Turkish families seek answers over relatives’ disappearances

After 100 days behind bars over accusations of belonging to a Turkish “terrorist organization,” Mustafa Yilmaz was relieved to be back with his wife and daughter and allowed to return to work. But his problems were far from over. On Feb. 19, six weeks after his release, he disappeared.

His wife, Sumeyye Yilmaz, says CCTV footage shows him being confronted outside their home after leaving for work and taken by two men before a black van passes by.

She fears he is now being held by “deep state” operatives and possibly tortured.

Yilmaz is one of 28 men that rights activists and lawmakers say have been disappeared by security forces since a failed coup in July 2016.

Twenty-five of them have since reappeared — either they turned up in the custody of the authorities or near a mountain somewhere in Turkey — but Yilmaz and two others are still missing.

The activists and MPs say that many of the 28 were tortured — the government says it has a zero-tolerance policy toward torture.

“Why is my partner not being released? What do they want to do? Is he still alive?” Sumeyye, 27, said in an interview with AFP, as their two-year-old daughter played nearby.

“In the first few days he was taken, my daughter would ask ‘Where is he?’ But now she has stopped. She’s a child, she’s forgetting,” she said, through tears.

Yilmaz, 33, was one of six men who disappeared within a few days of each other in Ankara, Istanbul, the southern city of Antalya and the northwestern province of Edirne in February.

All of them had been accused of ties to an Islamic organization run by US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara claims ordered the 2016 attempted coup.

On July 28, the families were told that four of the missing were being held by Ankara police. Yilmaz and another man, Gokhan Turkmen, were not among them, which hit Sumeyye particularly hard.

“The period after July 28 was like hell for me,” she said. Both Mustafa and Sumeyye were accused of ties to the Gulen group — a charge that has seen tens of thousands of people arrested or stripped of their jobs since the coup bid. The couple denies the claims.

SPEEDREAD Yilmaz is one of 28 men that rights activists and lawmakers say have been disappeared by security forces since a failed coup in July 2016.

However, Mustafa, a physiotherapist, was arrested last October and sentenced to six years in prison. He was out pending an appeal when he disappeared.

The nightmare began for Sumeyye when she received a call from her husband’s employer at around 11:00 a.m. to say he had not shown up for work.

First, she called hospitals, and even at one point feared he could have run off.

But she became suspicious when the authorities showed little interest, and she says the police are still not doing enough to find her husband.

“No effective investigation ... or procedure has been started,” Sumeyye said, adding it was “still not too late” to find him.

Human Rights Watch says the six men taken in February were “forcibly disappeared” and the four who re-emerged have been denied lawyers.

It said their wives had described them as traumatized.

Lawmaker Omer Faruk Gergerlioglu, of the pro-Kurdish leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party who spearheaded a social media campaign to try to find the six, said he believed they had been tortured. “They were in a wretched state. When the families asked where they had been, the men said: ‘Close this issue, leave it alone’,” said Gergerlioglu.

Those who took them wanted “to interrogate them for a long time,” he added. The four men have since been formally charged over suspected Gulen links.

“I assume that the goal here is to spread terror” among suspected Gulen supporters, said Ozturk Turkdogan, head of the Turkish Human Rights Association.

“Obviously our main suspect is the state,” he added.

Turkdogan said the disappearances often followed a similar pattern, particularly the use of black VW Transporters, according to CCTV images or witnesses.

Contacted by AFP, no comment was provided by the Ankara public prosecutor’s office and police, while the Interior Ministry did not respond to requests.

Cases of missing people have been rare in Turkey since the 1990s, and activists are concerned by the rising number since 2016.

Since the four men’s reappearance, another case has come to light. The family of father-of-three Yusuf Bilge Tunc, 35, have said he was taken by unknown individuals on Aug. 6.

Tunc was accused of Gulen ties — claims which he denied — and fired from his job at the state agency overseeing the defense industry.

His family says police claim to have no information on his whereabouts, but that one officer suggested he had run off.

