İmamoğlu was charged with “establishing and leading a criminal organisation, accepting bribes, misconduct in office, unlawfully recording personal data and bid rigging.” Prosecutors have even sought to charge him with “aiding an armed terrorist organisation,” a reference to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been engaged in a decades-long conflict with the Turkish state over its policies of oppression against the Kurds. While the court ruled that this particular charge was “not deemed necessary at this stage,” the broader strategy is clear: in Turkey, anyone who challenges the ruling system can easily be accused of terrorism to be sidelined from power.

What makes İmamoğlu’s case particularly striking is the historical irony of his party, the CHP. Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1923 by Mustefa Kemal (Atatürk), it was the CHP that institutionalized the denial of Kurdistan and suppression of Kurdish identity—a policy that has been carried forward by every ruling party since. Today, the very tools of repression once used against the Kurds are now being turned against the Kemalists themselves, exposing the cyclical nature of Turkey’s political repression.

Turkey is classified as a brown country with both democratic and authoritarian features, but democracy, legality, and citizenship rights effectively disappear in southeastern Turkey, known by the local Kurds as Northern Kurdistan. Since the 1920s, successive governments have maintained a state of emergency under different guises, all of which are used to systematically suppress Kurdish rights.

Erdoğan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), backed by the ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), are pursuing a dual strategy: systematically eliminating political rivals while continuing Turkey’s long-standing policy of denying Kurdish rights. This is evident in their approach to Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned PKK leader, and his call for disarmament, which the MHP manipulates for political purposes.

One of Erdoğan’s latest moves is his attempt to co-opt the Kurdish Newroz (New Year)—a significant cultural and political event for Kurds.

Erdoğan plans to propose that Newroz be celebrated collectively by the “Turkic world” under the auspices of the “Organization of Turkic States” in May 2025. This is a calculated attempt to erase Kurdish identity from a festival that was once banned by the Turkish state until 1992.

A day after Erdoğan’s speech on March 21, 2025, the desire to erase the Kurds as a separate people, became evident in the Kurdistani city of Urmîyeh (Urmia) in western Iran, where Kurds form the majority. Emboldened by Turkish and Azerbaijani-backed efforts, Azeri pan-nationalist mobs, with implicit support from the Iranian regime, gathered in Urmîyeh after a mass Kurdish Newroz celebration (marking the year 2725). The mobs called for massacres of the Kurds and a continuing denial of Kurdish identity.

To Erdoğan, Turkey’s “spiritual geography” spans “from Syria to Gaza, from Aleppo to Tabriz [in Iran], from Mosul to Jerusalem.” It is expansive and does not brook any challenge to this view.

As protests erupted in Turkey against İmamoğlu’s arrest, demonstrators chanted “rights, law, justice.” These same voices, however, remain silent when it comes to the rights of Kurds, who continue to suffer under the very system their political fathers—Atatürk and the CHP—created. This selective outrage exposes a deeper truth, Turkey’s political battle is not about justice but about control. In many respects, Kurds are viewed by the Turks similarly to how the Chinese view Uighurs. Turkish treatment is sometimes little better.

İmamoğlu is still awaiting trial, but history suggests that today’s persecutors could become tomorrow’s victims. The Kemalists who once labelled Kurds as “terrorists” now face similar accusations themselves, as Turkish power struggles turn inward. What is unfolding is not a fight for democracy but a conflict among Turks to dominate the state apparatus.

Despite their internal rivalry, both the CHP and AKP, along with their Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) ally, share one common reality—they need the Kurdish vote to win the next general election in 2028 and cement their grip on power. This places the Kurds and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM) in a precarious position, as both factions seek to manipulate Kurdish political aspirations for their own gain. This exposes the so-called “peace” initiative they launched in October 2024 as insincere from the start. Neither the Kemalists nor Erdoğan’s Islamists-nationalists offer true change for the Kurds.

In this high-stakes power struggle, the Kurds must be vigilant against being used as mere pawns in Turkey’s internal conflicts. Americans must also pay attention to Turkish politics because Turkey, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is also home to American nuclear weapons. Thus, Turkish treatment of Kurds serves as a signal for the direction of the Turkish state, which should matter to the United States.

Dr. Loqman Radpey, an expert on Kurdistan and the Middle East, is a fellow at the Middle East Forum with over a decade of experience analyzing the legal and political dimensions of conflicts in the Middle East, including Kurdistani regions in Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and the Soviet Union. He is the author of Towards an Independent Kurdistan: Self-Determination in International Law (published by Routledge in 2023), the first comprehensive historico-legal account of Kurdish aspirations for statehood. His upcoming work, “Self-Determination during the Cold War,” will appear in The Cambridge History of International Law (Volume XI).

