Turkey warned the Trump administration Tuesday that it will pay the price for refusing to extradite a cleric living in Pennsylvania who is thought to have played a role in a 2016 coup attempt.
“We are warning many of our friendly countries around the world and demanding the extradition of the terrorists hiding within their borders,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. “However, some of our friendly countries are shying away from extraditing the terrorists. But the price at the end for such a failure will be quite hefty.”
Erdogan regards the cleric, Fetullah Gulen, as the leader of a terrorist organization known as FETO, which he blames for a failed 2016 coup attempt. President Trump, like former President Barack Obama before him, has refused to extradite the Pennsylvania-based cleric as Erdogan has cracked down on journalists, political opponents, in recent years and even accused an American pastor of complicity in terrorism.
“The [FETO] terrorist organization in the United States is generating somewhere between $700 and $800 million through their charter schools located in different states of the country,” Erdogan said. “Of course, this figure does not include the income generated through commercial institutions involved in all sorts of money-laundering activities, and other structures with secret agendas, which appear to be [non-governmental organizations], of course.”
Erdogan’s animosity towards Gulen traces back to a political falling-out, according to U.S.-based Turkey experts. “Gulen [was] Erdogan’s closest political ally between 2002 and 2013, who later turned into his sworn enemy following the Gulen network’s role in exposing and publicizing the massive corruption scandal that threatened Erdogan’s government in December 2013,” a June 2018 report from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said.
The U.S.-Turkey relationship has come under serious strain in recent years. The failed coup, tactical disagreements over the plan to destroy the Islamic State in Syria, and Erdogan’s human rights abuses have undermined ties between the two countries.
“Those who equip terrorists with tens of thousands of trucks and thousands of cargo planes loaded with arms for the sake of their tactical interests will most definitely feel sorrow in the future,” Erdogan also said Tuesday.
Erdogan has hinted in the past that he would release a U.S. pastor, Andrew Brunson, in exchange for Gulen, but U.S. officials have rejected such a “hostage diplomacy” trade.
“Pastor Brunson and the other U.S. persons that are being held by Turkey all need to be released by Turkey,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a Monday press briefing. “And I’m sure there will be some conversations this week in furtherance of that. But no make no mistake, there will be nothing that we share with them here that we haven’t shared with them already about President Trump’s demands that these innocent people — these people who have truly done nothing wrong — not be detained wrongfully in Turkey.”
Trump’s team has imposed sanctions over the Brunson detention, while the Russian arms deals could also trigger sanctions mandated by a federal law designed to punish Moscow by deterring the purchase of Russian weapons. Erdogan maintained a defiant posture.
“None of us can remain silent to the arbitrary cancellation of commercial agreements and the use of economic sanctions as weapons,” he said.