“For the sake of argument, let’s say that there was a problem between us ... why would he not say anything to his parents?” asked Tunc’s wife, who did not wish to be named.

“The most painful thing in the world is not knowing what has happened to him.” Like Sumeyye, they have appealed for help from the European Court of Human Rights and the UN.

Tunc’s wife also claimed police had not bothered to search his car when it was found four days after he went missing. “I never thought this kind of thing could happen to us,” she said.</s>DUBAI (Reuters) - Forces loyal to former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh battled their former Houthi allies on Thursday over control of a key outpost, marking the first such battle between the two sides since the veteran leader was killed last year.

The fighting underlined the growing complexity of the conflict that has already killed more than 10,000 people and displaced more than 3 million in the impoverished country. 

 Sources in the pro-Saleh forces there said there were casualties on both sides in the fighting. The forces included a new unit set up by Saleh's nephew, Brigadier-General Tareq Mohammed Saleh. He had led a brigade of a Yemeni army unit before his uncle was forced to step down in 2012 following mass protests against his rule.

 The fighting followed a major switch in allegiances in the war. Saleh initially sided with the Iranian-allied Houthis who swept across most of northern Yemen in a series of military offensives that began in 2014. 

 The Houthis forced Saleh's successor President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi into exile, took the capital Sanaa and continued their advances until they were checked by a coalition of forces from mostly Gulf countries, led by Saudi Arabia.

 The switch in allegiances came when Houthis fighters killed Saleh in December after he called on the Saudi-led coalition to end the war, a move interpreted by the Houthis as betrayal. 

 The new force led by Saleh's nephew is now expected to bolster Hadi's supporters.

 Thursday's fighting was concentrated east of the Red Sea port of al-Mokha, at an intersection on the main road leading east into Taiz, Yemen's third largest city, and the road north to the port of Hodeidah, where most of the country's food imports enter. Sources said on Thursday that thousands of soldiers comprising former members of the elite Republican Guards, the paramilitary Central Security Forces and other elite troops, backed by Saudi-led coalition forces, were involved in the fighting.Internal clashes and a Saudi-led blockade, which has eased after international criticism, has led to a stalemate in the country and a human catastrophe. 

 

 (Reporting by Dubai Newsroom; Editing by Andrew Heavens)</s>Supported by the UAE Armed Forces operating as part of the Saudi-led Coalition, the offensive fits within the ongoing efforts to liberate and secure the Red Sea Coast and lift the anti-Taiz siege from the western front. The operation is backed as well by Yemen's Southern Resistance and Tahami Movement.

The operation coincides with across- the-board preparations on the part of the National Resistance Forces to widen the battlefronts in their fights against the Iranian-aligned militias in other parts of the Yemen's Red Sea Coast.

In the meantime, the Saudi-led Arab Coalition Forces' jets launched intensive raids against Houthi militias in Mocha, Jebel Al Shawka, Mowaz', and Albarah areas, destroying a large number of armoured vehicles, expunging, killing and injuring hundreds of the militiamen, with the Yemeni National Forces inflicting heavy damage on the front positions of Houthi militias.

A source of the Yemeni National Forces told WAM that thousands of trained resistance elements are advancing across different areas on the Red Sea Coast supported by the Arab Coalition Forces' aerial bombardment.

"This decisive and qualitative military operation is aimed at liberating the areas controlled by the coup perpetrators," he said, adding that the countdown has already started to liberate the remaining Red Sea directorates which are still under the control of the Iranian-backed elements.

The Arab Coalition Forces are playing a key role in securing most of the Yemeni coastal areas, starting from Al Mahra Governorate going all the way down to Red Coast as part of the overall effort being made to protect the international maritime navigation which has been consistently threatened by the Iranian Houthi militias who are using Hodeidah Seaport as a launching-pad for their terror operations.

In addition, regaining control over the rest of the Red Sea Coast will cut off the supply routes used by Iran to provide Houthi militia with smuggled weaponry.
Yemeni Vice President Lt. Gen Ali Mohsen Saleh says a plot to overthrow the internationally recognised government by Iran and Houthi rebels has been foiled.