Initially, the youth branches will be formed in 1,500 mosques. But under the plan, 20,000 mosques will have youth branches by 2021, and finally 45,000 mosques will have them. Observers fear the youth branches may turn into Erdogan’s “mosque militia,” like the Nazi Party’s Hitler Youth organization in Germany.
In the wake of the abortive July 15 coup, he purged thousands of experienced counter-terror police and rotated others out of areas they know best. In effect, this means the Turkish security and police are operating blind. It can take years to gain the experience in any particular locality that those whom Erdogan fired had.
At the heart of the matter is the question of Maa’rif’s credentials to take over the schools instead of its Pakistani management. Turkey is least known for its standard of education. Moreover, the Erdogan-backed organisation is neither experienced in the education field nor apolitical. The organisation is already scared with allegation of child sexually abuse in Turkey.
Amnesty South Asia Director Champa Patel: “With 24 million Pakistani children out of school, Pakistan’s decision to expel teachers from the Pak-Turk International Schools and Colleges will only hurt Pakistan’s children. What the country needs is more classrooms and more teachers, not a politically-motivated decision to purge educators at the behest of the Turkish government.”
In yet another example of human tragedies proliferated in the aftermath of the July 15 coup attempt, a Sinop woman lost her twins in jail after she was arrested due to the ByLock mobile application that she says has never downloaded.
Hacked emails show a race to discredit an audio recording of Turkey’s then PM Erdogan telling his son, Bilal Erdogan, how to avoid charges. These emails show that Turkey’s ruling party knowingly misled the public about previously leaked audio in which the country’s leader tells his son how to avoid corruption charges.
A three-year-old child with high fever has been denied treatment at a hospital since his father was arrested over alleged links to the Gülen movement, leading a suspension in the kid’s subscription to the nation-wide social security system.
An email included in Wikileaks’ Monday publication of the leaked emails of Berat Albayrak, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law and Turkey’s minister of energy, shows that Albayrak fabricated news with pro-government people in the United States in order to defame the Gülen movement in the US media.
What is the sense in advocating for the transfer of investments of private individuals to a government backed NGO? Is President Erdogan indirectly telling African leaders that his empire in Turkey extends to African countries hence the outrageous demand? From the preceding, it is clear that President Erdogan has little or no respect for African nations hence this anomaly. I also beg to state here that the politics of Turkey should be left in Turkey.
WikiLeaks has released a tranche of more than 57,000 personal emails from the account of Turkey’s Minister of Oil Berat Albayrak, President Erdogan’s son-in-law. WikiLeaks alleges that the emails reveal ‘Albayrak’s involvement in organisations such as Powertrans, the company implicated in Isis oil imports’. The company has been implicated in oil imports from ISIS-controlled oil fields.
If the executive branch were to interfere too forcefully in the Gülen extradition case now, it would only confirm Turkish leaders’ belief that the U.S. system operates on the same corrupt terms as Turkey’s. This would fundamentally affirm Erdoğan’s view that democracy as a value and a practice is a purely cynical discourse used by Western powers to harm Turkey.
When the residents of Sirnak returned to the city last month after Turkish authorities lifted eight-month curfew during intense urban fighting between the Turkish security forces and Kurdish insurgents, they were shocked with what they saw: there was no home where they left.