The gendarmerie came at six in the morning on 18 September, to addresses across İzmir.

In one of the homes searched, the photograph published afterwards shows prayer beads hanging from a cupboard door, an egg box, a handful of sweets, a cactus in the corner.

Twenty-one people were taken from their homes. Among them, according to TR724, were elderly people. The journalist Sevinç Özarslan, who reported the raids, wrote that the elderly man in the footage, and other women whose names are not yet known, are being accused of giving humanitarian aid.

The İzmir Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office had issued detention orders for twenty-seven people. The operation was carried out by the National Intelligence Organisation’s regional directorate and the provincial gendarmerie counter-terrorism branch. Five of the twenty-seven have not been found.

The twenty-seventh was already in prison. The state had ordered the detention of a man it was already holding.

The charges are offences under Law No. 6415 on the Prevention of the Financing of Terrorism, and membership of an armed terrorist organisation. In the official account, those named were identified as collecting and providing funds to maintain adherence to the organisation.

Those detained are accused, in the words of the account carried by TR724, of being connected to the Gülen movement and of giving humanitarian aid to people in need.

Since 2016, hundreds of thousands of people have been dismissed from public service by emergency decree. Ten years on, the people dismissed and their families still meet obstacles in work and in ordinary social life. Whether they may help one another has itself become the subject of criminal investigation.

That question now has an answer in practice. A report published in July 2026 by Johan Vande Lanotte, emeritus professor at Ghent University, found that operations against people who give financial support to convicted, prosecuted or dismissed persons and their families have become the second most common category of Gülen-related judicial action in Turkey: sixteen operations in 2025, 1,033 people detained. Before 2023, he found, support of this kind had never been treated as structural grounds for prosecution.

Türkiye’s counter-terrorist-financing law was written under international scrutiny. The Financial Action Task Force placed the country under increased monitoring in October 2021 and lifted it on 28 June 2024, saying Türkiye should continue to ensure its oversight of the non-profit sector remains risk-based and proportionate.

The proceedings at the gendarmerie were still going on as this was written. The twenty-one had not been brought before a court. The prosecutor’s office has not answered the question of what the money in the drawer was for.