Turkey's crackdown on supporters of Fethullah Gülen, the Muslim cleric accused by Ankara of masterminding July's coup attempt, is being felt by the Turkish diaspora across Europe.

Turks living in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Switzerland who have links to the influential Gülenist movement say they are being threatened and intimidated.

“Many of us received death threats,” said Ercan Karakoyun, head of the Berlin-based Stiftung Dialog und Bildung, one of the main Gülen think tanks in Europe. “I have reported six death threats to the police, and I know many people who have done the same. I am in constant touch with the police.”

One example cited by Gülen supporters in Europe came from Ozan Ceyhun, a Turkish-born former German MEP, who wrote on Twitter after the putsch: "Gülenists in Germany will have many sleepless nights. We owe that to our martyrs.”

Contacted by POLITICO, Ceyhun declined to comment on the tweet but said he had long believed "that the Gülen movement is a dangerous and misanthropic terrorist organization." That's also the view of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Once allies, they drifted apart and in 2013 Erdoğan accused Gülen of fabricating a corruption scandal that targeted officials with links to the president's Justice and Development Party (AKP).

The 75-year-old Islamic cleric has lived in self-imposed exile in the U.S. since the 1990s. That did not stop Erdoğan from accusing Gülen of trying to topple his government last month: In the ensuing crackdown, thousands of people, including many Gülen supporters have been arrested and Ankara has asked the United States to extradite the cleric.

"The Gülen movement is a dangerous and misanthropic terrorist organization" — Ozan Ceyhun, former MEP

Erdoğan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin, in an op-ed for POLITICO published last week, wrote that some army officers involved in the coup have "confessed to being members of the Gülenist cult, and admitted to taking orders from superiors in the Gülenist hierarchy."

Cultural centers, schools, associations and shops linked to Gülen's Hizmet movement have reported insults on social networks, death threats, arson attacks on their cars and stones thrown at their premises. There have also been calls to boycott shops owned by Gülenist Turks, and some parents have withdrawn their children from schools run by the Gülen network.

“Parents have pulled their kids out of our schools,” Karakoyun said. “One reason is that if they have a business in Turkey, they are afraid that something might happen to their business, and another reason is that they want to show loyalty to Erdoğan and so they do not want to support the school anymore.”

Days after the coup attempt, Karakoyun said a school near the German city of Stuttgart asked for police protection after reportedly receiving threats.

“Violence expanded in a phenomenal way after the coup,” said Hüseyin Çakmak, the spokesperson of Fedactio, a federation of Belgian Turkish associations, many of which are inspired by the Gülen school of thought. “We have been forced to file a complaint to the police as it was getting more and more virulent.”

'How dare you?'

The weekend after the coup, Çakmak said two men threw cobblestones at the windows of his association in the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek. Others daubed insults on the building of another office of the association in Ghent. He also said the word “FETÖ” — an abbreviation for "Pro-Fethullah Terror Organization" — was sprayed on a car.

Çakmak said people affiliated with Hizmet in Belgium have set up a blog compiling the threats, while Fedactio has complained to the cabinet of Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.

“We showed them screenshots of insults,” said Çakmak, who called the post-coup tensions a "Turco-Turkish conflict which shouldn’t be exported to Europe.”

The group advised some of its most prominent figures to avoid traveling to Turkey during the summer holiday, and urged its members to make sure their local police forces were familiar with the Gülenist movement.

In Germany, Karakoyun said the threats came from Turkish government supporters, especially the German branch of the Union of European Turkish Democrats (UETD), a branch of Erdoğan's AKP. Karakoyun said Dursun Bas, head of the UETD in the Hesse region of Germany, had addressed two members of Stiftung Dialog und Bildung via Twitter, saying, “How do you dare to go out on the streets? For you there will be no easy death.”

The UETD failed to respond to POLITICO's request for comment for this article.

Karakoyun says he feared the threats against Gülen supporters could get worse once Turks living in Europe return from their holidays in Turkey. Back in the homeland, he said, “they have been listening and reading Turkish news for weeks and they'll bring this Turkish propaganda back to Germany. This will lead to further escalation.”

Turk against Turk

With millions of followers and schools in 140 countries, including across Europe and Africa, Gülen heads one of the world's most prominent and influential Islamic movements. The group describes itself as an umbrella nonprofit organization — Hizmet means "service" — which promotes altruism and religious and cultural dialog. Many supporters donate a small percentage of their income to groups linked to the movement.

Hizmet expanded to Europe about 30 years ago, particularly Germany, which has the largest Turkish community on the Continent.

There are no official statistics on the size of the Gülen movement in Europe. Karakoyun said Germany is home to approximately 100,000 supporters of Gülen, with about 150 affiliated tutoring centers, 30 schools and 12 dialogue centers, many of them financed via donations.

In Belgium, experts and social workers say there are fewer than 10 Gülenist schools, including in Brussels, Charleroi and Liège. France has at least two Gülen affiliated schools in Villeneuve-Saint-Georges near Paris and Strasbourg, according to news reports.

The Gülenist community in Belgium is now the target of "very serious" threats, says professor Ekran Toguslu. "People here are scared."

The movement's stated purpose is to focus on Muslim communities' difficulties with integration in Europe, and to “take initiatives to be useful to society through education and dialogue, and develop sociocultural programs which promote mutual understanding and togetherness,” said Ekran Toguslu, the coordinator of the Fethullah Gülen chair for intercultural studies at the University of Leuven in Belgium.

“The young generation, including Muslims and children of immigrants, need bearings," he said, adding that the Gülen chair focused on responses to radicalization and other problems facing Muslims living in Europe. Its fields of research include Muslim entrepreneurship, religious identity for young people, the role of Muslim women, and inter-religious dialogue. One recent conference was on the subject of “Sport and Islam."

But the Gülenist community in Belgium is now the target of "very serious" threats, said the professor, adding: "People here are scared.”