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Türkiye's Kilicdaroglu Faces the Heat after Election Loss to Erdogan

Türkiye's main opposition Republican People's Party, CHP, leader and Nation Alliance's presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu speaks at CHP headquarters, in Ankara, Türkiye, late Sunday, May 28, 2023. (AP)
Türkiye's main opposition Republican People's Party, CHP, leader and Nation Alliance's presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu speaks at CHP headquarters, in Ankara, Türkiye, late Sunday, May 28, 2023. (AP)
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Türkiye's Kilicdaroglu Faces the Heat after Election Loss to Erdogan

Türkiye's main opposition Republican People's Party, CHP, leader and Nation Alliance's presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu speaks at CHP headquarters, in Ankara, Türkiye, late Sunday, May 28, 2023. (AP)
Türkiye's main opposition Republican People's Party, CHP, leader and Nation Alliance's presidential candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu speaks at CHP headquarters, in Ankara, Türkiye, late Sunday, May 28, 2023. (AP)

After failing to seize the moment to defeat President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Türkiye's elections, Kemal Kilicdaroglu faces questions about his leadership and the challenge of preserving a bitter opposition alliance ahead of local voting in March 2024.

According to some party members, analysts and voters, Kilicdaroglu, the opposition presidential candidate in Sunday's runoff vote, will need to immediately re-focus on maintaining control of Türkiye's big cities in the municipal elections.

But after his loss to Erdogan - who was seen as uniquely vulnerable due to a cost-of-living crisis - many opposition members and supporters are frustrated, soul-searching and considering leadership changes.

"It was not a surprising result since the opposition did not change for 20 years facing the same government," said Bugra Oztug, 24, who voted for Kilicdaroglu in Istanbul. "I feel sad and disappointed, but I am not hopeless."

Kilicdaroglu, a former civil servant, got 47.8% support in the runoff vote despite an optimistic, inclusive campaign that pledged to rein in Erdogan's maverick economic policies.

Instead, Erdogan, modern Türkiye's longest-serving leader, will extend his increasingly authoritarian rule into a third decade, backed by a majority for his alliance in parliament.

Meanwhile the Republican People's Party (CHP), which Kilicdaroglu leads, holds internal discussions this week in Ankara to pick up the pieces. The broader six-party opposition alliance convened after Sunday's election results came in.

Akif Hamzacebi, a former CHP deputy parliamentary group chair, said his party and Kilicdaroglu were "seriously unsuccessful" because of a poor strategy, and a comprehensive re-evaluation is needed. If "the necessary actions are not taken, the future will be worse than today," he said on Twitter.

Second-guessing

Kilicdaroglu, 74, had long pressed to be the man to take on the 69-year-old Erdogan.

The opposition alliance - which included nationalists, Islamists, secularists and liberals - chose him as candidate in March, even though some members had warned at the time that he was not the strongest option based on opinion polls.

His selection came after a dramatic weekend in which Meral Aksener, leader of the IYI Party, the Turkish opposition's second largest, briefly walked out in protest.

Yet on the campaign trail, Kilicdaroglu won the key backing of the pro-Kurdish People's Democratic Party (HDP), leading most pollsters to predict he would prevail in the initial vote on May 14 and begin rolling back Erdogan's legacy.

In the end, he barely managed to force a runoff on May 28. In the last two weeks, he struggled to motivate voters in the face of an overwhelmingly pro-government mainstream media and Erdogan's strong base of support across rural Anatolia.

In a speech on Sunday evening, Kilicdaroglu called it "the most unfair election in years". But he gave no sign of resignation and said he "will continue to lead and struggle for democracy".

Atilla Yesilada, analyst at GlobalSource Partners, said, "I don't know whether CHP and IYI Party can tolerate their leadership anymore".

Zeynep Alemdar, professor of international relations at Okan University, said Kilicdaroglu sought to be a collaborative leader, but his allies contributed little to his success.

"None of them seem to have increased their share of votes, neither for themselves nor for Kilicdaroglu," she said.

Holding the cities

Analysts say Kilicdaroglu will now seek to keep this unwieldy alliance united, including the HDP's support, to hold on to cities in March.

In the last municipal elections in 2019, CHP candidates backed by the alliance shocked Erdogan's AK Party (AKP) by winning mayoralties in Istanbul, Ankara, Antalya and Adana.

Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu of the CHP - who Aksener had promoted as a better presidential candidate than Kilicdaroglu - said on Monday that the "struggle is starting again".

"We will no longer expect different results by doing the same things. From now on, we will continue to fight to win all hearts," Imamoglu said in the video address.

An internal debate within the CHP, the party of modern Türkiye's founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, will likely stir ahead of a party congress scheduled for this summer.

Emre Erdogan, political science professor at Istanbul's Bilgi University, said the opposition's election loss made it harder to form a "grand" alliance but this remained necessary for success in the local elections in March 2024.

"If the opposition cannot unite again, the victories of 2019 may be reversed and the opposition camp can lose Istanbul and even Ankara," he said.

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Long Silenced by Fear, Syrians Now Speak about Rampant Torture under Assad

People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
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Long Silenced by Fear, Syrians Now Speak about Rampant Torture under Assad

People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)

Handcuffed and squatting on the floor, Abdullah Zahra saw smoke rising from his cellmate’s flesh as his torturers gave him electric shocks.

