Yusuf Tekin (50), the recently appointed minister of education, responsible for overseeing the education of nearly 20 million children in Turkey and entrusted with billions of Turkish lira to carry out that task, was red-flagged during a counterterrorism probe into the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force network, classified documents obtained by Nordic Monitor have revealed.
Tekin’s links to Quds Force operatives in Turkey were exposed during a confidential, multi-year probe into the group, known by its Turkish name, Tevhid Selam. Tekin’s communications with a specially trained Iranian operative were intercepted between December 15, 2012 and November 22, 2013, and the wiretaps were entered as evidence into the case file.
The investigation launched in 2011 by Istanbul prosecutor Adem Özcan under case file No.2011/762 identified 232 Turkish and Iranian suspects, some later designated by the US Treasury under sanctions, after painstaking surveillance of operatives, wiretapping of their phones and internet communications and a review of the shell companies that were used as covers to mask secret operations. The prosecutor’s probe lasted until 2014 before then-prime minister and now president Recep Tayyip Erdogan stepped in to kill the country’s most comprehensive counterespionage investigation in its recent history.
The case file contains 10 intercepted phone and SMS conversations between Tekin and Furkan Torlak (37), a known Iranian asset who was working as an advisor to Numan Kurtulmus, the then-deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and now the speaker of parliament. Torlak was a suspect and a target of the investigators, with the conversations revealing a close relationship between Torlak and Tekin, who was serving as undersecretary of the Ministry of Education at the time.
The content of these conversations suggests that Torlak was introducing his associates to Tekin and arranging meetings with him. One of the individuals Torlak introduced to Tekin was Yahya Bostan, who was also a suspect in the Quds Force probe. In a call on May 16, 2013 Torlak described Bostan as his roommate and a member of the same community, referring to a group of Islamists who promote the Iranian mullah ideology in Turkey.
Tekin’s appointment as minister of education on June 4, 2023 means that he is now responsible for overseeing the entire public education system in Turkey. This vast system employs 1.1 million personnel, predominantly teachers, who work under his leadership to educate children from kindergarten to 12th grade. Additionally, the ministry has a global presence, with education attachés reporting directly to Tekin from Turkish embassies in 63 countries.
The ministry accounts for a significant portion of the central budget, which was 285 billion Turkish lira at the end of 2022. Moreover, it allocated 2.3 billion Turkish lira for overseas operations during the same period. With its authority to license, inspect and utilize administrative tools, the Ministry of Education also exerts considerable influence over private schools, including minority schools.
According to the ministry’s official records, 19.2 million children were educated during the 2021/2022 school year, including 732,000 Syrian refugees between ages of 5 and 17 in various schools, corresponding to 65 percent of all Syrian youngsters of school age. Each year, the ministry publishes 300 million school textbooks, which it distributes to schools after it has monitored their content.