From Repression to Expansion: Turkey’s Power Strategy was originally published on Global Security Review.

It is important to remember that election-related violence and unrest do not just happen spontaneously. There is a long build-up of tension leading to such events, and much of this tension is deliberately instigated by adversarial nation-states that are engaged in spreading misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation through social media influence operations.

During non-election times, the general goal of these influence operations is simply to cause as much polarization and divisiveness within American society as possible. But during election time the goal becomes more specific: sow confusion, suspicion, mistrust, and chaos regarding the American political process to undermine democracy.

The problem is that this post-election period is still a prime time to achieve that specific goal. To ensure the peaceful transfer of power and preserve democracy, it is essential to understand why the level of risk remains high.

More Actors Are Getting Involved

The first factor to consider is that the number of adversaries Americans should be legitimately concerned about, with respect to social media information operations, continues to grow. Where Russia and China were the two primary nation-states to worry about, Iran is increasingly entering the picture as a formidable adversary. While Iran is already a threat in terms of conventional cyberwarfare, it is not known for its prowess in influence operations.

However, this is changing, and Iran is proving itself a formidable adversary on the information warfare front. Just last August, for example, American intelligence officials revealed that Iran attempted to hack the presidential campaigns.

They were successful in hacking the Trump campaign, but this was not a conventional cyberattack. Their main objective was not the hack itself. Rather, it was the influence operations made possible by the information gained from that hack.

This was evidenced by Iran offering the Biden campaign access to information stolen from the Trump campaign. The Biden campaign did not respond.

In addition to the more obvious nation-states such as China, Iran, and Russia, there are also potential influence operations being carried out or in planning by other threat actors that the US must not ignore. Overly focusing on just the usual suspects can lead to overlooking other players in the game which include not just external nation-state adversaries but also domestic threat actors.

Despite Iran’s hack of the Trump campaign, in this and in other election-related influence operations, the goal is not necessarily to favor one presidential candidate over the other. With Trump’s victory, that is now a moot point anyway. Instead, the goal is to use misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation to confuse and overwhelm Americans, regardless of their political persuasions, and to trigger their negative emotions to sow as much chaos and discord as possible.

The ultimate end game is to get the American populace to lose trust in their political system, thereby undermining democratic society. This, in turn, would open the way for these nation-state adversaries to further assert their own interests.

Election Day Was Just the Beginning

Thankfully, election day came and went with few and only minor incidents. This was not due to lack of harmful activity. In fact, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued joint statements advising the public that their respective agencies observed adversarial states—namely Iran and Russia—conducting influence operations “intended to undermine public confidence in the integrity of US elections and stoke divisions among Americans.” They added, “The IC expects these activities to intensify through election day and in the coming weeks, and that foreign influence narratives will focus on swing states.”

First, the fact that these three agencies felt the need to issue joint statements is highly significant and they would not have done so had the level of risk not justified it. The lack of major incidents is therefore a testament to their vigilance. But pay special attention to this part of their statement: “These activities will intensify through election day and in the coming weeks.”

What this means is that even though there is a clear winner, and the public has peacefully accepted the outcome, from the viewpoint of the nation’s adversaries, now is the time to strike. Now is the time to flood social media with misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

In fact, adversaries may very well have prepared months’ worth of content in advance to use in the case of either presidential candidate’s victory. That way, regardless of who won, they were ready.

A quick search of popular media platforms brings up posts claiming that the winner cheated. Are these sincere, good faith actors with real evidence to back up their claims? Or are they part of an influence operation? In today’s age, especially with powerful AI tools widely available, it is difficult for citizens to tell at a glance.

As a nation, regardless of individual politics, the US has gone through too much and fought too hard to preserve its democracy to allow malicious actors to put that hard-won fact at risk. Although it passed an important milestone, the election itself, it is not time for the country to breathe a collective sigh of relief.

It should not be assumed that the time between now and inauguration day, January 20, 2025, will be uneventful. Now is precisely when the intelligence and cybersecurity communities, the media (especially social media platforms), and the American people need to remain watchful and vigilant.

Craig Albert, PhD, is Professor of Political Science & Graduate Director of the Master of Arts in Intelligence and Security Studies at Augusta University. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own. 

The Election May Be Over, but the Threat of Foreign Interference Is Not was originally published on Global Security Review.