In an event not seen in since 1997, military factions in Turkey tried to seize control of the country on Friday night, setting off a scramble for power and plunging a crucial NATO member and American ally into chaos in what is already one of the world’s most unstable regions. However, by Saturday morning President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose whereabouts were unclear and was rumored to have been on vacation when the coup attempt began, flew to Istanbul Ataturk Airport, signalling that the coup had failed.
“A minority within the armed forces has unfortunately been unable to stomach Turkey’s unity,” Erdogan said at the airport, after the private NTV network showed him greeting supporters.
Blaming political enemies, Mr. Erdogan said “what is being perpetrated is a rebellion and a treason. They will pay a heavy price for their treason to Turkey.”
In essence, thanks to the very poorly planned coup - which some have suggested had been orchestrated by Erdogan himself - has given the Erdogan regime legitimacy to accelerate the recent trend of converting Turkey from a parliamentary into a presidential regime, thus granting himself even more power as a result.
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As the NYT adds, there were strong indications that coup leaders, at a minimum, did not have a tight grip on many parts of the country. One could go further and say that the military never really had much control anywhere. Supporters of Erdogan took to the streets of Istanbul early on in the coup hours to oppose the coup plotters, and there were scattered reports some of its leaders had been arrested.
Martial law was declared in the country, although few if any casualties were confirmed, despite constant media reports of clashes between the army and the protesters.
President Erdogan, an Islamist who has dominated politics for more than a decade and sought to exert greater control over the armed forces, was forced to use his iPhone’s FaceTime app from an undisclosed location to broadcast messages urging the public to resist the coup attempt.
In one of the night's more comic moments, before returning to Istanbul Erdogan appeared in a video call to the studio of the Turkish sister channel of CNN, where an announcer held up a mobile phone to the camera to show him. He called on Turks to take to the streets to defend his government and said the coup plotters would pay a heavy price.
“There is no power higher than the power of the people,” he said in a night of wild confusion and contradictory accounts of who was in control. “Let them do what they will at public squares and airports.”
After Erdogan appeal for people to take to the streets, many of his followers obeyed his orders and mosque loudspeakers exhorted his supporters to go out and protest the coup attempt. The state-run Anadolu News Agency said 17 police officers had been killed in a military helicopter attack by coup plotters on a police special forces headquarters outside Ankara, although that has not been confirmed. There were also reports that fighter jets had shot down a military helicopter used by coup plotters. CNN Turk reported that 12 civilians were killed in an explosion at the Parliament building.
During this time, foreign support poured in from both neighbors such as Greece and Russia, all the way to the US. The United States Embassy said in a statement that “shots have been heard in Ankara” and urged Americans to take shelter. Social media outlets worked intermittently or were blocked. The US state depratment later said that it would only support the democratically elected regime. Senior Pentagon officials in Washington said they were still trying to determine what was occurring in Turkey. They said the United States had not adjusted its military posture in the region.
The Defense Department has roughly 2,200 uniformed military personnel and civilians in Turkey. About 1,500 of them are based at Incirlik, an air base in southern Turkey near Syria. The United States has used the base to launch airstrikes against the Islamic State. Since March, Incirlik has been on an “elevated force protection level” amid concerns that militants were targeting it. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter in May ordered all family members of military personnel based at Incirlik to leave the country.
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The events began unfolding around 10 p.m. Friday as the military moved to stop traffic over two of Istanbul’s bridges, which cross the Bosporus and connect the European and Asian sides of the city.
There were reports of gunfire in Istanbul’s central Taksim Square, where pro-Erdogan supporters had gathered, but there were no reports of injuries, and it appeared that security forces were acting with restraint. On the Bosporus Bridge, which was closed earlier in the evening by the military, there were reports of gunfire as protesters approached, and according to NTV, a television news channel, three people were injured.
What was surprising, is that some prominent military figures spoke out against a coup, including the commander of the First Army, Gen. Umit Guler, who issued a statement, carried by a pro-government news channel, saying, “ The armed forces do not support this movement comprised of a small group within our ranks .” One wonders then just how organized and orchestrated this "low level" coup.
Even leaders of opposition political parties, who have otherwise worked against Mr. Erdogan’s government, spoke out against a seizure of government by the military. “This country has suffered a lot from coups,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish initials C.H.P., said in a written statement, according to Hurriyet Daily News. “It should be known that the C.H.P. fully depends on the free will of the people as indispensable of our parliamentary democracy.”
One thing is undisputed: the coup was poorly organized from the beginning: instead of arresting Erdogan on the spot and taking over all media, while unleashing infantry forces around key choke points, the army was on the defensive almost from the beginning, and was unable to open fire on its own people when the momentum started to slip away.
To be sure, some tried to spin the coup as well-organized. According to Reuters , early in the evening the coup appeared strong. A senior EU source monitoring the situation said: "It looks like a relatively well orchestrated coup by a significant body of the military, not just a few colonels. They've got control of the airports and are expecting control over the TV station imminently. They control several strategic points in Istanbul.
"Given the scale of the operation, it is difficult to imagine they will stop short of prevailing."
Only they did, and dramatically so, failing to show either substantial organization or resolve to push the coup to its end. As a result, as the night wore on, momentum turned against the coup plotters. Crowds defied orders to stay indoors, gathering at major squares in Istanbul and Ankara, waving flags and chanting. The army had lost control just a few hours after the attempted coup started late on Friday evening.
“Some people illegally undertook an illegal action outside of the chain of command,” Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said in comments broadcast on NTV, a private television channel. “The government elected by the people remains in charge. This government will only go when the people say so.”
Shortly after Yildirim spoke, factions of the Turkish military issued a statement, according to the news agency DHA, claiming it had taken control of the country.
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