But despite increasing indications that his followers were behind the failed military uprising, analysts say concerns about whether Gulen could get a fair trial complicate Turkey’s bid. “I think that they take the side of coup”, President Erdogan was quoted as saying in a combative speech from his palace in Ankara on Tuesday. But by 2009 or so, Gulen judged that he had helped engender a monster, a covertly extremist Islamist regime that would ruin Turkey and damage Islam by starting violent quarrels with all its neighbors, which duly happened. “That’s called “the rule of law”, Mr Renzi said. With the government implementing a relentless crackdown in the wake of the coup, Erdogan vowed the harshest consequences for anyone who even supported Gulen.
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In a rare show of public humility, Erdogan said he had failed to see the “true face” of Gulen, who cooperated closely with the Turkish strongman while he was mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s and after his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002.
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on 1 August that he would abandon Turkey’s refugee deal with the European Union if Turkish citizens are not granted visa-free travel to the Schengen Area by October 2016.
His comments follow Mogherini’s remarks, who just days after the attempted overthrow of the Turkish government, demanded Ankara adhere to the country’s Constitution as it investigates those behind the attempted coup. “Maybe it is what they are most powerful at”, he said in remarks to the heads of chambers of commerce in Ankara, according to multiple reports.
About 18,000 people have been detained or arrested.
On Western allies, however, the leaders agree. For a week, Turkish authorities cut off external electric power to an air base at Incirlik that the US Air Force has used to conduct raids on IS targets in Iraq and Syria for the past year.
Turkish media has denounced the United States as responsible for the coup either directly or indirectly. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford met with Turkish officials and inspected operations at the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey, from which the U.S.-led coalition is launching anti-ISIS air operations.
Turkey has sent an array of documentation to the United States asking for Gulen’s extradition and has so far expressed exasperation over the slowness of Washington in taking up the issue.
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Those concerns were amplified by a broad purge of state institutions and some private ones after the July 15 uprising, in which at least 270 people died. The anti-Ataturk camp that wants to remake Turkey into an Islamic state was always supported by the less educated majority of the country’s population, but until 2002 it was firmly kept under control by the Turkish officer corps, whose unifying “Kemalist” ideology was strictly secular. Countries that still have a death sentence include the U.S., Japan, China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Iran, Pakistan, Taiwan, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Dominican Republic, Cuba and the Bahamas.
