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Leaked documents: Turkey drew up plans to invade Greece and Armenia

The plan is codenamed after an 11th century Turkish military commander who ruled an independent state during the Byzantine era, and the information was revealed by secret documents unveiled by Nordic Monitor.

The final date of the operation is specifically that: June 13th, 2014, but it is likely that it was a redaction or a final version, of a document that was years in the making.

According to the outlet, these documents were uncovered in a court case file in Ankara, where “investigating prosecutor Serdar Coşkun, a loyalist of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, appears to have forgotten to remove the classified documents before submitting them to the court.”

They were apparently collected from the General Staff HQ during an investigation into the failed July 15th, 2016 coup.

These documents were exchanged between members of the General Staff via secure email. Coşkun ordered the military to forward copies of all email messages for the previous two months including the encrypted ones, on August 1st, 2016.

On August 11th, the prosecutor assigned his assistant, police officer Yüksel Var, to collect emails General Staff’s internal servers and report back to him.

A commission investigated for a bit over half a year, until February 14th, 2017.

In the end, the indictment filed by prosecutors Necip Cem İşçimen, Kemal Aksakal and İstiklal Akkaya in March 2017 with the Ankara 17th High Criminal Court included all the emails collected from General Staff computers.

The document regarding the plan to invade Greece bears the name of a popular war hero in Turkey, Caka Bey, the man who led the first-ever Turkish military expedition in the Aegean. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has been promoting Caka Bey for a while now.

House Speaker Binali Yıldırım, another Erdogan loyalist who has served as prime minister, launched a campaign in 2010 to commemorate Bey’s achievements.

The document discovered recently does not have any details other than the name and the updated date of the plan.

They were likely marked “top secret” and could not be shared through the intranet system run on the email exchange servers of the Turkish military.

According to Nordic Monitor, the Power Point document appears to have been prepared for presentation at headquarters as a contingency plan with regard to military developments in Syria.

The Turkish military was assessing its capabilities and troop commitments according to various planning directives in effect.

They wanted to maintain their offensive and deterrence capabilities on the western front while moving some troops and equipment to the Syrian border.

Furthermore, there were alarms sounding that the documents had leaked. This is seen in a warning letter from March 8th, 2017 by Lt. Gen. Ugur Tarcın, head of the General Staff Communication, Electronic and Information Systems (MEBS).

Tarcin allegedly warned the legal department of Turkey’s General Staff that the documents contained secret documents regarding the country’s national security, including classified intelligence reports and operations in Syria and the eastern Mediterranean.

He said the documents [pdf] must be kept secret and not be shared with any unauthorized individuals.

Acting on the advice of the MEBS commander, the General Staff’s deputy legal counsel Col. Aydın Sevis wrote [pdf] to the Ankara 17th High Criminal Court on August 24, 2017, repeating the same concerns about the secret documents, and urged the establishment of a commission to screen the documents.

Earlier, Nordic Monitor revealed similar documents that outlined plans to invade Armenia, codenamed “Altay.”

According to the short memo drawn up by the inspectors to brief the General Staff, the secret plan was finalized on July 13, 2001.

It was prepared by the 2nd Tactical Air Force Command as part of the OĞUZTÜRK air offensive plan of the Turkish Air Forces in order to complement the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) directive code-named “ALTAY” for an offensive against Armenia.

It appears that the ALTAY plan was a general action plan drawn up by the TSK and that each force command had its own part under the directive.

Source: SOUTHFRONT