Turkey has dismissed 2,766 people from their posts in state institutions over alleged links to “terror” organisations, according to an emergency decree published in the country’s official legal database.

On Sunday, a decree in the Official Gazette said 637 military, 360 gendarmerie personnel, 61 police and four coastguard members were among those sacked.

Some 341 people were dismissed from the Directorate of Religious Affairs.

The rest were civil servants from other institutions.

The decree also said 115 employees who were dismissed in the past were reinstated.

Arrests and purges

Turkey has arrested or sacked tens of thousands of people from state institutions after a failed coup attempt in July 2016.

Local and international rights groups as well as Turkey’s Western allies accuse President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government of using the failed coup as a pretext to silence opposition in the country and tighten its grip on power.

The government says that the purges and detentions are aimed at removing supporters of Fethullah Gulen from state institutions and other parts of society.

Gulen is a US-based, self-exiled religious leader who Ankara blames for the attempted coup.

Metin Gurcan, a security analyst, told Al Jazeera from Istanbul that the decrees show that Turkey is committed to the purges some 18 months after the 2016 coup attempt.

“Ankara is still inclined to prioritise ‘de-Gulenification’ of the army personnel rather than operational effectiveness of the military,” he said.

The European Union recently shrunk so-called “pre-accession funds” for Turkey for the first time in the 2018 budget, due to what it called the country’s “deteriorating situation in relation to democracy, rule of law and human rights”.

Source    www.aljazeera.com