An official from Turkey’s ruling party has endorsed fans who wore masks depicting Mahmut Yıldırım, a state agent known for his involvement in extrajudicial killings of dissident Kurds, at a match against a team from a Kurdish-majority city.
Yunus Tever, head of the Sakarya branch of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), declared that the fans detained “will never be alone” and criticised opposition figures for condemning their actions, which he defended as expressions of “patriotism”.
The incident occurred on 28 August when 11 members of the Sakaryaspor supporters’ group Tatangalar wore masks of Mahmut Yıldırım aka Yeşil (Green), a notorious Turkish deep state agent linked to extrajudicial killings in the 1990s, at a football match.
The match was against Amedspor, a team from the Kurdish-majority city of Diyarbakır (Amed), and was held at the Necmi Kadıoğlu Stadium in İstanbul. Images of the masks quickly spread across social media, causing public outrage. Police arrested the 11 fans, but there has been no official statement from law enforcement agencies about the arrests or the status of the investigation.
Yunus Tever was responding to criticism from Ayça Taşkent, opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) MP for Sakarya, who had condemned the display of Yıldırım’s image, asserting that Sakaryaspor’s green colours symbolise hope, struggle, peace and unity, rather than figures associated with extrajudicial killings. Tever accused the CHP of “siding with terrorists” and defended the fans, saying their actions showed their “patriotism” and their “loyalty to Sakarya and the country”.
This controversy follows similar incidents, such as when Bursaspor fans displayed posters of Yıldırım during a match against Amedspor in 2023, leading the family of Ayten Öztürk, a Kurdish woman abducted and murdered by the killer in 1992, to press charges against the supporters who glorified her killer.
Despite these tensions, there has been no official response from the Turkish authorities. Tever’s support for the detained fans has reignited debates about the AKP’s stance on figures linked to state violence, and its handling of racism and hate speech in Turkish sports.
