Over the past couple of days there had been speculation about a police operation against the Gülen Movement. On Sunday, Dec. 14, the operation began and 31 people, including executives of newspapers and television stations associated with the Gülen Movement, were taken into custody. Let us leave aside how obviously biased reactions against the operations are and hope that the justice system will avoid the mistakes it made in the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer coup plot trials. The proceedings ought to live up to universal standards, but this cannot mean that the Gülenist shadow state will not be held accountable for its actions over the past years.The bottom line is that the rule of law in Turkey cannot be instituted unless the country brings operatives of the Gülen Movement, who exploited the nation's eagerness to come to terms with military coups for their own gain and created a state of fear by eavesdropping on a number of people including the president and the prime minister. This is not to suggest that this process will be simple. After all, the shadow state remains quite strong within the bureaucracy as their ability to leak information about the police operation before it happened indicates.This fact alone is nothing short of alarming.Let us now take a closer look at a small detail about the operation. Ahead of Sunday's police operation, various Gülenist accounts on social media sites claimed that a large number of journalists and members of law enforcement affiliated with the movement would be detained. Invariably, they alleged that innocent police officers who conducted raids on the Tahşiye group as part of an anti-al-Qaida operation would be taken into custody. Obviously, the fact that they could know in advance that a police operation was in the making was quite interesting. But what was the Tahşiye group that they were so eager to mention?It was an online news website hurhaber.com that deciphered this reference roughly 10 hours before the operation began. This actual basis of the investigation was that Sunday's operation against the shadow state was based on a small number of law enforcement personnel who were involved in the imprisonment of a religious order called the Tahşiye group. And why, you might ask, did these Gülenist policemen target the group?Here's a brief summary. The Tahşiye group consists of followers of Muslim thinker Said Nursi who reject Fethullah Gülen's interpretation of the Nur Movement, which is Nursi's masterpiece. The group, led by Mullah Muhammed Doğan, has been active at least since 2004 and primarily concentrated on religious publications. Something particularly interesting happened in 2009. Delivering a speech, Gülen mentioned the name with no reference to the actual religious order: "You could, for instance, come up with something called the Party of Ferocity [Hizbulvahşet]. What else? After Hizbulvahşet, they invented al-Qaida. Tomorrow, they could develop new things. They could, for instance, create something called Tahşiye.Provided that they could, God forbid, organize, they might attempt to make these people mingle with true Muslims, book-reading Muslims. They might arm themselves in order to increase their power. They might hang posters of the individual in the back cover of books in their houses."We annotate [the Nur Movement], they might claim and call themselves the Tahşiye group. Then they will give them AK-47s."While the actual reason behind the strife remains unclear, those intended to hear Gülen's message subsequently assumed responsibility and began to mention the Tahşiye terrorist organization in television series on Gülenist channels. The operation was launched in 2010 as members of law enforcement raided the homes of the group's members, discovered explosives in certain residences and proceeded to detain 120 people. Although ballistics experts found the fingerprints of police officers who conducted the raid on the explosives, their superiors turned the other way and swept this detail under the rug. Hürhaber columnist Murad Çetin identified the elimination of the Tahşiye group as one of the Gülen Movement's greatest accomplishments.Such is the background of the most recent police operation that media outlets associated with the Gülen Movement have been complaining about.