The real victims of the purges are the thousands of Turks who have been detained for almost a year on what are, more often than not, spurious charges. Among the detained are the Altan brothers, Ahmet and Mehmet, one a renowned novelist and journalist, the other an economist and professor. One of the crimes they are accused of: sending subliminal messages on the eve of last year’s coup through a television program encouraging the overthrow of the government.

The Erdogan government’s efforts to blame foreigners for the coup attempt is a cynical effort to shore up support at home. Some 10 German or German-Turkish dual nationals are currently being detained by Turkey. Ankara most likely wants Berlin to extradite some Turkish generals purged after the coup attempt who have sought asylum in Germany.

But Germans are not the only ones being targeted. Andrew Brunson, an American pastor, found his life inexplicably upended when he was arrested in early October 2016, also for supposedly supporting a terrorist organization. He has been kept in jail since, and the pro-Erdogan Turkish press has had a field day conjuring up ludicrous stories about him. One such story: that Brunson is a CIA employee who helped the Gülen organization and the Kurdish insurgency. There is also Serkan Göle, a 37-year-old Turkish American NASA scientist who went to Turkey to visit family with his wife and two young sons, but was picked up by Turkish authorities on his way home. He has been in jail for a year. He, too, stands accused of being a CIA agent and, because he had a $1 bill in his possession—not unusual for someone who lives in America—a member of a terrorist organization. In his youth, he attended Gülen-linked schools, including one university where he benefitted from a Turkish state scholarship.

One particularly absurd case is that of Hamza Uluçay, a 37-year employee of the U.S. consulate in Adana, who was picked up on “terrorism” charges. He is a foreign service national, a local hire who helps U.S. diplomats arrange meetings and navigate the local political and social scene. I have known Hamza for 25 years—I first met him in the 1990s in Adana during a research trip. When I saw him last in March 2016, I joked with him that he ought to never retire because Consulate Adana, notwithstanding his American colleagues, could not function without him. These audacious charges amount to nothing less than sticking a thumb in America’s eye.

The Turkish leadership is playing hardball: It has gone after the Americans because the United States has yet to positively respond to Ankara’s request to extradite Gülen. Ankara has supplied reams of material that supposedly support the case for his extradition that the Justice Department has found to be inconclusive and well below the evidentiary threshold needed to take away someone’s green card. In addition, the Turkish government is seeking the release of Reza Zarrab from a detention center in Manhattan. Zarab is the Iranian-Turkish-Azeri owner of a *company that engaged in sanctions busting. Turkey’s international reputation has suffered immensely from all this. Only this week, Turkish judicial authorities withdrew their formal accusation lodged with Interpol against almost 700 German firms, including the giants Daimler and BASF, of colluding with terrorists. Turkish officials often accuse the Europeans, be they Dutch or Germans, of being Nazis. At a rally in March, Erdogan, angry at the Europeans’ refusal to allow Turkish politicians to campaign on their soil, said, “I thought Nazism was dead but I was wrong. … The West has shown its true face.” The Erdogan government has done a great deal of damage to Turkey’s relationship with Europe, and it will take a very long time for it to be mended.