Levent Kenez/Stockholm
Journalist Levent Gültekin covers serious revelations about Turkey’s recent history in his new book, “Yaklaşan Kasırga” (The Approaching Hurricane). Among them is the coup attempt in 2016, which is still not fully understood. Gültekin writes that then-prime minister Binali Yıldırım asked Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan about issues that did not fit with the official narrative on the night of the coup, and he was met with a harsh reprimand in return.
Former prime minister Yıldırım said several times that he could not reach Hakan Fidan, the undersecretary of National Intelligence Organization (MİT), whom he called to find out what was happening on the evening of July 15, 2016. It was previously revealed that Fidan was having dinner with the head of the Religious Affairs Directorate at his office at that time. 
Yıldırım, who called Fidan again in the following hours, succeeded in catching him this time and was told by Fidan that everything was fine and that he was just doing his routine work. In an interview he gave after the coup attempt, Yıldırım criticized Fidan and expressed his discomfort at not being informed.
According to official statements, hours before the start of the coup attempt, Fidan went to the General Staff and had a meeting with senior commanders including then-Chief of General Staff Hulusi Akar.
Despite this, Fidan’s failure to inform the prime minister about the attempted coup remains a mystery. Fidan did not testify before any court or parliamentary committee after the coup attempt as this was prevented by Erdoğan himself.
Gültekin tells about the scandal in an interview he gave about his book, saying: “I talked to a senior bureaucrat whom I trust. The bureaucrat said to Binali Yıldırım, ‘You’re the prime minister, didn’t you ask the head of MİT? How could he not inform you?’ Yıldırım said, ‘I asked. I called Hakan Fidan and said, “How come I don’t know a single thing?” Fidan said, ‘Sir, there’s no answer I can give to your questions. Your questions can only be answered by the president’.”
According to Gültekin, Yıldırım then went to Erdoğan, who told him: “Binali, I will not hear you ask a question about July 15 again. I will not hear you mix up the 15th of July again.”
Gültekin worked for many years as a journalist and manager in government-funded media organizations, supporting the ruling party. He was appointed as the managing editor of the Cine 5 TV station, which was confiscated by the Erdoğan government in 2009. Coming from an Islamist background, he is acquainted with many people close to the government; however, he has been questioning the government for a while now. Announcing that he was running for the presidency in 2018, Gültekin later announced that he had given up due to the difficulty of the procedures for becoming a candidate.
Meanwhile, journalist and lawmaker Ahmet Şık had previously claimed that there was a plan to assassinate Yıldırım on July 15 so that it would be easier to convince the public about how serious the coup attempt was. According to Şık, Erdoğan and his team, who were aware of the coup attempt beforehand, prepared in advance. According to Şık, if the coup plotters had killed the prime minister, an overwhelming majority of the public would have reacted negatively to the coup plotters and would have stood by the government.
According to official reports , Prime Minister Yıldırım set out for Ankara from Istanbul after hearing of the coup attempt. His vehicle was shot at in the vicinity of Çankırı, was saved thanks to his bodyguards. He said they hid for a while in a tunnel under construction, then continued on to Kastamonu and stayed the night at the house of the district governor of Ilgaz.
Binali Şantiye saklanma tutanakAccording to a document obtained by Nordic Monitor, it was reported by the gendarmerie that Yıldırım’s eight-to-10-vehicle convoy was in the tunnel. It is interesting that tens of thousands of officers and civil servants were dismissed after the coup , while the officers in the area where Yıldırım was attacked stayed on the job.
Yıldırım said remarkable things about the coup attempt during the state-run Anadolu news agency’s “Editor’s Desk” program in 2018. When one of the editors asked the prime minister, “Has there been any project that challenged you so much that it made you say, ‘If only we had not gotten into this business?”
“Which one [of them] should I tell you about? The project I did not like was July 15,” said Yıldırım, laughing, sparking a chuckle among the journalists who sat around the table with him.
The prime minister’s remarks attracted widespread criticism on social media, with many saying that Yıldırım had confessed to the government’s involvement in the coup attempt, which claimed the lives of 249 people and injured a thousand others.
Yıldırım has a long-standing friendship with Erdoğan. In 1994, after Erdoğan became the mayor of İstanbul, Yıldırım was appointed as head of the transportation department. Yıldırım later served for years as transportation minister in Erdoğan’s cabinet. As former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu slowed down the legislative work necessary to pass the presidential system of governance that Erdoğan desired, he was forced to resign by Erdoğan and replaced by Yıldırım. With the transition to the presidential system, Yıldırım became the last prime minister in the history of the Republic of Turkey. Yıldırım was later elected speaker of parliament in 2018. He ran for mayor of Istanbul in the local elections in 2019; however, he lost against Ekrem İmamoğlu, who is currently among potential presidential candidates of the opposition in the 2023 elections.
Despite the seriousness of the allegations that the coup attempt could have been a conspiracy, it is claimed by political observers that Yıldırım’s family could not afford to clash with Erdoğan due to allegations of corruption and bribery.
An investigation into Yıldırım’s family enterprise, part of the European Investigative Collaborations’ (EIC) Malta Files, revealed in 2017 that his family possesses shipping and related assets of well over 100 million euros, according to reports on the black sea.eu and mediapart.fr news websites.
Yıldırım’s family enterprise consists of 11 foreign-flagged ships in a network of secretive companies in Malta, the Netherlands and the Netherlands Antilles with more suspected in the Marshall Islands and Panama. At least four of the ships were financed by huge loans from Swiss and Turkish banks.
The Black Sea website discovered that Yıldırım’s son, daughter, uncle and nephews have purchased seven properties in the Netherlands, worth over $2.5 million – all of which were paid for in cash.
The investigation also uncovered how the Yıldırıms used one of the Dutch companies to anonymously donate 600,000 euros to the municipality of Pendik, near İstanbul, for a lavish new mosque.
Last year, convicted gang leader and former Erdoğan ally Sedat Peker, who fled Turkey and made YouTube videos watched millions of times about criminal relations between Turkey’s ministers and the mafia, came to the fore, claiming that Erkam Yıldırım, the son of Binali Yıldırım, was involved in the drug trade.
Shocking many Turks, Peker alleged that the younger Yıldırım, a businessman who currently runs the family’s offshore shipping operations with his brother, traveled to Venezuela to make arrangements for a new cocaine route to Turkey.
