Gülen school in Turkmenistan. Image via author.
An old Turkmen proverb says that if two horses fight, it is the donkey in the middle that will die. This aptly describes the fate of Turkish-Turkmen schools in Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country which has been ruled by an autocratic regime since it gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. A few years back, the Turkish schools fell victim to the bitter enmity between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, two former allies turned bitter enemies. The implications of the feud have reached far beyond Turkey’s borders and continue to this day, especially following the alleged July 2016 military coup, which Erdogan accuses Gülen of orchestrating.
