ISTANBUL: Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, who was accused by Turkey of organizing a failed 2016 coup, has died in exile in the United States aged 83, his movement said Monday. Gulen, who had lived in the United States since 1999, was once a close ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan before the two became bitter enemies. “The leader of this dark organization has died,” Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said, vowing Turkey would continue to fight Gulen’s “terrorist organization” and its “treasonous” followers.

The charismatic preacher, who was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 2017, died in hospital on Sunday night, his nephew and a website close to him said. Gulen moved to Pennsylvania in 1999, ostensibly for health reasons, and from there ran his Hizmet movement, which once operated 4,000 schools in Turkey and 500 others around the world.

Initially close to Erdogan, the pair fell out in 2013 and three years later the Turkish strongman accused him of masterminding the coup, dubbing Hizmet “the Fethullah Terror Organization” (FETO). Some 250 people died on July 15, 2016 when a rogue military faction tried to overthrow Turkey’s government. Erdogan blamed Gulen supporters within the military.

Even beyond government circles, Gulen was widely disliked for his alleged role in the coup and the widespread influence once wielded by his movement behind the scenes. “We had wanted him to be held accountable in Turkey,” said main opposition leader Ozgur Ozel, describing Hizmet as “a terrorist organization that infiltrated every corner of the state”. “Only its founder has died.. we need to be on guard against this insidious organization.”

Having helped Erdogan when he became prime minister in the early 2000s, Gulen’s ties with him became strained in 2010. Three years later, their relationship became pure enmity after a corruption scandal engulfed the Turkish premier’s inner circle for which Erdogan blamed Gulen. After the 2016 coup, authorities prosecuted more than 700,000 people and jailed some 3,000 Gulen followers for life over their alleged involvement in the putsch.

Bayram Balci, a researcher at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences-Po) told AFP the preacher’s death would have little impact in Turkey. “Since the break with Erdogan in 2010 and especially after the attempted coup in 2016, Gulen’s image has been very bad. “Few people held him in high esteem,” he told AFP, saying many harbored a deep distrust of Gulenists from the time when they worked closely with Erdogan “in support of his repression”.

In Germany, home to Europe’s largest Turkish diaspora of three million people, a Hizmet spokesman said Gulen’s death would not affect its work with up to 100,000 members and its management of some 250 associations. Although Gulen had wanted to be buried in the western Turkish city of Izmir, there was no chance Ankara would let his body be repatriated, meaning he would likely be interred in Pennsylvania, he said.

Turkey still regularly rounds up Gulen followers and demands their extradition from countries where Hizmet is active. Despite Gulen’s death, Turkey would continue to “fight against this organisation, which poses a national security problem”, Justice Minister Yilmaz Tunc wrote on X.

But Balci said Hizmet “no longer represents any threat” as it was “no longer the big movement it once was” with its network of schools now reduced to just a handful operating mainly in Germany, the United States, Nigeria and South Africa. “The community is no longer as strong: It concentrates mainly on helping the victims of the (Ergodan regime’s) repression,” he said. “It’s over and they know it.”

Known to his supporters as Hodjaefendi, or respected teacher, Gulen was born in a village in the eastern Turkish province of Erzurum in 1941. The son of an imam, he studied the Holy Quran from infancy. In 1959, Gulen was appointed as a mosque imam in the northwestern city of Edirne and came to prominence as a preacher in the 1960s in the western province of Izmir, where he set up student dormitories and would go to teahouses to preach.

These student houses marked the start of an informal network which would spread in coming decades through education, business, media and state institutions. His influence also spread beyond Turkey’s borders to the Turkic republics of Central Asia, the Balkans, Africa and the West through a network of schools. Fidan said he hoped Gulen’s death would lift a “spell” over Turkish youth who had taken a path of “betrayal” against their country under the pretense of religious values. “This is not a good road,” he added.

Ankara long sought to have him extradited from the United States. Speaking in his gated compound in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains, Gulen said in a 2017 Reuters interview he had no plans to flee the United States to avoid extradition. Even then, he appeared frail, keeping his longtime doctor close at hand. – Agencies