Stripped, jailed, exiled Turkish soldier tells story of coup night

A Turkish soldier who was stripped, beaten, jailed and exiled after a failed military coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016, said he was aware of the plot only after his commander said that a group of soldiers had attempted to overthrow the government.

“We were 300 men, fully armed, being detained by 10 men with only pistols, but we did nothing. We followed instructions,” Muhammed Emin Gündoğdu said in an interview with Euronews on Thursday.

On the day after the failed coup, thousands of soldiers were arrested, Gündoğdu being one of them.

Gündoğdu said he was preparing to visit his family when his commander, Muhlis Kocak, sent a message on a WhatsApp group announcing that his entire team needed to come together for a mandatory night training session the evening of the putsch.

“Our commander never showed up that night,” he said adding that during the training they were briefed on a potential terrorist attack and provided with live ammunition, unlike in previous training sessions.

The soldiers were then dispatched to various locations, said Gündoğdu, who claimed he was tasked, on the night of July 15 with defending the Gendarmerie Guard Academy Command post that housed a large number of weapons, including tanks and helicopters.

Forty soldiers were sent to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s presidential palace in Ankara to protect him, he said.

The failed putsch resulted in the deaths of 251 people and a further 2,200 were injured. The Turkish government has accused the Gülen movement, headed by U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, of masterminding the coup. Gülen vehemently rejects the claims.

Gündoğdu said they only learned about the attempt to overthrow the government later when Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım made an announcement.

“I thought our commanders were anti-coup,” he said underlining that the soldiers he was with were not involved in the putsch.

Troops and military cadets as young as 17 were captured, jailed and torturred in prions. Many received life sentences, while thousands fled the country, Euronews said.

In court last week, a Turkish prosecutor urged life imprisonment for Gündoğdu, who managed to escape Turkey to Germany earlier this year after being branded as a “traitor”.

He said he never wanted to leave Turkey but was left with no choice.

“I had no right to live a normal life in my country,” he said.

More than 500,000 people have been detained since the attempted putsch and over 150,000 have been dismissed from their jobs, according to government sources.

Some 39,000 Turkish nationals have sought asylum in Germany since 2016, according to figures provided by the German government agency for migrants and refugees (BAMF).