Turkey, once touted as regional model, is mired in tension

Turkey’s financial regulator has cancelled the licence of a research director at one of the country’s largest brokerage firms after his report on the failed July 15 coup.

Anadolu Agency also said that the government has chose to close down dozens of media organizations, including 45 newspapers and 16 television stations.

Broadcaster CNN Turk has reported that more than 15,000 people, including around 10,000 soldiers had been detained so far over the coup, citing the interior minister.

Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, who is Erdogan’s son-in-law, said Turkish authorities had been planning a major purge of the military and other institutions to remove Gulen-linked elements ahead of the coup attempt. That is in addition to 42 journalists and columnists arrested on Monday.

Gulen, who says he runs a peaceful Islamic movement, rubbishes the claims that he was behind the coup and expressed hope that the United States would not give into Ankara’s pressure and extradite him.

The newspaper criticized Ulker for speculating over who was behind the coup, including an allegation that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had some awareness of what was going on.

The army said on Wednesday that 8,651 of its military personnel had been involved in the coup, 1.5 per cent of its total number.

On Wednesday, Turkey also discharged more than 2,400 military personnel for “complicity in the attempted coup”, a senior Turkish official said.

However, the rebelling servicemen started to surrender July 16 and Turkish authorities said the coup attempt failed.

Erdogan, a popular but polarising figure who has dominated Turkish politics for more than a decade, will chair an annual meeting of the Supreme Military Council (YAS) on Thursday after vowing to restructure the armed forces following the coup. “[The armed forces] will pay a heavy price for this”, he said after the failed coup, Reuters reported.

Erdogan is set to visit Russia on August 9 to fix ties harmed by the downing of a Russian warplane by Turkish jets past year, in an apparent shift in diplomatic strategy.

The U.S. has told Turkey to present evidence against Gulen and let the U.S. extradition process take its course. In 2013, his followers in the police and judiciary opened a corruption probe into business associates of Erdogan, then prime minister, who denounced the investigation as a foreign plot.

The strains with the European Union and the United States have coincided with Turkey’s renewed push to fix ties with Russia, badly hurt last November by the Turkish downing of a Russian jet involved in military operations in Syria, and Moscow’s subsequent imposition of trade sanctions.

The UN chief “trusts that the government and people of Turkey will transform this moment of uncertainty into a moment of unity, preserving Turkey’s democracy”, Ban’s spokesman Farhan Haq said.