Is Ankara Solving a Fifteen-Year-Old Death—or Sending a Message to the Old State?
The most important question surrounding the reopened investigation into the death of former Turkish intelligence officer Kaşif Kozinoğlu may no longer be how he died.
It may be why Turkey suddenly wants to know.
Fifteen years after Kozinoğlu died in Silivri Prison, Turkish authorities have reopened a case that had effectively disappeared into the archives. His grave has been exhumed. Forensic samples have been collected. Prison surveillance footage, emergency-call records and hospital documents are being reexamined. Former prison officials, medical personnel, prosecutors and Kozinoğlu’s former cellmates have been drawn into an expanding criminal investigation.
Among them is retired Jandarma Colonel Hasan Atilla Uğur, one of the emblematic figures of Turkey’s old security establishment. Uğur and former naval captain Hasan Ataman Yıldırım have been placed under house arrest in an investigation involving allegations of intentional homicide. Two prosecutors who served at Silivri at the time have been jailed on allegations of membership in a criminal organization.
The official explanation is straightforward: the Turkish state is finally trying to determine whether Kozinoğlu died naturally or through third-party intervention.
But Turkish political analyst and former police intelligence official Emre Uslu, in a recent broadcast devoted to the case, proposes a very different interpretation.
Uslu does not begin with Kozinoğlu’s death.
He begins with timing.
Why, he asks, are surveillance images and allegations surrounding Hasan Atilla Uğur emerging now? Why is the public being shown particular fragments of a fifteen-year-old case? And why does the narrative currently being constructed appear to direct attention so heavily toward Uğur and the security networks historically associated with him?
His thesis is provocative: the Kozinoğlu investigation may have become one front in a much larger struggle over who will control the Turkish state after Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
That proposition is not an established fact. Much of Uslu’s argument consists of inference, political interpretation and intelligence-world speculation that cannot presently be independently verified.
Yet the framework deserves examination because it connects several developments that otherwise appear unrelated.
And at the center of that framework stands an old Turkish phenomenon:
the state within the state.
The Strange Timing of an Old Death
Kozinoğlu died on November 12, 2011.
For years, his death attracted allegations and suspicions without producing anything resembling the investigation now underway.
Then, in September 2026, the state machinery suddenly moved.
The previous non-prosecution decision was lifted. Detentions followed. Kozinoğlu’s grave was opened. Forensic experts took bone, soil and other samples. Prosecutors began reconstructing what happened inside Silivri Prison.
The investigation has even expanded into an examination of the television series Kurtlar Vadisi Pusu, whose writers have been questioned as witnesses. Prosecutors say experts will examine allegations concerning messages and representations in the series connected to Kozinoğlu and other political themes.
That breadth is unusual enough to justify Uslu’s first question:
Why now?
His argument is that the government is not simply releasing evidence. It is releasing evidence within a narrative.
Uslu points specifically to images and accounts concerning Uğur allegedly turning off a light, movements around Kozinoğlu’s room and the handling of a coffee cup after Kozinoğlu became ill. He argues that these fragments are being presented in a way that encourages the public to focus on one particular circle.
Whether that interpretation is correct remains uncertain.
But politically, the distinction matters enormously.
A government can pursue a genuine crime and simultaneously derive political advantage from the investigation.
The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive.
Kozinoğlu may indeed have been the victim of wrongdoing.
Evidence may genuinely have been suppressed.
And fifteen years later, the decision about which evidence to activate, whom to investigate and how to publicly frame the case can still carry contemporary political significance.
Erdoğan and the Old State: From Enemies to Partners
To understand Uslu’s thesis, one must go back to one of the defining transformations of Erdoğan’s political career.
The AKP originally rose to power in conflict with much of Turkey’s traditional military-bureaucratic establishment.
That establishment was secularist, nationalist and deeply influenced by the political traditions of the armed forces. Erdoğan and his allies spent much of their first decade weakening its institutional power.
But after the political ruptures of the 2010s, Erdoğan increasingly found himself governing alongside elements of the very nationalist-security establishment that his movement had once confronted.