Then it was Zahra’s turn. They hanged the 20-year-old university student from his wrists and electrocuted and beat him for two hours. They made his father watch and taunted him about his son’s torment.

That was 2012, and the entire security apparatus of Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad was deployed to crush the protests against his rule.

With Assad’s fall a month ago, the machinery of death that he ran is starting to come out into the open.

It was systematic and well-organized, growing to more than 100 detention facilities into which tens of thousands disappeared over more than a decade. Torture, sexual violence and mass executions were rampant, according to rights groups and former prisoners.

A blanket of fear kept Syrians silent about their experiences or lost loved ones. But now, everyone is talking. After the insurgents who swept Assad out of power on Dec. 8 opened prisons and detention facilities, crowds swarmed in, searching for answers, bodies of loved ones, and ways to heal.

The Associated Press visited seven of these facilities in Damascus and spoke to nine former detainees. Some details of the accounts by those who spoke to the AP could not be independently confirmed, but they matched past reports by former detainees to human rights groups.

Days after Assad’s fall, Zahra — now 33 — came to visit Branch 215, a detention facility run by military intelligence in Damascus where he was held for two months.

There, he said, he was kept in a windowless underground cell, 4-by-4-meters (yards) and crammed with 100 other inmates. When ventilators were cut off -- either intentionally or because of a power failure -- some suffocated. Men went mad; torture wounds festered. When a cellmate died, they stowed his body next to the cell’s toilet until jailers collected corpses, Zahra said.

“Death was the least bad thing,” he said. “We reached a place where death was easier than staying here for one minute.”

A member of the security forces for the new interim Syrian government stands next to prison cells at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility operated by the General Intelligence Agency during Bashar al-Assad's regime, in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 14, 2024. (AP)

Assad’s system of repression grew as civil war raged

After he and his father were released, Zahra fled to opposition-held areas. Within a few months, security agents returned and dragged off 13 of his male relatives, including a younger brother and, again, his father.

All were killed. Zahra later recognized their bodies among photos leaked by a defector showing thousands killed in detention. Their bodies were never recovered.

Rights groups estimate at least 150,000 people went missing since anti-government protests began in 2011, most vanishing into detention facilities. Many were killed, either in mass executions or from torture and prison conditions. The exact number remains unknown.

Even before the uprising, Assad had ruled with an iron fist. But as protests turned into a civil war that would last 14 years, Assad expanded his system of repression. New detention facilities run by military, security and intelligence agencies sprung up in security compounds, military airports and under buildings.

At Branch 215, Zahra hoped to find some sign of his lost relatives. But there was nothing. At home, his aunt, Rajaa Zahra, looked at the leaked pictures of her killed children for the first time – something she had long refused to do. She lost four of her six sons in Assad’s crackdowns. Her brother, she said, lost two of his three sons.

“They were hoping to finish off all the young men of the country.”

A site believed to be a mass grave for detainees killed under Bashar al-Assad's rule is visible in Najha, south of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)

Syrians were tortured with ‘the tire’ and ‘magic carpet’

The tortures had names. One was called the “magic carpet,” where a detainee was strapped to a hinged wooden plank that bends in half, folding his head to his feet, which were then beaten.

Abdul-Karim Hajeko said he endured this five times. His torturers stomped on his back during interrogations at the Criminal Security branch, and his vertebrae are still broken.

“My screams would go to heaven. Once a doctor came down from the fourth floor (to the ground floor) because of my screams,” he said.

He was also put in “the tire.” His legs were bent inside a car tire as interrogators beat his back and feet. Afterward, they ordered him to kiss the tire and thank it for teaching him “how to behave.”

Many prisoners said the tire was inflicted for rule violations -- like making noise, raising one’s head in front of guards, or praying – or for no reason at all.

Saleh Turki Yahia said a cellmate died nearly every day during the seven months in 2012 he was held at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility run by the General Intelligence Agency. He said he was given electric shocks, hanged from his wrists, beaten on his feet. He lost half his body weight and nearly tore his own skin scratching from scabies.

“They broke us,” he said, breaking into tears as he visited the Palestine Branch. “A whole generation is destroyed.”

Documents are scattered around Branch 215, a detention facility run by Bashar al-Assad's regime, in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)

The mounting evidence will be used in trials

Now comes the monumental task of accounting for the missing and compiling evidence that could one day be used to prosecute Assad’s officials, whether by Syrian or international courts.

Hundreds of thousands of documents remain scattered throughout detention facilities. Some seen by the AP included transcripts of phone conversations; intelligence files on activists; and a list of hundreds of prisoners killed in detention. At least 15 mass graves have been identified around Damascus and elsewhere around the country.

A UN body known as the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism has offered to help the new interim administration in collecting, organizing and analyzing all the material. Since 2011, it has been compiling evidence and supporting investigations in over 200 criminal cases against figures in Assad’s government.

Many want answers now.

Officials cannot just declare that the missing are presumed dead, said Wafaa Mustafa, a Syrian journalist, whose father was detained and killed 12 years ago.

“No one gets to tell the families what happened without evidence, without search, without work.”