Turkish police teams have detained 101 more people in the ongoing crackdown on the faith-based Gülen movement, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya on Friday.
Yerlikaya said on X that suspects have been taken into custody in police operations across 27 provinces, including İstanbul, İzmir, Trabzon and Bursa.
"FETÖ'ye yönelik düzenlediğimiz operasyonlarda 101 şüpheli yakalandı"
27 ilde FETÖ'ye yönelik Jandarma tarafından düzenlediğimiz operasyonlarda yakalanan şüpheliler;
◾FETÖ terör örgütünün “Güncel Yapılanması" içerisinde faaliyet yürütmek,
◾Ankesörlü telefonlarla örgüt… pic.twitter.com/oWTLTJGwvv— Ali Yerlikaya (@AliYerlikaya) May 16, 2025
The detainees were accused of engaging in activities linked to the Gülen movement, contacting members of the movement via pay phones, financing the movement and disseminating propaganda on social media.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been targeting followers of the Gülen movement, inspired by the late Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, since corruption investigations revealed in 2013 implicated then-prime minister Erdoğan as well as members of his family and his inner circle.
Dismissing the investigations as a Gülenist coup and conspiracy against his government, Erdoğan designated the movement as a terrorist organization and began pursuing its followers. He intensified the crackdown on the movement following an abortive putsch in 2016, which he accused Gülen of masterminding. Gülen and the movement strongly deny involvement in the coup attempt or any terrorist activity.
The so-called “payphone investigations” are based on call records. The prosecutors allege that a member of the Gülen movement used a single payphone to consecutively call all his contacts. Based on that assumption, when an alleged member of the movement is found in call records, it is assumed that other numbers called right before or after the primary call also belong to people with Gülen links. The authorities do not possess the content of the calls in question. The supposition of guilt is solely based on the order of the calls made from the phone.
According to a statement from Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç ahead of the eighth anniversary of the coup attempt last July, a total of 705,172 people have been investigated since the coup attempt on terrorism or coup-related charges due to their alleged links to the movement. Tunç said at the time that there were 13,251 people in prison in pretrial detention or convicted of terrorism in Gülen-linked trials.
These figures are thought to have increased over the past 10 months since the operations targeting Gülen followers continue unabated. Erdoğan and several government ministers said on many occasions that there would be no “slackening” in the fight against the movement following the cleric’s death at 83.