In the wake of the failed 2016 coup, a palpable sense of fear has enveloped President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan‘s administration. While a robust response to the plotters is expected, the government’s subsequent actions suggest a deeper, more alarming strategy: the creation of parallel security structures loyal not to the state, but to one man. This path, critics warn, is dangerously paving the way for potential civil conflict.
The paranoia within the presidential palace has reached extreme levels. One of Erdoğan’s chief advisors, Yiğit Bulut, publicly accused foreign chefs featured on Turkish television of being spies, claiming their culinary tours of Anatolia were a front for gathering military and industrial intelligence. While such statements may seem absurd, they emanate from the highest echelons of power and signal a mindset that justifies extraordinary measures against perceived threats, both real and imagined.
This mindset is now being institutionalized. Erdoğan appointed Adnan Tanrıverdi, a retired general and founder of the controversial private military contracting company SADAT, as a chief advisor. SADAT’s stated mission is to provide international defense consultancy and training. However, opposition figures and analysts express grave concerns that its true purpose is to train loyalist paramilitary forces to suppress domestic dissent and wage Erdoğan’s proxy wars abroad, particularly in Syria.
Further fueling these concerns is a restructuring within Turkey’s national intelligence agency (MİT) to create a new deputy undersecretary role in charge of “special operations.” This move is seen by experts as a formalization of Turkey’s increasingly adventurous foreign policy in Syria and Iraq, creating a centralized command for deniable operations.
Perhaps most troubling is a domestic initiative to mobilize youth through religion. The Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has issued a directive to establish “youth branches” in thousands of mosques across the country. The plan aims to have these branches in 20,000 mosques by 2021, eventually expanding to 45,000.
Observers fear this initiative is a blueprint for creating a “mosque militia”—a vast network of religiously indoctrinated youths whose loyalty is to Erdoğan’s ideology. In a nation as deeply polarized between secular and conservative factions as Turkey, the formation of such a force is a recipe for disaster. It risks provoking a counter-reaction from secular groups, potentially igniting street-level violence.
Erdoğan already commands NATO’s second-largest military and a sprawling state security apparatus. The drive to build a private army of pious youths and empower paramilitary contractors is not about national security. It is about consolidating personal power and creating a defense mechanism that operates outside the official chain of command. Before it is too late, this dangerous project must be abandoned to pull Turkey back from the brink of internal strife.
