The Turkey Documentation was online from 2010, when we were documenting the purge on the secular military, until 2020 when we took the project offline due to a lack of web space.

The key player in this project is the full named Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul from 1994 to 1998. Indeed, like Ekrem İmamoğlu who defeated him in the local elections of April 2024. Erdogan was dealt a big blow by losing Istanbul as one of AKP's strongholds. The other is Ankara.

In 2028, Turkey will see its next presidential election. but the Mayor of Istanbul is so popular, that Erdogan saw him as his main rival. After having arrested Ekrem İmamoğlu in March 2025, Istanbul University invalidated an MBA diploma from Ekrem İmamoğlu contrary to Erdogan's educational background.

Erdoğan was born on February 26, 1954, in a poor conservative Muslim family. His family is originally from Adjara, a region in Georgia. So, Erdogan appears not to be a native Turk.

Although Erdoğan was reported to have said in 2003 that he was of Georgian origin and that his origins were in Batumi, he later denied this. His parents were Ahmet Erdoğan (1905–1988) and Tenzile Erdoğan (née Mutlu; 1924–2011).

Erdoğan graduated from Kasımpaşa Piyale Primary School in 1965, and the (Islamic) İmam Hatip High School in Istanbul, a religious vocational high school, in 1973. The same educational path was followed by other co-founders of the AK Party. These schools are also in other countries. Many of them are known in the United States but the Turks denied that there is such a school in The Hague, Netherlands (see image).

Erdogan wanted to pursue advanced studies at the Ankara University Faculty of Political Science, commonly known as Mülkiye, but only students with regular high school diplomas were eligible to apply, thereby excluding Imam Hatip graduates. Mülkiye was known for its political science department, which trained many statesmen and politicians in Turkey. So, Erdogan doesn't have the prestigious Mülkiye diploma.

According to his "official biography", Erdoğan subsequently studied business administration at the Aksaray School of Economics and Commercial Sciences now known as Marmara University's Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. Both the authenticity and status of his degree have been the subject of disputes and controversy over whether the diploma is legitimate and ought to be considered sufficient to make him eligible as a candidate for the presidency

The issue of revoking the diplomas concerns Istanbul University's claim that 38 people, including Istanbul’s mayor, had irregularly transferred to its Management Faculty’s English-language program in 1990. It said that 10 of those with the irregularity had their transfer annulled, and the degrees of 28 graduates, including Imamoglu, “will be withdrawn and canceled on the grounds of … obvious error”.

Imamoglu said for his part “They [the university] do not have the authority to make such a decision. The authority lies solely with the Board of Directors of the Faculty of Business Administration. The days when those who made this decision will be held accountable before history and justice are near. The march of our nation, thirsty for justice, law, and democracy, cannot be stopped.”

The revocation of graduates by Erdogan is not new. Read more in the tab 'Islamization in Turkey'

So, the motive to relaunch the project, which was taken offline in 2020, is not just the continuation of undermining the electoral democracy but his gradual attempts to convert the country into an Islamic state..

It should be noted that undermining by Erdogan is strategic since his cleansing of the governmental and judicial institutions from those who are not members of his Islamic AKP party as part of the country's longstanding claims of coups, which was once dubbed "Turkey's 30-years coup".

You won't understand the developments in Turkey under Erdogan if you don't have some background knowledge.

As we mentioned earlier, Erdoğan is from a conservative Muslim family who migrated from Georgia. He is said to be the founder of the Justice and Development Party. But adding "justice" to the name of a political or militant entity is common among those carrying the character of Islamism like the Muslim Brotherhood.

When released from prison in 1999, Erdogan had openly abandoned Islamist politics before forming his AKP party, which we all now know as Islamist.

An early sign showing Erdogan is moving the country in the direction of undermining secularism was the first Islamic hotels in 2007 (video on the left).

A year later, Erdogan lifted the ban on headscarves and banned the consumption of pork meat. Bikini-free beaches emerged.

During his presidential election campaign in 2007, Erdogan supported the LGTB movement which appeared to be misleading to get voted by this community. In an atmosphere where Turkey is being criticized for the slow pace of its EU reforms, Erdogan refuses to sign a declaration calling all states to take steps to stop the criminalization of homosexuality, contradicting his commitments to the EU in promoting human rights.

