According to secret wiretaps obtained by Nordic Monitor, The office of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan predicted that the Muslim Brotherhood would make a huge comeback three to five years after the ouster of Mohamed Morsi.
Erdoğan’s chief of staff, Hasan Doğan, said “God willing, I predict that this [ouster of Morsi] will lead to an explosion, a bigger and more dynamic change in Egypt within three to five years.”
Doğan claims that Egypt’s Brotherhood would make a huge comeback just like the Islamists did under Erdoğan few years later. He was referring to the resignation of the late Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, the Turkish equivalent of a Muslim Brotherhood figure, from a coalition government in 1997 under pressure from the military. Erdoğan, who was mayor of Istanbul from Erbakan’s Islamist Welfare Party at the time, was also removed from office after a conviction and served a four-month prison term.
Erdoğan’s chief of staff declared that Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt were not ready, as they lacked control of the judiciary, the military and other government branches. “Now I see the same in Egypt. They had been thwarting the work of that man [Morsi], anyway. The poor guy had no army, no police, no governor, no municipality, no judiciary, nobody,” Doğan told Qotb.
Turkey and Egypt have had troubled ties over the Erdoğan government’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Turkish president declared he did not recognize Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the leader of a legitimate government.
The wiretap was authorized by the Istanbul 2nd High Criminal Court, which was looking into terror-related cases. The authorization was granted on June 19, 2013 as part of investigation file No. 2012/656.
Al-Qadi, Doğan and Erdoğan’s son Bilal were all leading suspects in an organized crime investigation pursued by prosecutors in Istanbul and were the subjects of detention warrants issued on December 25, 2013 by the prosecutors. However, Erdoğan stepped in, illegally preventing the execution of the warrants by ordering the police to ignore the prosecutor’s orders. After the removal of the prosecutors and police chiefs who were involved in their investigation, Erdoğan managed to whitewash the crimes of his associates.