The relationship was never necessarily ideological harmony.
It was a convergence of interests.
This is crucial to Uslu’s interpretation of the Kozinoğlu case.
His argument is essentially that the alliance is entering another phase.
The question is no longer whether Erdoğan needs nationalist elements of the security establishment.
The question is which nationalist networks remain useful, which have become autonomous, and which may already be preparing for a Turkey beyond Erdoğan.
That is where Hasan Atilla Uğur becomes politically significant.
Why Hasan Atilla Uğur?
Uğur is not simply another retired colonel.
His biography intersects with Jandarma intelligence, the nationalist security establishment, the interrogation of Abdullah Öcalan and political networks that extend well beyond the barracks.
In Uslu’s reading, therefore, putting Uğur at the center of the Kozinoğlu investigation potentially sends a message beyond one individual.
It reaches an entire network.
Uslu goes much further, alleging that Uğur’s old intelligence and political connections overlap with circles capable of supporting alternative political arrangements after Erdoğan. He links these networks to media personalities, former security officials and nationalist figures operating around contemporary opposition politics.
These claims require substantial independent evidence that the broadcast itself does not provide.
But beneath them lies a more defensible analytical question:
What happens when retired members of a security establishment retain political, bureaucratic, media and economic networks after leaving office?
In countries with a long history of military tutelage and informal security politics, such networks do not necessarily disappear when governments change.
They adapt.
And governments that once cooperated with them may eventually begin to regard them as threats.
The 360-Vote Problem
This is where Uslu connects the intelligence struggle to Erdoğan’s political future.
Under Article 116 of Turkey’s Constitution, parliament can renew presidential and parliamentary elections with a three-fifths majority—360 of 600 deputies. If parliament makes that decision during a president’s second term, the president may run once more.
That constitutional mechanism makes parliamentary arithmetic potentially important to Erdoğan’s future candidacy.
Uslu builds an elaborate scenario around precisely this vulnerability.
What if, when the decisive moment arrives, Erdoğan cannot secure 360 votes?
What if politicians inside or around the governing bloc refuse to cooperate?
What if elements of the bureaucracy, intelligence establishment or old state begin preparing for succession rather than continuity?
Uslu even raises the possibility of factions inside Erdoğan’s own political universe positioning themselves for the post-Erdoğan period. Among the names he discusses is former MİT chief and current Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan. But here his argument becomes particularly speculative: he says he is hearing of networks considering a post-Erdoğan configuration in which Fidan could emerge prominently.
There is no publicly established evidence of such a plan.
But the broader structural observation is more important than the personalities.
Personalized regimes inevitably develop a succession problem.
The longer power is concentrated around one leader, the more consequential the question becomes:
What happens the morning after that leader is gone?
The Kurdish Question Changes the Equation
There is another dimension to Uslu’s argument that deserves particular attention.
The Kurdish question.
Turkey is currently pursuing a new political process officially framed around ending terrorism and strengthening national cohesion. Erdoğan has publicly backed legislation associated with that process and specifically credited MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli among those contributing to it.
This creates a remarkable historical paradox.
Some of the nationalist-security figures who once embodied the state’s hardest line against the PKK now exist inside a political environment in which Ankara is exploring a fundamentally different strategy.
Hasan Atilla Uğur has particular symbolic importance because he participated in the interrogation of Abdullah Öcalan after the PKK leader’s capture.
Uslu therefore asks whether Uğur could become politically useful to opponents of the new process.
Could his history with Öcalan give him unusual credibility among nationalist voters?
Could he become a public symbol of resistance if the Kurdish initiative reaches politically sensitive concessions?
Could pressure through the Kozinoğlu investigation neutralize—or at least discipline—one potential center of opposition?
Uslu explicitly raises such a scenario, including the possibility that Uğur could become a prominent public critic of an Öcalan-centered process.
Again, there is no evidence establishing that this is why prosecutors are investigating him.
