Coup In Turkey
The Turkish military stages coups on a regular basis to remind politicians that Turkey was founded as a secular country by Ataturk.
The current unrest could have been expected based on a number of things that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has done in the recent past. The ABC’s coverage, Gunfire, explosions as Turkish military attempts government takeover, features live updates.
Remember to assume that both sides are probably lying at this point, and both will attempt to block free and independent reporting.
4 comments
The coup does not appear to have managed to take over the communications facilities nor taken out top government officials, top government officials are still sending out irate communicades to the faithful and various top military commanders are announcing their loyalty to the Erdogan regime, so my guess is that it’s going to fizzle. This time. If the result is that the Erdogan regime attempts a purge of the armed forces leadership, the next time might not be so half-hearted.
It doesn’t look like it was an “official” coup, but a rushed operation to take advantage of Erdogan being out of the country. It’s back to more beatings until morale improves or the full military has had enough.
The outreach to Russia and Syria must have really pissed some in the military off…
And of course the opposition is saying that it was a put-up false flag job by Erdogan moles inside the armed services and not a “real” coup by Erdogan opponents.
Given that this is the part of the world that invented the term “Byzantine” to describe politics, all this just makes my head hurt.
Well, there were an awful lot of Turkish flags ready to go, and the “bad guys” are not being arrested by the security forces, but by Erdogan supporters…
The fact that Erdogan landed at the Ankara airport on a scheduled airliner while there were coup aircraft flying overhead was weird to say the least.