previously. “If its president has completely regained control, which I think is the case, we shall have a period of considerable calm, but there will probably be repression”, Hollande said after visiting the French foreign ministry’s crisis centre. “And the United States will accept that and look at it and make judgments about it appropriately”.
A Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with government regulations, said Turkey “has been preparing a formal application with detailed information about Gulen’s involvement in illegal activities”.
“I call on the United States and President Barack Obama”, Mr. Erdogan said, addressing hundreds of supporters in Istanbul late Saturday.
“It is deeply disappointing to see what has become of Turkey in the last few years”, Gulen wrote in 2015.
Nevertheless the attempted coup lit up the night sky in Ankara and Istanbul.
“Government should be won through a process of free and fair elections, not force”, he said. On Saturday, President Obama reiterated the United States’s “unwavering support for the democratically elected, civilian government of Turkey”, according to a statement. He said a change of government should only come through a legal, constitutional process.
Turkey, a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation member with the second biggest military in the Western alliance, is one of the most important allies of the United States in the fight against Islamic State.
“All of that continues as before”, Kerry said. The Turkish sister channel of CNN said he was “safe”.
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Turkey’s president says the coup was organized by the followers of Fethullah Gülen, a cleric living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania.