But the political collision is real:
the man associated with interrogating Öcalan is now himself under judicial pressure at precisely the moment Turkey is redefining its approach to the Kurdish conflict.
That coincidence alone makes the political context relevant.
From Kozinoğlu to the Special Forces
The most interesting section of Uslu’s analysis comes near the end.
He asks what connects several of Turkey’s most controversial political deaths.
Necip Hablemitoğlu.
Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu.
Kaşif Kozinoğlu.
His answer is not a specific assassin.
It is an institutional ecosystem:
intelligence and the Special Forces.
Uslu describes the Special Forces not merely as a military command but as part of a broader historical security infrastructure with connections reaching into civilian society and clandestine networks. From this he asks whether the renewed investigations surrounding these old cases represent something resembling a second “Cosmic Room” confrontation—a struggle over the deepest and least transparent layers of the Turkish security establishment.
This is perhaps the most useful analytical question in the entire broadcast.
Because if several dormant cases involving figures from overlapping security environments become active simultaneously, there are two fundamentally different explanations.
One is judicial.
Turkey may finally be investigating crimes that previous governments or institutions failed to solve.
The other is political.
Old files may be providing the present government with leverage against autonomous elements of the security establishment.
Again, these explanations can coexist.
A file can contain genuine evidence and possess enormous political utility.
A Second Cosmic Room?
The original Cosmic Room controversy involved an extraordinary confrontation over some of the Turkish military’s most sensitive mobilization and Special Forces structures.
Uslu’s metaphor therefore carries weight.
His question is whether Turkey is again witnessing an attempt to map, penetrate or neutralize security networks that possess institutional memories and capabilities outside the immediate political leadership.
If so, Kozinoğlu is not the destination.
He is the doorway.
The significance of the investigation would then lie in where its evidentiary branches lead: former Jandarma intelligence personnel, Special Forces officers, prosecutors, forensic officials, media figures and perhaps eventually the institutions that accumulated intelligence on all of them.
This interpretation also helps explain an apparent paradox.
Why would Erdoğan confront networks that at various points helped sustain the political order surrounding him?
Because alliances inside authoritarian or highly centralized systems are rarely permanent.
They survive while both sides need each other.
The moment one partner begins planning for the other’s succession, yesterday’s ally can become tomorrow’s security threat.
Hakan Fidan: Another Layer of the Succession Question
Uslu introduces an even more sensitive possibility.
He suggests that the struggle may not simply pit Erdoğan against the old nationalist establishment.
There may also be competition inside the post-Erdoğan succession space itself.
Fidan is particularly interesting in this respect because his career spans intelligence and foreign policy and because he spent years at the center of Erdoğan’s security architecture.
But Uslu speculates that some actors may see Fidan as part of a future configuration beyond Erdoğan.
There is presently no public evidence establishing an organized Fidan succession project, and it would be irresponsible to describe one as fact.
Nevertheless, the structural question again survives the speculative claim.
If Erdoğan’s system eventually approaches succession, institutions will not remain passive.
MİT will have interests.
The military will have interests.
The nationalist bureaucracy will have interests.
Political parties will have interests.
Business networks will have interests.
International actors will have interests.
The struggle may therefore begin long before any formal transition.
The Missing Piece in Uslu’s Theory
There is, however, a significant weakness in Uslu’s analysis.
He sometimes moves too quickly from network overlap to coordinated political intention.
Knowing one another is not the same as acting together.
Having belonged to the same institutional tradition does not prove membership in an operational network.
And the simultaneous political interests of different actors do not establish that they are executing a common plan.
This distinction becomes especially important when Uslu introduces vaguely defined international, financial, Masonic or other external networks. The broadcast provides insufficient public evidence to treat those claims as established components of the Kozinoğlu investigation.
The stronger version of his argument does not require them.
It requires only three observable facts.
The Kozinoğlu case was dormant for fifteen years.
It has suddenly become an extraordinarily broad criminal investigation.
And the investigation is reaching figures associated with historically powerful parts of Turkey’s security establishment.
Those facts alone justify asking why the case became politically actionable now.
