Mick Hartley

The purges begin. 2,745 judges removed from duty. That's an awful lot of judges.

And this:

"We will continue to cleanse the virus from all state institutions, because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state," Recep Tayyip Erdogan told mourners at a funeral in Istanbul for victims of the coup.

It's not good. It's not good at all. The language of purification is deeply disturbing. The historical parallels are grim.

On the cui bono principle, the finger would have to point at Erdogan himself. And it was so poorly executed:

Military coups – successful or otherwise – follow a predictable pattern in Turkey. Political groups – typically Islamists – deemed by soldiers to be antagonistic to Kemal Atatürk’s vision of a secular Turkey gain increasing power. Tensions rise, often accompanied by violence on the streets. Then the military steps in, exercising what the soldiers claim is their constitutional power to restore order and secular principles.

This time, it was very different. Thanks to a series of sham trials targeting secularist officers, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had managed to reconfigure the military hierarchy and place his own people at the top. While the country has been rocked by a series of terrorist attacks and faces a souring economy, there was no inkling of unrest in the military or opposition to Erdoğan. On the contrary, Erdoğan’s recent reconciliation with Russia and Israel, together with his apparent desire to pull back from an active role in the Syrian civil war, must have been a relief to Turkey’s top brass.

No less baffling was the almost amateurish behavior of the putschists, who managed to capture the chief of the general staff but apparently made no meaningful attempt to detain Erdoğan or any senior politicians. Major television channels were allowed to continue to operate for hours, and when soldiers showed up in the studios, their incompetence was almost comical.

Planes strafed civilians and attacked the parliament – very uncharacteristic behavior for the Turkish military outside areas of Kurdish insurgency. Social media were full of pictures of hapless (and apparently clueless) soldiers being pulled out of tanks and disarmed (and sometimes much worse) by civilian crowds – scenes I never thought I would see in a country that has come to hate military coups but still loves its soldiers.

The idea that Erdogan planned the whole thing is, no doubt, a conspiracy theory too far. More plausible is the possibility that certain sections of the military – certain sections of the military with secularist sympathies, who'd heard rumours that a large scale purge was in the offing and realised this was their last chance – were too indiscreet in their planning, and were perhaps encouraged by promises of support from those who were in reality Erdogan supporters. Erdogan saw his chance, and let events unfold…very much to his advantage, as it turned out. A risk, then, but one that paid off handsomely. Now he has a free hand to purge away to his heart's content.

This is of course wild speculation. See Claire Berlinski's post here for some more thoughts, from someone who knows Turkey well. Even she though, as she admits, is baffled.