On Dec. 5, the daily Sabah, the flagship of Turkey’s pro-government media, came out with an assertive headline: “It is very clear that Daesh [Islamic State], the PKK and FETO are acting all together.” Accordingly, these three very different nonstate actors — IS (radical jihadis), the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK Kurdish separatists) and the Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization, or FETO (an Islamic cult with political ambitions) — were attacking Turkey at the same time in a well-coordinated campaign. Moreover, their coordinator was the nefarious “mastermind” — a conspiratorial power that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invented in 2015 and has been defined by his supporters as the US government.
This Sabah “news story” was not unique; it is rather a political narrative that one can read in Turkey’s pro-government media literally every single day. It is a narrative based on a partial fact: Turkey, indeed, has been targeted by repeated terror attacks by IS and the PKK. It is also common wisdom in Turkey that the Gulenists were indeed the main element behind the failed coup attempt in July. However, the assertion that these groups are coordinated by a single major manipulator is not a fact — it is a conspiracy theory.