On April 16, Turkish citizens voted in a referendum that will give Erdogan even more power over the country. Ahead of the vote, we were desperate to find out more about those who had been affected by the crackdown—their lives, hopes, and dreams. What follows is our months-long attempt to map the current course of one of the most geopolitically important countries in the world, through the eyes of those who are now deemed its traitors.

The Journalist

There was a time when 31-year-old Fatih Yagmur, an award-winning Turkish journalist, thought his biggest problem was convincing his editor to run a story. But last July, three days after the coup attempt, Fatih found himself in a jail cell listening to 40-odd naked, beaten, bloodied young men screaming. Everywhere was a heavy stench of urine. Those men were soldiers who had been detained at the Istanbul Sabiha Gokcen airport on the night of the coup attempt.

“Please don’t!” Fatih’s cellmate begged the police officer punching prisoners nearby.

“Why?” the policeman yelled back. “Do you want me to take you among them? Are you a FETOist too?”

The man stopped pleading.

In that moment, Fatih later recalled to us over FaceTime, he accepted one of the most difficult truths of his life: “I should leave my country.”

Fatih was stopped at the Sabiha Gokcen airport while trying to flee Turkey. Luckily for him, he was stopped over a non-coup related incident in which he allegedly insulted the president. None of the officers was aware that he was a “wanted” journalist in the incipient coup investigation.

Fatih faced trial the next day. The judge released him. He immediately hit the road to the airport again.

With some cunning in the face of a travel crackdown, he traveled to neighboring Georgia visa-free. But days later Turkey unlawfully canceled 50,000 passports, and he once again had to flee. He ended up in an African country, where he has been stuck for the last eight months.

Fatih had already attracted the anger of the Turkish authorities in 2013, with his stories on corruption allegations against the government. But it was his January 2014 story about Turkish intelligence agency trucks carrying weapons to Syria that really darkened his life.

“I was completely a target for the government,” he recounted.

Even as Fatih was deemed a traitor by the government for working against the interests of the state, he received the EU Investigative Journalism Award. He tried to continue his work despite significant threats. But three days after Erdogan won the presidential elections in August 2014, Fatih was fired from the liberal-leaning Turkish daily Radikal —a paper that was later shut down. (“We cannot resist anymore,” Fatih recalled his editor telling him. “Erdogan demanded it be done.”)