I've always thought the taking of the Bosforus bridge was one of the strangest episodes of last year's coup attempt. If I was organizing a coup and wanted to take the strategically and symbolically important road link between European and Asian Turkey how would I organize it? Would a send a small contingent of troops (the photographs show maybe 50 soldiers surrendering) and only two tanks? Hardly. Would I position them in the middle of the bridge where any rounds fired from the tanks against advancing opposition would be in danger of breaking the bridge and dumping my troops into the Bosforus? Surely I would send two large military detachments to secure each end of the bridge. Unless I only had two tanks and 50 men at my disposal. If I was a criminal genius, capable of organizing thousands and schools, colleges and universities around the world, who was masterminding this coup - which is what Erdogan claims to be role of Gulen - surely I could have manged a little better than this? Especially if I had the support of the 150,000 plus Turks who have since lost their jobs, or been imprisoned as "coup conspirators", or who have simply "disappeared".
I am not proposing any "conspiracy theory" here; not saying that the whole thing was a put up job by the AKP. I am merely saying that the coup may have been just what it appears without AKP spin: a relatively small group of disaffected army officers, and the soldiers over whom they had sway, involved in a badly-considered and under-resourced plot. But it was a "gift from God" to Erdogan to put the country under a long-lasting and wide-ranging crackdown whilst massively increasing his powers.
