Erdoğan: Gülenists, PKK, ‘Armenian brigands,’ YPG tarred with the same brush

While giving an address at an iftar dinner hosted for members of the Police Department in the capital city of Ankara on June 16, Erdoğan recalled that Turkey had gone through trying and troubled times in the past similar to the current period.

“We know quite well how the Police Department was split into two before 1980, gravely endangering the safety and peace of the country,” Erdoğan said, referring to the Sept. 12, 1980, military coup d’état. “In a similar vein, we were appalled to see that a group, disclosed with the Dec. 17-25 coup plot, had formed parallel structures, so to speak, in the judiciary and the police,” he said, referring to the now-dropped Dec. 17 and Dec. 25, 2013, graft cases.

“Among the state institutions, it was our Police Department that sustained the gravest damage and witnessed the fiercest struggle since it was one of the primary targets of this structure,” Erdoğan said, reiterating his determination in the struggle against followers of U.S.-based Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen in security institutions and the judiciary. 

“This treason gang, which takes it as its duty to attack the interests of the Turkish nation and state, is working against Turkey all around the world. We see in the countries we go to that the parallel state structure stages protests shoulder-to-shoulder with the separatist terror organization [PKK] and Armenian brigands against our country. I, myself, witnessed on my way to a think-tank in America, where I was set to give a lecture, how this parallel gang staged protests alongside the YPG and the PKK against me and my delegation,” he said. 

“They are neither national and native nor the children of this homeland. I put it clearly that this structure has done and is doing anything it can to undermine our fight against terrorism,” he argued.

The issue of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) trucks was “only the known example of treachery,” he noted, adding that “the nation has been sincerely supporting the struggle against the parallel structure since the nation saw the slyness, the real intention and the real side of this structure.”

In January 2014, trucks belonging to the MİT were stopped by a prosecutor who sought to have the gendarmerie search the vehicles in the southern province of Adana before they crossed into Syria. Claiming that the trucks were carrying “humanitarian aid to Turkmens” in the war-torn country, the Turkish government accused followers of ally-turned-foe Gülen in security institutions and the judiciary of illegally ordering the search.

In February 2014, a ban was imposed on the publication of reports about the search, and in April 2015 a Turkish court arrested 17 active soldiers who stopped the trucks.

There has long been speculation that the aid was actually being sent to jihadists in Syria.