Secret report reveals Erdogan family foundation training agents to target India, Russia and China

13th November 2021

2 minutes read

A secret report by an institution linked to Turkey’s intelligence agency has revealed that a government-funded Islamic group has drawn up a plan to train experts with a special focus on China, Russia and India.

“According to the leaked report, released on September 29, 2016, the Strategic Coordination Department of the Turkish Youth Foundation (TÜGVA), run by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s family, drafted a plan to train experts who will work in this field abroad with a special focus on India, China, and Russia“.

The report said: Their expertise will cover a range of areas from politics to history, sociology to societal dynamics in the targeted countries, according to the Swedish website Nordic Monitor.

The three countries mentioned in the report resonate deeply with Turkey’s Muslim communities because of the large Muslim communities that live there. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party and its affiliates often present cases of Islamist groups in Russia, China, and India as a rallying cry during elections.

The foundation, which facilitates young Turkish Islamists’ access to government jobs including diplomacy, intelligence and security, suggested that candidates would also be sent to these countries for further study; “The program, which covers a period of four years, will also be assisted by foreign staff employed by the foundation“.

The report, titled “A Report to Our President,” included photos of young people who appear to have been selected for training, some of whom were seen alongside an Indian or Pakistani coach.

And Nordic Monitor said: The program was developed to fill vacancies in government agencies after the Erdogan government launched an unprecedented purge of government officials – including one-third of all Turkish diplomats, several veteran police chiefs, almost all army staff officers, and hundreds of intelligence officers.

In 2014, President Erdogan approved the program and directed that government resources help facilitate the work of the foundation, which was presented to the public as a non-governmental activity.

It said that Islam Emant, the president of Tügva, had submitted the report to Erdogan, with Emant now serving as a member of the Foundation’s Supreme Advisory Council alongside Bilal Erdoğan, the president’s son and mastermind of the Foundation’s operations.

The report was written by a Tügva staff member named Mahmoud Amin Yalinkaya, secretary of Emant, and approved by the leadership.

“The secret program sounded alarm bells for many of Turkey’s observers who closely follow developments in the country, especially given the institution’s links to the Turkish intelligence agency MIT and jihadist groups, one must worry about the repercussions the countries mentioned in the report are sure to feel”.

The leaked documents from the Tügva archive indicated that the foundation worked closely with the Turkish Jihadist charity Association for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (Human Rights and Freedoms i̇ Hürriyetleri ve i̇nsani Yardskim Vakfı or IHH), which assisted both al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In many cases, IHH references played an important role in gaining government jobs as revealed in the leaked emails of Erdogan’s brother-in-law Berat Albayrak in the fall of 2016.

The Nordic Monitor had previously reported how IHH, a partner organization of TÜGVA, had communicated with a radical Indian Islamic organization, the Indian People’s Front, as part of the Turkish Government’s outreach to Muslim communities in South-East Asia. IHH hosted two key leaders from PFI, E. M.