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Comment by tuna-piano | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have an explanation, or a link to an explanation for all the happenings in Turkey? I'm an occasional follower of this kind of stuff, but it would be great to understand the full situation in Turkey in an easily digestible way.

1. The current coup

2. The president's history

3. The different terrorist groups operating within the country and their beliefs and goals

4. Turkey's legal system and freedoms allowed

5. Information on past coups

6. The general beliefs and sentiments among Turkish people

Edit: And a simple question that I'm sure is a complex answer: is this attempted coup bad or good for a peaceful free turkish people?

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The army is secular. Every 20 years they remove some dictator or zealot that the system seems to throw up regularly. I'm not sure if there's been a split in the armed forces before, but the police always cop a hammering.

More like ten: 1960, 1970, 1981, 1993, 1997, 2007 — threat of the coup. I hope I got years right.

The army was. Erdogan has gone to great lengths to dismantle the army's tradition of constitution over nominal leadership. Already years ago people started to suspect that this time, there won't be a coup like so many times before. If what the government claims is true ("Gülen parallel structure"), then the coup was staged by people who got into army leadership positions as replacements for ousted kemalists, back when AKP and Gülen were still allies.

Wikipedia is actually a really good source for this kind of info, but since it's technically editable by anyone, I'll try to give you three other sources from three different countries:

[1] BBC's country profile on Turkey: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17988453

[2] CIA's world factbook on Turkey: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[3] Aljazeera's country profile on Turkey, from 2011: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/spotlight/turkeyelection/20...

The linked Atlantic article is REALLY robust. It's not just a Twitter feed!

Printed last Tuesday: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/world/europe/recep-tayy...

Additionally I wonder how bloody (vs. clean) past coups have been; seeing videos of civilians under fire, so this doesn't seem to be the most benevolent of coups.

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