Obama: All parties in Turkey should support Erdogan gov’t

And now Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has survived a military coup – a boast many of his predecessors ousted in previous army takeovers can not share.

After a night of turmoil in the streets of major cities, Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency said all soldiers involved in the attempted coup at the military headquarters in the capital, Ankara, had been taken into custody.

Earlier on Saturday, around 700 coup troops surrendered to police, and counter-terrorism officers would make detailed search of the compound, the report said.

The MP stressed that there is no victor in military coups. Authorities arrested thousands of people amid gunfire that left dozens of people dead, and Erdogan vowed that those responsible “will pay a heavy price for their treason”.

Mr Erdogan, a polarising figure whose Islamist-rooted ideology lies at odds with supporters of modern Turkey’s secular principles, said the plotters tried to attack him in the resort town of Marmaris. “The government is in control”.

After a deadly night of unrest, Turkey’s government defeated a coup attempt by a faction of its military as it imposed martial law and a curfew on Saturday.

While Erdogan insisted the government was in control, some fighting appeared to continue into Saturday.

“I predicted this would fail from early on, because all of Turkey’s opposition parties came out against the coup from the beginning”, Aykan Erdemir, a former member of Turkish parliament and senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based think tank Foundation for Defence of Democracies, told Business Insider on Saturday.

Erdogan, a consumate political tactician, will sense the failed coup has created opportunities to tighten his control over Turkey but faces a critical choice. It’s just that their numbers grew thin after he began to question Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian streak. Turkey plays a key role in U.S.-led efforts against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

Gulen sharply rejected any responsibility: “As someone who suffered under multiple military coups during the past five decades, it is especially insulting to be accused of having any link to such an attempt”. The cleric, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania, promotes a philosophy that blends a mystical form of Islam with staunch advocacy of democracy, education, science and interfaith dialogue.

“They have pointed the people’s guns against the people”, Erdogan said of the coup plotters. He issued a defiant address to the nation in a FaceTime call from his mobile phone.

Citizens opposed to the coup took to the streets in both cities. US President Barack Obama urges Turks to support their “democratically-elected government” and the European Union calls for a swift return to “constitutional order”.

He explained that the reasons for the coup included “one of the latest developments that has been the bill redesigning the high courts as well as Erdogan’s refusal to be impartial”.