In Turkey's northwestern province of Edirne, another operation against FETÃ- netted 16 suspects. Prosecutors in the province had earlier launched an investigation into the group's secret members. Among the arrested suspects were doctors, academics, teachers and lawyers.
How Gulenist Group FETÃ- infiltrated the Turkish Armed Forces
Information gleaned from testimonies of former members, captured in police operations, shed light on little-known tricks of the group to maintain secrecy on identities of infiltrators and how they picked youngsters to be their future members and sent them to military schools. The suspect identified with the initials P. M. by security sources is one of those members, according to daily Sabah.
The alleged deputy manager in the group's wing in charge of infiltrators in the prestigious Air Force Academy, P. M. collaborated with investigators and gave an account of his activities for FETÃ- and tactics he and others employed to brainwash the youth to join the terrorist group. He disclosed the secretive jargon of the group to avoid suspicions, such as code names attributed to infiltrators and their handlers. He also revealed how each student "recruited" for the Air Force Academy was tracked down and their lives were constantly monitored to check their loyalty to the terrorist group.
His confessions helped authorities identify a large number of suspects previously unknown to the authorities, in investigations targeting FETÃ-, which faced renewed scrutiny after the coup attempt.
P. M. also confirmed that Adil Ã-ksuz, a fugitive mastermind of the 2016 coup attempt, was in charge of the group's infiltration into Turkish Air Forces until 2015 and Kemal Batmaz, one of the jailed planners of the coup attempt, replaced him that year.
"We used to track every cadet's progress and loyalty by giving each a unique number in a database, where their names were not included. For instance, 1112 is given to a cadet, with one at the beginning representing his year at the school and when the first two numbers are subtracted from the last two, it would give a result showing which province the cadet comes from, in that case, from Adana (which has 01 as its license plate registration number)," P. M. said.
Who is Fetullah Gulen?
Fetullah Gulen was born on April 27, 1941, in Erzurum. Gulen began primary school in 1946, in Erzurum and studied at the KurÃ...Ÿunlu Mosque madrasah in 1954. In 1966, when he was 25, he was assigned to Ä degreeszmir as the main imam. It is believed that the Gulen Movement Hizmet was founded in that year in the western province.
Nurettin Veren, the man who built the structure in 1966 together with Gulen and remained close friends until 1996, says about the year that "Gulen came to Ä degreeszmir from Edirne as a man who had not even finished primary school. His diploma was faked so that he could be an imam as a public servant. He used to take shelter in a small mosque. This is where our paths crossed."
On March 20, 1981 he resigned as an imam from the Presidency of Religious Affairs and focused on his own network with his close associates. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gulenists geared up interest in business, education and media.
Gulenist figures were stationed within the military using "taqiyya," a form of religious dissimulation mainly emphasized in Shiism, based on hiding one's true identity to achieve a goal or remain safe, and seemed to be nonreligious to avoid exclusion.
In line with this, Gulen urged his followers to infiltrate the state in a sermon that was captured on video in the early 1990s. "You have to penetrate the arteries of the system without being noticed," he said. "You have to wait for the right moment, until you have seized the entire power of the state," Gulen says in a video.
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