The Real Question: Who Controls the Transition?
Seen through this lens, the Kozinoğlu investigation is no longer simply a historical murder mystery.
It becomes a window into Turkey’s approaching succession problem.
Erdoğan must preserve his governing coalition.
He must manage a changing Kurdish policy.
He must maintain control over the security bureaucracy.
He must navigate the constitutional conditions surrounding another candidacy.
And at the same time, every serious institution and political faction has an incentive to contemplate what Turkey might look like when Erdoğan is eventually no longer its dominant political figure.
Uslu interprets the pressure on Hasan Atilla Uğur as part of that struggle.
That conclusion remains unproven.
But the question underneath it is unavoidable:
Has the Turkish state begun fighting over the post-Erdoğan era before the Erdoğan era has ended?
The Kozinoğlu File as Political Leverage
This brings the Cevheri Güven and Emre Uslu analyses together in an intriguing way.
Güven’s investigation asks us to look backward:
What happened inside Silivri?
What happened during the autopsy?
What happened to the biological samples?
What happened to Kozinoğlu’s notes?
What did MİT know?
Uslu asks us to look forward:
Why are these questions being asked in 2026?
Why Hasan Atilla Uğur?
Why these particular security networks?
And what does the investigation have to do with the political architecture of Turkey after Erdoğan?
The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive.
In fact, together they produce a more disturbing possibility.
The Kozinoğlu file may contain genuine evidence about the crimes of Turkey’s past while simultaneously functioning as leverage in the power struggles of Turkey’s future.
That would hardly be unprecedented.
States preserve archives.
Intelligence agencies preserve secrets.
Political systems preserve vulnerabilities.
The decisive question is often not whether damaging information exists.
It is when someone decides to use it.
Erdoğan Versus Ergenekon—Again?
Uslu ultimately describes the emerging conflict as a renewed confrontation between Erdoğan and what he broadly calls the “Ergenekon network.”
That terminology should be treated cautiously. “Ergenekon” has been used in Turkey to describe everything from specific defendants and alleged clandestine structures to a much broader—and often poorly defined—secular-nationalist state tradition.
But the underlying political proposition is clearer.
During different phases of Erdoğan’s rule, elements of Turkey’s old security establishment were first adversaries, later weakened, subsequently partners, and perhaps now potential rivals again.
If the Kozinoğlu investigation continues expanding into the institutional history of Jandarma intelligence, Special Forces and other security structures, that proposition will become increasingly testable.
Watch the investigation.
Not the rhetoric.
Who is questioned?
Who is arrested?
Which institutions surrender their archives?
Which old cases are reopened?
Which evidence suddenly becomes available?
And equally important:
Which institutions and individuals remain untouched?
That will tell us whether Turkey is genuinely investigating its deep state—or whether one configuration of the deep state is investigating another.
The Battle May Already Have Begun
Emre Uslu ends his broadcast with an expansive claim: that the Kozinoğlu investigation ultimately concerns whether Turkey enters the next political era with Erdoğan or without him.
There is not enough public evidence to accept that conclusion as fact, and no responsible analysis can determine from the current record which political faction will prevail or how a future election will unfold.
But Uslu has identified something important.
Turkey’s succession struggle does not have to begin when Erdoğan leaves office.
It can begin while he is still there.
And if that struggle has begun, it will not necessarily announce itself through party congresses, campaign speeches or presidential candidates.
It may appear first in far less obvious places:
a fifteen-year-old prison video;
a forensic report;
an intelligence archive;
a retired colonel placed under house arrest;
an exhumed body;
and a dead intelligence officer whose secrets suddenly matter again.
That is why the Kaşif Kozinoğlu investigation deserves to be followed not only as a murder investigation.
It may also be a map.
A map of the factions, institutions and unresolved secrets that will shape Turkey’s next political order.
And perhaps the most revealing question is no longer simply:
Who killed Kaşif Kozinoğlu?
It is:
Why has the struggle over what Kaşif Kozinoğlu knew begun again—fifteen years after he died?
