How will Turkey's Alevis react to Syrian gambit?
After years of facing pressure from the state and the country's Sunni majority, Turkish military involvement in Syria has caused Turkey's Alevi minority further problems in their relations with the AKP government.
On the night of the July 15 coup attempt, a friend called from Nurtepe, a predominantly Alevi neighborhood of Istanbul. She was concerned about the hundreds of men marching on her street with sticks in their hands chanting Allahu akbar (God is Great). Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had called upon the people to come out on the streets and some saw it as an opportunity to intimidate Alevi neighborhoods.
Alevis have had notoriously sour relations with the Gulen movement, which many Turks suspect of orchestrating the coup attempt, so there was no reason to suspect Alevi involvement in the putsch. Indeed, at the end of August the government had announced that Dersim, a majority Alevi province, was the least infiltrated province by Gulenists among Turkey's 81 provinces. My friend, who had studied Alevi massacres in modern Turkey, was scared for her life. Has life as an Alevi gotten much more difficult in Turkey in the aftermath of the attempted coup?
Al-Monitor interviewed over 100 Alevis from different parts of the country to discuss this issue, which Turkey's mainstream media does not cover.
Erdal Dogan, a prominent human rights attorney, told Al-Monitor, "Any sort of military coup or intervention is a political situation almost all Alevis would refuse and resist; that was the first reaction of the Alevi community on July 15. Yet, the coordinated lynching attempts in heavily Alevi neighborhoods confirmed Alevi fears about security." Indeed, my friend's observations in Nurtepe were not isolated, several other Alevi districts were attacked in Hatay, Istanbul, Ankara and particularly Malatya.