Another step that Erdogan took in 2008 was reinterpretating Islam and radically "modernizing" the religion. The latter is ill-conceived as it can't be modernizing if you are a conservative, which Islamists are,  about whom is known that they don't like progress.

It should be noted that Islamism is a conversion of the religion of Islam into politicized ideas and ideologies to achieve authority in -if not control over the political system of a country, in this case by Erdogan. It is an insult to the writings in Prophet Mohammed's travel journal, and against the basis on which Ataturk founded Turkey in 1923.

Secularism is the principle of seeking to conduct human affairs based on naturalistic considerations, uninvolved with religion. The Turkish military has always seen themselves as the guardians of the basis laid out by Ataturk.

But Erdogan started in that same year 2008 the "reforming" of the military to get rid of secularism within the military. In 2010, the Turkish police arrested 49 generals over a suspected coup plot.

The recent arrest of the Mayor of Istanbul, and the revocation of his diplomas are just Erdogan's move to maintain in power and to ensure the process of Islamization goes unhindered.

Erdogan is defacto a threat to the continuation of the life of the principles on which the country is founded.

In other explanations, the Kurds are described as Ottoman Kurds who lived in the Ottoman Empire. At its peak, the Ottoman Empire ruled North Kurdistan, South Kurdistan, West Kurdistan, and a small part of East Kurdistan. Parts of Greater Kurdistan under Ottoman control are collectively known as Ottoman Kurdistan.

Such kind of information views (maps) and reads as if the Kurds came out from nowhere. But still, if the Kurds are part of the Iranic civilization because of the language, which has been described as Iranian, then the distribution of the Kurds must have started there where that civilization sprouted. Even then, that civilization must also come from somewhere. 

People appear to forget that the distribution of a population, whether it is that of the Kurds, is like how human existence started to distribute.

So, when and from where did the Kurdish existence start to distribute, and when and from which other civilization did the Iranic civilization sprout? 

Now, there is this question: Why do the Kurds not have a country?

The roots of the Kurdish problem is the same as those of Palestine, the partition of the remains of the Ottoman Empire by the British Mark Sykes and the French Francoise Picot in 1916. The proposal was accepted by the involved parties in 1918.

After the First World War, Jordan, Iraq, and Ottoman Palestine came under British mandate, while South East Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon came under French rule, Southern Turkey came under the Italian sphere, and Armenia came under international supervision.

The map on the left shows the Ottoman Empire in 1914, and the map on the right shows the Sykes-Pivot partition as agreed in 1918.

Many Kurds tried to establish an independent Kurdish state, but they failed to establish the Kingdom of Kurdistan. To avoid unrest, the British granted the northern Kurdish region considerable autonomy, something that the Kurds also had under Ottoman rule but was annulled by Kamal Ataturk in 1923 by viewing the Kurds as Turkish.

On February 27, 2025, a delegation of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish DEM Party visited the İmralı Island in the Sea of Marmara where PKK's leader, Abdullah Ocalan has been held since 1999.

During the visit, Ocalan handed a statement to the visiting groep who read out his writing in nearby Istanbul. In the statement, Ocalan wrote, what is reported "a historic call" for the party to lay down its arms, dissolve itself and end its decades-long conflict with the Turkish state, as reported by Al-Jazeera. The latter is obvious as it suggest that the PKK started the decades-long conflict while Turkey under the military junta created the PKK.

Now, we don't know what's really behind that statement, meaning whether that written call is purely his own, or by (false) promises, or by unvoluntary circumstances. It is an political issue that no one independently can verify. So, we leave it as it is as Turkey under Erdogan doesn't have freedom of information.

Although we haven't document recent armed confrontations between the military and the Kurdish resistance movement, we did during the period from 2015 to 2017, concerning the bloody crackdown in South East Turkey because it had all the ingredients of a internal waged war by Erdogan. The Cizre massacre has moved us to conclude that Erdogan was waging an internal war. The collected material about the massacre will be republished here.