Book. It is a gigantic hunt on the scale of a continent where all blows are allowed: kidnappings, political assassinations, extraditions, blackmail… Throughout Europe, the regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan deploys its tentacles when it acts to neutralize, apprehend or harm its opponents. Silence all dissident voices, whether Kurdish, pro-Armenian, extreme left, from the brotherhood of Fethullah Gülen or even the fact of former fellow travelers who have broken the ban. Increasingly paranoid since the Taksim revolt in 2013, the return of civil war with the Kurdish movement in 2015, then the failed coup of 2016, the Turkish regime takes any opposition for an existential threat.
In Wolves love the mistLaure Marchand and Guillaume Perrier, former correspondent of World in Turkey, tell the underside and the relays of this “army” which does not say its name, whose spearhead is MIT, the Turkish intelligence services.
The arm of MIT is very long. He is found implicated in the assassination of three PKK activists, including one of the founding members of the movement, in an apartment in rue Lafayette, Paris, on January 9, 2013. If the author died of illness in prison , sponsors and facilitators, some of whom live in France, are still running. An investigation is in progress but, as Marchand and Perrier tell, the judge is not particularly helped by the French intelligence services which block the declassification of notes making it possible to identify the accomplices of the killer.
A “deep state”
In fact, it is a vast spider’s web that the Turkish services in Europe have woven, the epicenter of which is in Germany, where the largest Turkish community in Europe lives. It is estimated that no less than 6,000 people work there for services. It is a mixture of secret agents, assassins, diplomats, informants, political activists and business intermediaries, all united in a “deep state” which mixes mafia networks and state services. It is moreover to describe the mechanics of counter-revolutionary violence (anti-PKK and anti-leftist) of the 1980s in Turkey that this expression of “deep state”, which has since flourished, was invented.
But, forty years later, the Turkish deep state has been strengthened by the addition of a religious and Islamist dimension since the alliance, dating back to 2015, between President Erdogan and the far right nationalist “Grey Wolves”. “. Gone are the days when the former Turkish Prime Minister charmed the European Union and was named “European of the Year” (2004). What Marchand and Perrier’s book recounts is also this vast movement of withdrawal into itself of an “Ottomaniac” Turkey which sees itself as the center of an empire to be rebuilt, a despoiled power, both temporal and religious. This explosive mixture will not be without consequences for the future of Europe.
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