During the 1990s, Gulen's global political Islam Cemaat spread across the Caucasus and into the heart of Central Asia all the way to Xinjiang Province in western China, doing precisely what Fuller had called for in his 1999 statement: "destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia."
By the mid-1990s, more than seventy-five Gulen schools had spread to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and even to Dagestan and Tatarstan in Russia amid the chaos of the post-Soviet Yeltsin era.
Gulen never left the United States after that, curiously enough, even though the ErdoÄŸan courts later cleared him in 2006 of all charges. His refusal to return, even after being cleared by a then-friendly ErdoÄŸan AKP government, heightened the conviction among opponents in Turkey about his close CIA ties, Frederick William Engdahl argues.
(Article changed on July 17, 2019 at 21:20)
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