Turkey's Widest LGBTQ+ Crackdown in Years Sweeps Up Activists, KAOS GL Leadership
Turkish police have detained more than 250 people since September 13 in raids on LGBTQ+ organizations, clubs, and homes under an operation the government calls 'My Family Is Safe.' Here's what's happening and why it matters.
Since the morning of September 13, Turkish police have raided LGBTQ+ clubs, advocacy offices, and the homes of activists and journalists in Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir, in what Human Rights Watch is calling the widest crackdown on LGBTQ+ people in Turkey in recent memory. More than 250 people have been detained across the initial raids and the protests that followed, and the government shows no sign of stopping.
What happened
The first wave of raids targeted KAOS GL, Turkey’s oldest and most prominent LGBTQ+ rights organization, along with several other associations and businesses. Police detained KAOS GL’s board of directors as part of what the Ankara chief prosecutor’s office described as an investigation that has so far produced 21 arrests connected to the group alone. Justice Minister Akın Gürlek announced on social media that authorities had raided 13 businesses and 9 associations and detained more than 100 suspects “to protect children, the family, and public order.”
The operation carries the name “Aile Güvende” — “My Family Is Safe” — and lands squarely inside President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ongoing “Decade of Family and Population” push, a demographic campaign aimed at reversing Turkey’s falling birth rate. LGBTQ+ organizations and independent journalists have increasingly been cast, in state rhetoric, as threats to that project.
A second wave followed on September 16, when prosecutors in Mersin and Istanbul opened new arrests targeting current and former members of LGBTQ+ rights and HIV-awareness groups, bringing more than 63 additional detentions. Authorities have also blocked access to dozens of websites and social media accounts belonging to LGBTQ+ organizations and activists, cutting off both organizing capacity and public information during the crackdown itself.
When people took to the streets of İzmir to protest the arrests, police responded with tear gas. More than 150 protesters were detained in a single demonstration on September 15, according to CNN, including at least two journalists covering the unrest.
Why this crackdown is different
Turkey has a long, grim history of blocking Istanbul Pride and harassing LGBTQ+ organizations, but rights monitors say the scale and coordination here — simultaneous raids across three major cities, a named government operation, mass detentions of an organization’s entire leadership, and an internet blackout — mark an escalation. Emma Sinclair-Webb, Human Rights Watch’s Turkey director, called it “the widest crackdown on LGBTQ+ people in recent years.”
KAOS GL has operated in Turkey since 1994 and has survived previous closure attempts, including a 2005 effort by the Ankara governor’s office to shut it down for violating “Turkish family structure and moral values” — an effort Turkish courts eventually rejected. This time, the pressure is coming through mass arrests rather than administrative dissolution, which makes it harder for the organization to mount an immediate legal defense while its leadership sits in detention.
The broader picture
Turkey’s slide on LGBTQ+ rights has been steady rather than sudden. Istanbul Pride has been banned and forcibly dispersed by police every year since 2015. But an organized, multi-city operation naming an advocacy group by name — and detaining its entire board — is a marked step past crowd-control policing into direct institutional targeting.
It also lands at an uncomfortable moment for Turkey’s Western partners. As a NATO member and long-standing (if stalled) EU candidate country, Turkey’s human rights record is a recurring friction point with Brussels and Washington, and rights groups are already pressing both to respond. So far, reaction from European institutions has been muted relative to the scale of the arrests, which activists on the ground say reflects a broader reluctance to jeopardize migration and security cooperation with Ankara.
For LGBTQ+ people in Turkey, the immediate effect is straightforward and frightening: an organization built to offer legal aid, healthcare referrals, and community is currently unable to safely operate, at the exact moment more people are turning to it. We’ll keep following this story as it develops, including what happens to those still in detention and whether KAOS GL is able to resume operations.
If you want to support LGBTQ+ Turks directly, KAOS GL and ILGA-Europe are both accepting donations and tracking the situation closely.
