On Dec. 17, the Turkish public and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan were shocked by the news that a major corruption operation had nabbed three sons of Erdogan’s cabinet members, a prominent businessman, a mayor belonging to his party, a bank manager and a slew of government officials. Almost immediately Turkish pundits pointed fingers at the secretive Islamist Gulen movement for triggering this investigation that has so embarrassed the government.

No one can really divine whether this allegation is true, but in a world where perceptions rule the day, this matters little. The investigation will be perceived as another battle in a war that no one can win. The only question is who will lose less? Erdogan is far more powerful than Fethullah Gulen, a charismatic preacher on self-imposed exile on a farm in Pennsylvania since 1999, when the then-powerful Turkish military sought to charge him with undermining the secular order. But Erdogan has also far more at stake as an elected leader and, therefore, is likely to emerge as the bigger loser.

Ironically, the Gulenist movement with its vast array of private schools in Turkey and around the world, including the United States, as well as its media empire and affiliated business organizations, had been a close ally of Erdogan. From the start, the Gulen movement embraced the conservative and Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party (AKP). They not only had a similar worldview but also had one common and powerful enemy: the military. It took almost nine years for the intrusive Turkish military, an organization that dominated domestic and foreign policy, to be defeated politically and pushed back into its barracks.

With the military gone, the two movements began to suspect each other. The Erdogan government felt increasingly irked by the power of the Gulen movement, which was seen as overreaching by getting sympathetic prosecutors and judges to punish its critics in the media and elsewhere. The Gulen movement grew increasingly fearful of Erdogan’s accumulation of power and his total domination of the Turkish political scene. It is not just corruption allegations — bandied about for years — but rather that in the face of a hapless and ineffective opposition, the AKP and Erdogan in particular came to view Turkey as their private property.