Sangar: It is no surprise that during the Kurdish regional uprising in the Middle East, a Kurd will come to power in Turkey, just as a Turk was elected president in Iran.
Author: Khodayar Said Vaziri, International Security Researcher, especially for Sangar.
Hakan Fidan’s father is a Kurd from Varto and his mother is a Turkish woman from Denizli. He is from the Kurdish tribe of Hasani. This is what has helped him greatly in playing on the political climate in Turkey, where the Kurdish issue is the most important domestic issue.
Fidan received a bachelor’s degree in management and political science from the University of Maryland (USA), and then a master’s degree and a doctorate from Bilkent University in Turkey.
From 1986 to 2001, he served as an officer in the Turkish Ground Forces and was a member of the NATO Rapid Reaction Unit in Germany.
From 2003 to 2007, Fidan headed the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) was involved in development projects in Turkish and African countries and was essentially the architect of Turkey's entry into North Africa, including Libya, and gas projects in the southern Mediterranean and coastal Africa.
Internationally, he represented Turkey at the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and is one of those who cherish the dream of an industrial and nuclear Turkey.
But the most important period of Hakan Fidan's political life began with his leadership of MIT. Fidan took over the Turkish Intelligence and Security Organization (MIT) in May 2010 and remained in this position until June 2023, when he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. Fidan’s foreign relations doctrine at the helm of the Intelligence Organization played a major role in formulating Turkey’s regional strategy of actively supporting Syrian rebels fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad.
During the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, Fidan played a major role in helping Erdogan crush the coup, and at the Munich Security Conference in February 2017, he passed a list of 300 suspected supporters of the Gülen movement to Bruno Kall, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND). The BND was expected to cooperate in the political purge in Turkey following the failed coup attempt in July 2016. The list prompted German officials to inform those under surveillance about Turkish intelligence activities.
Fidan participated in secret peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) because he had links to the Kurds in the past, and in 2012 The state prosecutor demanded an investigation into him, but Recep Tayyip Erdogan intervened in Fidan's favor. He was later appointed as the person in charge of negotiations with Abdullah Ocalan. There are also reports that his nephew is a member of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).
He is one of the architects of the Turkish Intelligence Organization's strengthening of relations with the extremist and pan-Turkist group "Grey Wolves", a political mafia group that carries out everything from the arms trade to terrorist attacks following the pan-Turkist dream of a Greater Turkestan. Plans such as the Zangezur Corridor and the naming of Central Asia as Turkestan are also included in this political and security doctrine and must be considered Hakan Fidan's influence on Turkey's macropolitics. With this in mind, we will briefly discuss the Grey Wolves mafia's connections to MIT.
Alaattin Çakıcı was Turkey's most notorious mafia boss of the 1990s who was imprisoned and released in 2020 at the request of the government. Çakıcı has a long criminal record and is one of the main leaders of the Turkish nationalist and pan-Turkist mafia. Çakıcı even killed his ex-wife Nuriye Uğur Kılıç in January 1995 after he exposed some of her dirty deeds. Before the murder, Çakıcı had openly threatened her, and the hired killer, Abdulrahman Keşkin, admitted in a statement that he carried out the murder on the orders of the mafia boss.
When questioned by Belgian investigators after his arrest in France in August 1998, he admitted to being involved in smuggling large quantities of heroin into Europe with Turkish drug trafficker Salim Işık, also known as Salim Fox. Işık was arrested in Istanbul in January 2010 and accused of running a heroin and drug trafficking network from Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to Europe, particularly the Netherlands.
Çakıcı's history with MIT goes back to his relationship with Yavuz Ataç, a former MIT official who was responsible for the organization's overseas operations. He worked closely with the official. Ataç brought Çakıcı to the intelligence agency's headquarters after MIT's Istanbul directorate vouched for him and confirmed his credentials as an asset. He began protecting Çakıcı and even gave him a diplomatic passport to help the mafia leader escape Turkey. When the news broke, MIT officer Yavuz Ataç was temporarily sent to China as a diplomat.
In a 2011 statement by a prosecutor investigating the extrajudicial killings of the 1990s, Ataç acknowledged that Çakıcı had been involved in some MIT operations, had used the organization’s resources, and had been trained to carry out its duties. Another intelligence officer, Kashif Kazinolo, also worked with Çakıcı at the operational level.
Çakıcı lost his main patron in 2002 when the far-right party lost elections to Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), who later used the police and judiciary to crack down on mafia groups.
However, the resumption of cooperation between the Turkish Intelligence and Security Organization led by Hakan Fidan and the Justice and Development Party with the Grey Wolves occurred because on February 20, 2015, Firat Yilmaz Cakiroğlu, the leader of the Grey Wolves, was stabbed to death by Kurdish nationalist students at Ege University. After this, the MIT and Justice and Development Party members began working with the Grey Wolves to counter the Kurdish parties.
Now, when various news about Erdoğan’s illness appears in the media, his most serious alternative is Hakan Fidan, who, with his experience in military intelligence, intelligence services, and foreign policy, can take over the leadership of Turkey and use his various communication levers in this direction.
Perhaps it would be a good idea to refer to the Turkish TV series “I Don’t Fit Into This World”. This series, whose main and positive character is a man named "Jaban Türk" who has close ties and loyalty to the government; is essentially a cinematic depiction of the "grey wolves'" relationship with the Turkish government and the country's intelligence organization.
