The Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) is still active in Turkey years after a coup attempt where it employed its military infiltrators. But it faces more exposure nowadays, thanks to an increasing number of members collaborating with authorities to shed light on its secretive network.
In the capital Ankara alone, 1,244 people out of the 4,724 detained for links to the terrorist group collaborated with investigators last year. Their confessions, in exchange for a lenient sentence in terrorism cases, helped authorities to uncover nearly 20,000 FETÖ suspects previously unknown to the authorities. Officials in the capital say the rate of collaborators who helped in deciphering schemes and networks of infiltrators reached an unprecedented 26.3%.
The capital is at the heart of most FETÖ investigations, since the coup attempt where putschists linked to the terrorist group took over military bases in the city, including the headquarters of the army and attacked the Presidential Complex and Parliament, while running the nationwide coup attempt from a military base there. Last year, 121 operations were conducted against FETÖ in the city, rounding up hundreds of suspects, including infiltrators still working at public agencies as their ties to the group have remained undetected.
FETÖ members captured in operations in the years before the coup attempt were less willing to collaborate with authorities, the figures show. But this changed after the coup attempt, where several members of the group had confessed that they have seen “the true face” of the group for the first time. FETÖ, even after two coup attempts in late 2013, managed to keep its followers it exploited under the guise of a charity movement with religious undertones.
Collaborators, however, draw the wrath of prominent members of the group who have fled Turkey before and after the 2016 coup attempt, and who can be deciphered on social media. Emre Uslu, a fugitive FETÖ member who currently resides in the United States, where FETÖ leader Fetullah Gülen also lives, had recently uncovered the identity of a former FETÖ member who collaborated with authorities on social media. Uslu had sought to incite fellow FETÖ members against the collaborator, “now living in Cologne, Germany.”
