Turkish rebel jets had Erdogan’s plane in their sights

Former head of air force who was due to retire next month was among the chief plotters, officials in Ankara say.

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan waves to supporters in front of his residence in Istanbul on June 16, 2016, after a failed coup attempt by a section of the military. EPA

ANKARA // As Recep Tayyip Erdogan rushed to Istanbul to try and put down an attempted coup, the rebel pilots of two F-16 fighter jets had the Turkish president’s plane in their sights. And yet he was able to fly on.

Mr Erdogan was on holiday near the coastal resort of Marmaris when a faction in the military launched the coup attempt on Friday night, sealing off a bridge across the Bosphorus, trying to capture Istanbul’s main airport and sending tanks to parliament in Ankara.

“At least two F-16s harassed Erdogan’s plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul. They locked their radars on his plane and on two other F-16s protecting him,” said a former military officer with knowledge of the events.

“Why they didn’t fire is a mystery.”

A senior Turkish official confirmed that Mr Erdogan’s business jet had been harassed by two F-16s commandeered by the coup plotters. A second official said the presidential jet had been “in trouble in the air” but gave no details.

Mr Erdogan said as the coup unfolded that the plotters had tried to attack him in Marmaris and had bombed places he had been at shortly after he left. He “evaded death by minutes”, the second official said.

Just after Mr Erdogan left his hotel in Marmaris, about 25 soldiers descended on ropes from helicopters, shooting, broadcaster CNN Turk said.

Prime minister Binali Yildirim was targeted in Istanbul and narrowly escaped, an official said, without giving details.

Flight tracker websites showed a Gulfstream IV aircraft, a type of business jet owned by the Turkish government, take off from Dalaman airport, which is about an hour and a quarter’s drive from Marmaris, at about 1.40am on Saturday.

It later circled in a holding pattern just south of Istanbul, around the time bursts of gunfire were still heard at the city’s airport, before finally coming in to land.

Gunfire and explosions rocked both Istanbul and Ankara through Friday night, as the faction which tried to seize power strafed the headquarters of Turkish intelligence and parliament in the capital. At one point it ordered state television to read out a statement declaring a nationwide curfew.

But the attempt crumbled as forces loyal to Mr Erdogan pushed the rebels back and the Turkish leader, at one point appearing on broadcaster CNN Turk in a video call from a mobile phone, called people out on to the streets to support him.

More than 290 people were killed in the violence, 104 of them coup supporters, the rest largely civilians and police officers. At least 6,000 people have been arrested, including senior army commanders, judges, prosecutors and a military aide to Mr Erdogan, Ali Yazici, who had only been working for the president since August last year.

Mr Erdogan said the coup plotters could face the death penalty, which was abolished in 2004. “We cannot delay this any more because those who launch a coup will have to pay the price for it,” he told supporters after attending funerals for the coup victims on Sunday.

The aerial aspect of the plot appears to have centred on the Akinci air base about 50km north-west of Ankara, with at least 15 pilots involved under a rebel commander, according to the former military officer.

The head of the armed forces, Hulusi Akar, was held hostage at the base but was eventually rescued. Jets from Akinci roared low over Istanbul and Ankara repeatedly during the chaos of Friday night, shattering windows and terrifying civilians with sonic booms.

Fighter jets taking off from another air base at Eskisehir, west of Ankara, were scrambled to bomb Akinci and try to stop the rebels. However, the rogue aircraft were able to keep flying through the night by refuelling in mid-air after a tanker plane was commandeered from the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey. The commander of Incirlik, which is used by the US-led coalition to bomb ISIL in Syria and Iraq, was arrested on Sunday.

Three senior officials in Ankara said Akin Ozturk, head of the air force until 2015 and a member of High Military Council (YAS), the top body overseeing the armed forces, was one of the masterminds of the plot. He was among thousands of soldiers detained, pictured on Sunday in handcuffs wearing a striped polo shirt at Ankara police headquarters.

Mr Ozturk was due to be retired this August at a meeting of the YAS, which convenes twice a year. According to his biography, still on the military’s website, he was born in 1952.

The second mastermind is thought to be Muharrem Kose, a former legal adviser to the chief of military staff, the officials in Ankara said. They said Mr Kose was a follower of Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric whose network Mr Erdogan has blamed for carrying out the coup attempt.

Mr Kose was removed from his post in March for misconduct but had not been discharged. His whereabouts are not known.

“There were serious preparations ongoing for a very long time. The two people in question seem to have been the brains behind the coup attempt,” an official said.

Mr Erdogan and the government have long accused Mr Gulen’s followers of trying to create a “parallel structure” within the courts, police, armed forces and media with the aim of seizing power, a charge the cleric has repeatedly denied.

Mr Erdogan, his roots in Islamist politics, has always had a difficult relationship with the military, which saw itself as the guardian of secularism in Turkey, carrying out three coups and forcing a fourth, Islamist-led government from power in the second half of the 20th century.

Coup plot trials saw hundreds of officers jailed while Mr Erdogan was prime minister, as the government used the courts to clip the wings of the armed forces. The allegations were later discredited and convictions overturned, but the actions damaged morale and fuelled resentment.

Yet the coup plotters appear to have overestimated the support they would find within the military ranks.

“It was outside the chain of command which was the biggest handicap for the coup plotters,” said Sinan Ulgen, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe and a former Turkish diplomat.

“They had an insufficient portfolio of resources. They were grossly under-equipped to achieve their strategic objectives ... There was definitely quite a degree of incompetence compared to how coups were done here in the past.”

The former military officer said the coup plotters appeared to have launched their attempt prematurely because they realised they were under surveillance, something corroborated by other officials in Ankara.

“They weren’t fully prepared. The plans were leaked, they found out they were being monitored and it all apparently forced them to move faster than planned,” the ex-officer said.

They also underestimated Mr Erdogan’s ability to rally the crowds, his appeal for supporters to take to the streets bringing people out in Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere even as tanks took to the streets and jets screamed overhead.

Sertac Koc, press adviser to the mayor of Kazan district where the Akinci base is located, said residents started noticing the high number of jets taking off as events unfolded.

“When they saw jets hitting parliament in Ankara and people in Istanbul, they got organised among themselves and marched to the base to try and stop them,” he said.

“They tried to block traffic to the base by parking their vehicles, burning hay to block the jets’ vision, and in the end they attempted to cut the power to the base,” he said.

Seven people were killed when the rebel soldiers opened fire, Mr Koc said, among the dozens of civilians killed across the country in one of Turkey’s worst nights of bloodshed.

* Reuters