The death of Mücahit Soysal

I had told the story of Cevzet Soysal before. The one who, while working as a TPAO worker in Batman, was forced into a car in front of his house one morning in 1998 as he was going to work, and of whom nothing was ever heard again. Afterwards no reliable information was ever obtained about what happened to him. No one was able to learn who abducted him, where they took him, or what his fate was.

His son Mücahit, who was a high school student in those years, was left alone, together with his three sisters and one brother, with the misery of having lost their father in this way, while also trying to overcome financial hardship. Had the father died and his death been established, he had 24 years of service as a worker and a salary would have been granted immediately. Because his death could not be established, this procedure could not be carried out.

This formed the beginning of a long and agonizing journey for Mücahit, because the economic responsibility of the whole family fell on his shoulders.

He left school and at first started working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Even though he never completely abandoned his desire to study, he never found either the time or the opportunity for it. When I last saw him, he was continuing to earn his living by delivering carboy water to homes and workplaces. The Rector of Batman University, Prof. Aydın Durmuş, had also come to know him somehow, and he had become a subject of common concern between us. One day Mücahit called him by phone and, complaining that because of the elevators not working he had to carry the carboys of water up to the upper floors one by one, asked him to have the elevator repaired.

In the midst of this struggle to make a living, Mücahit would also try to learn what had happened to his missing father, and would go after the slightest clue he could find. Yet every clue he pursued would also confront him with greater threats.

He notices that the police forces he applied to are almost forcing him to believe their statements that his father was the victim of an intra-organizational execution. Yet he knows very well his father's friends in the İlim group, of which his father was said to be a member. He has the firm conviction that such a thing could definitely not have happened.

On top of that, he is subjected to the police's threats and their warnings to drop this matter. If he did not believe this story, he could very easily have been steered toward a story that the perpetrator was JİTEM. Indeed, he had found the JİTEM story more convincing than that intra-organizational execution. The police he applied to had in any case wanted him to settle on the JİTEM story.

There was actually not much that young Mücahit could do. But he still did not give up. From time to time, while following a clue he had caught, he finds himself in detention or in the middle of an event he never expected. That these were not coincidences he would of course understand much better later.

Until, when Sabri Uzun's book titled İn was published and he learned that his father had in fact fallen victim to one of the many extrajudicial executions that the FETÖ members carried out in those years, a new and more intense legal struggle would begin for him.

In those years Hizbullah, which was very influential in the region, was FETÖ's strongest rival. An instruction came from the FETÖ ringleader Gülen to the members of the organization to finish off this organization, and this would be a long period of terror and dark unsolved murders that would begin in the region. For these unsolved murders everyone was focusing on all the usual and unusual suspects, and no one even entertained the possibility of FETÖ. Yet Cevzet Soysal was on the list of those to be eliminated, and after being taken from his home and interrogated under severe torture for 15-20 days at an address in the city, he was executed and buried somewhere in the Beşiri countryside.

The story had become clear, but Cevzet Soysal's body was still nowhere to be found, and still is not. Hulusi Cemil Altınlı, the operative whom Sabri Uzun had placed inside the organization and who gave this information to Sabri Uzun, voluntarily assisted the prosecutor's office and told everything he knew. All of those involved in the abduction had in any case been arrested after July 15 because of their ties to FETÖ. On the instruction of the Batman Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, in line with Aydınlı's statements, they were brought in and interrogated for some time longer, but as could be expected they took the route of denial.

The hope of reaching Cevzet Soysal's remains thus began once again to fade. Throughout this entire process Mücahit put up an incredible struggle for the case to be reopened and the investigation to be deepened and continued anew.

The fact that nothing came out of the latest investigation was wearing him down psychologically.

At the very least, for now, the prosecutor's office deciding on his father's death, which is evident from the existing statements and the de facto situation over 20 years, and thereby a salary he deserved being granted to his wife and a job being given to himself as a victim of terrorism was a demand that I too was following. This demand could not be brought to a conclusion in any way.

While Mücahit was trying to face this heavy struggle alone, his psychology was deteriorating more and more. When the news came at the beginning of last week that Mücahid had been found shot in his car, frankly my first reaction was to think, "Oh no, the boy has evidently caught a clue that would lead to a result." Right afterward the information came that the incident was a suicide. To that too I said, "It can't be; whatever happens, Mücahit was not someone who would commit suicide." Yesterday I visited his family in Batman, both offering my condolences and hearing all the details of the incident from them. It was not a murder; rather than a suicide, it appears very highly likely that, as he took the gun in his hand, he accidentally pulled the trigger of the gun pointing toward his waist.

Mücahit was a long-suffering young man. Even while dealing with these personal cases of his, he did not remain distant from the affairs of the ummah. Just a few months earlier he had gone to Myanmar as a volunteer of an aid organization.

He tried to carry the very heavy responsibility he took on at a young age properly, with honor and dignity, as best he could until the last day. In this way he in fact tried to pay a debt that belongs to all of us, to cover the shame of all of us. Forgive us the claim you have on us, Mücahit. May God forgive our shortcomings and receive you with His boundless mercy.

NOTE: What later befell Hulusi Cemil Altınlı, who provided the clarification of the Cevzet Soysal case both with his intelligence and then with his active and voluntary statements, is a separate and instructive story. When his story is somehow listened to and evaluated carefully, FETÖ's pitch-dark terror story beyond the Euphrates will be seen much more clearly.