US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who was accused by Ankara of organising a failed 2016 coup, has died in exile in the United States aged 83, his movement and the Turkish government said Monday.
Turkish-born Gulen, who had lived in the United States since 1999, was once a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before the two became bitter enemies.
“Our intelligence sources confirm the death of the leader of the FETO organisation,” Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told a press conference, using Turkiye’s term for Gulen’s once-influential Hizmet movement.
Turkiye’s TRT public television said the preacher, who had lived in Pennsylvania for a quarter of a century and was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 2017, died in hospital overnight.
In a message on X, Gulen’s website Herkul, which is banned in Turkiye, said he died on “October 20”, pledging to share details about his funeral.
Gulen moved to Pennsylvania in 1999, ostensibly for health reasons, and from there he ran Hizmet which, at the time, had a sprawling network of public schools on every continent.
In 2013, he had a major falling out with Erdogan and three years later the Turkish strongman accused him of plotting to overthrow him, dubbing Hizmet “the Fethullah Terror Organisation” (FETO).
Some 250 people died on July 15, 2016, when a rogue military faction tried to overthrow Turkiye’s government using warplanes and tanks, with Erdogan blaming Gulen supporters within the military.
“This organisation has become a threat rarely seen in the history of our nation,” Fidan said, accusing its followers of “being used as a weapon against their own country”.
Despite Gulen’s death, Turkiye would continue “the fight against this organisation, which poses a national security problem”, Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc wrote on X.
Ally turned enemy
Once an ally who helped Erdogan when he became prime minister in the early 2000s, Gulen’s ties with him became strained in 2010.
Three years later, Gulen became persona non grata when a corruption scandal engulfed the Turkish premier’s inner circle.
Erdogan blamed Gulen and later began accusing him of terror links although the preacher repeatedly insisted his movement was merely a network of charitable and business institutions.
Things worsened after the coup, with the authorities prosecuting more than 700,000 people and handing a life sentence to some 3,000 Gulen followers for their alleged involvement in the putsch.
Bayram Balci, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences-Po) told AFP that the death of the once-charismatic preacher would have little impact in Turkiye.
“Since the break with Erdogan in 2010 and especially after the attempted coup in 2016, Gulen’s image has been very bad. Few people hold him in high esteem,” he told AFP.
There was no chance Ankara would allow Gulen’s body to be repatriated for burial, and he would likely be buried near his home in Pennsylvania, he said.
Hizmet is “no longer the big movement that it once was” with its influence much reduced and its vast network of schools now only mainly operating in Germany, the US, Nigeria and South Africa.
Turkiye still regularly rounds up Gulen followers and demands their extradition from countries where his network is active.
Turkish security sources quoted by the private NTV broadcaster said very few people were expected to attend Gulen’s funeral and that his body would likely be buried in the US at a location which would be kept secret.
Pak-Turk schools
In 2019, Turkiye’s Maarif Foundation formally assumed the management of all educational institutions in Pakistan previously linked to Gulen’s organisation.
There were 28 Pak-Turk schools in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore that were handed over to the foundation.
The Supreme Court had previously instructed the government to declare Gulen’s organisation a terrorist group and ordered the handing over of the schools to the Maarif Foundation.
Turkiye had established the Maarif Foundation in 2016 after a coup attempt. It was tasked with taking over the administration of overseas schools linked to Gulen’s organisation. It also establishes schools and educational centres internationally.
However, the students of Pak-Turk schools and their parents protested against the government for handing over their teachers to Turkiye and later the schools to the foundation.
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