Turkey’s military chiefs resign

Last week, Gen. David Petraeus met with Turkey's top military commander, Gen. Isik Kosaner, on a stop-off in Ankara as he made his way back from commanding international peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan to take up his new post as CIA director in Washington.

Today, Gen. Kosaner abruptly resigned--along with three other Turkish military chiefs--in the latest eruption in long-running tensions between the country's ruling Islamic AKP party and the military, which considers itself the guardian of the modern Turkish state's secular foundations.

According to a Reuters dispatch, Turkey's state-run Anatolian news agency said that Kosaner was stepping down, along with the commanders of the ground, naval and air forces, "in what some Turkish media initially described as resignations."

Relations between Erdogan and the military have been tense, particularly since the Erdogan government's arrest of some 200 Turkish military officers, accused of conspiring in an unrealized, alleged 2003 coup plot called Sledgehammer.

On Monday, Turkey's Supreme Military command is due to meet on military promotions.

"The problem is that many [military officers] who are in jail [in the Sledgehammer case] and due for promotions cannot be promoted. This was making the officers nuts," Henri Barkey, a Turkish expert at Lehigh University, told the Envoy.

"I thinks this is healthy: Instead of threatening or overthrowing the government they are resigning," Barkey continued. "Finally the Turkish military is being civilianized."

But the seeming excesses and flaws of the investigation into Sledgehammer have alarmed other U.S. analysts and officials, and raised questions about whether the alleged coup investigation is targeting a broader swathe of AKP critics.

Turkish journalists have also been arrested in connection to the alleged coup plot--including some who reported on the alleged activities of a Turkish-based Islamic group known as the Gulen movement. Its head, Fethullah Gulen, lives in exile in Pennsylvania. One arrested journalist, Ahmet Sik, was arrested this spring as he was preparing to publish a book alleging the Gulen movement had infiltrated the Turkish police forces as a kind of counter-weight to the secular military. (The group also runs schools around the world, including some 120 in the United States, where it has come under investigation by the FBI and Department of Education.)

Today, the lone Turkish military service chief who did not resign was the Turkish military police chief, Gen. Necdet Ozel, who was subsequently named acting military chief of staff.

The United States said of the resignations today that it is an internal matter.

"We have confidence in the strength of Turkey's institutions, both democratic and military, and it's an internal matter," State Department spokesman Mark Toner told journalists at the press briefing.

Turkey is a major U.S. and NATO ally. Petraeus had stopped in Turkey last week to thank Turkish leaders for sending 1,600 troops to aid stabilization efforts in Afghanistan.