İkra Avcı worked as a nurse at a hospital in Kocaeli. After an armed group in north-east Syria cut off the braid of a woman fighter who had been killed and circulated the footage, women across Turkey and elsewhere posted videos and photographs of themselves braiding their hair in response. Politicians, journalists, artists and health workers took part.

Avcı posted a video of herself braiding her hair. She was then targeted on social media, detained on an allegation of organisation propaganda, and made the subject of both a criminal and an administrative investigation by the Kocaeli Provincial Health Directorate.

On 19 August 2026 the Health Ministry’s High Disciplinary Board decided the case. It assessed her act under Article 125 of Law No. 657 on Civil Servants and imposed the heaviest sanction available: removal from the civil service.

The stated ground was that braiding her hair constituted disrupting the peace, quiet and working order of the institution for ideological or political purposes.

Avcı announced the decision herself, saying she had hoped it would be reversed. The notification informed her she may challenge it through the administrative courts.

Removal from the civil service under Article 125/E is permanent. It bars a person from ever holding a public post again. In Turkey, nursing is overwhelmingly public-sector employment.

There is no allegation that she was absent from work, that patients were affected, or that she said anything at all. The act sanctioned was a woman braiding her own hair, filmed on her own account, in response to the mutilation of another woman’s body.

Thousands of women did the same thing that week. Politicians, journalists and artists among them, publicly and without consequence. The one who lost her livelihood was a nurse — a state employee, and therefore reachable.

That is what makes the decision useful to the state. It was never really about her. Every civil servant in Turkey now knows what a personal social media post can cost, and will weigh that before posting anything at all. The sanction was severe because the audience was not İkra Avcı. It was the several million people who work for the state and saw what happened to her.