Turkey raids scientific council in latest post-coup crackdown

As former Central Intelligence Agency official Graham E. Fuller, wrote in The Huffington Post, Gulen operates a civil movement called “Hizmet”, which translates to “Service”, and probably has more than one million followers or sympathizers who are not under centralized control.

People walk in a main road near Taksim square in Istanbul, on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016.

Following the failed coup attempt, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the death toll as a result of the coup attempt stood at 246 people excluding the coup plotters and over 2,000 people were wounded. 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.

But in a new speech that was broadcast live from the presidential palace in Ankara, Erdogan pledged to show no mercy in a crackdown on the cleric’s interests.

Being with the group, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) Istanbul lawmaker Oguz Kaan Salici said the US would cooperate with Turkey during the ongoing legal process for Gulen’s extradition.

“I told President Erdogan that they should present us with evidence that they think indicates the involvement of Mr. Gulen or anybody else who is here in the United States, and it would be processed the way that it is always processed and that we would certainly take any allegations like this seriously”, Obama said.

The visit comes over a month after a military coup attempt in Turkey.

Gulen has repeatedly denied any involvement in the coup, in which almost 300 people were killed.

And he lashed out at the United States for dragging its heels over Ankara’s request to extradite him, describing it as “a huge obstacle” to Turkey’s fight against terror.

Anadolu said the court issued the warrant over a number of accusations, including an “attempt to eliminate the government of the Turkish Republic or to prevent it from carrying out its duties”.

It is not the first time an arrest warrant has been issued for Gulen, who broke ranks publicly with Erdogan in 2013.

The country has designated his movement as a terror organization.

His comments came as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a rare apology, asked forgiveness for having an alliance with Gulen in the early years of his political career.

He accused Gulen of harnessing his extensive network of schools, charities and businesses, built up in Turkey and overseas over decades, to infiltrate state institutions and build a “parallel structure” that aimed to take over the country. “In the same way that we do not pardon those who fire the bullet, we will not forgive those who financed the bullet”. “Turkey is a key military ally”, Ohlin added.

Under Turkey’s three-month state of emergency, imposed after the July 15 coup attempt, suspects can be held by police for five days without access to a lawyer and for a total of 30 days without being charged.