turkey named the operation “my family is safe” and then went into everybody's homes

via Reuters, carried by the Cyprus Mail, with The Jerusalem Post and bianet.

Somebody in a Turkish ministry sat down and named this thing. They had options. They went with "Ailem Güvende," which means My Family is Safe, and then sent police to a men's hammam.

The raids started in the small hours of Sunday and ran across the country. Police searched the offices of LGBTI+ associations, went into activists' apartments, and in Istanbul hit a gay bar and a nightclub that the people who go there had understood to be a safe space. Detentions were reported in the Beyoğlu and Şişli districts. The hammam was on the list too, which tells you how much of this was about crime and how much was about knowing where we go.

what the minister announced

Justice Minister Akın Gürlek put numbers on it publicly, which governments do when they are proud. Legal proceedings, he said, have been brought against 162 suspects, nine associations and 13 businesses, across 15 provinces, coordinated by prosecutors in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Aydın and Mersin. He presented the operation as part of the government's 2026 to 2035 Decade of Family and Population, the demographic program President Erdoğan has been building his social policy around. Erdoğan has repeatedly called LGBT people "perverted" and blamed the community for the country's falling birth rate, a piece of arithmetic nobody has ever been asked to show their working on.

the numbers do not match

Here is the part worth holding onto. The chief prosecutor's office says 26 people were detained and six association offices were searched. Kaos GL, the country's longest-standing LGBTI+ organization, says at least 50 activists were taken, more than 10 of them out of their own homes.

Both figures cannot be right, and the gap is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a contained legal action and a sweep, and which number you are told depends on who is counting. Kaos GL is counting people it knows by name. The prosecutor is counting a file.

Ankara prosecutors are investigating Kaos GL on accusations of "obscenity" and "violations of the Associations Law," based on what the group published on its own website and social accounts. The allegation is that it put obscene material where children could reach it, and did so "under the umbrella of a civil society organization," as though being a registered nonprofit were the aggravating factor. Members were reported facing charges of insulting public decency. Kaos GL has been running since the 1990s. The material is thirty-odd years of magazines, reports and press releases.

the blackout came first

The sequence matters. The night before anybody's door was knocked on, an Istanbul penal judgeship ordered the websites and social media accounts of 73 associations and activist groups blocked. Kaos GL, 17 May, ÜniKuir, Pembe Hayat, SPoD, Genç LGBTİ+, Lambdaistanbul, Muamma LGBTİ+, Velvele.net. Individual accounts went too, belonging to journalists, lawyers and actors. X carried out the orders. Instagram, as of bianet's reporting, had not.

So the accounts went dark, and then the raids happened, and the organizations that would normally tell you a raid was happening could no longer post. That is not two events. That is one event with a running order.

The Human Rights Association put it plainly: "The real name of this operation is not 'My Family is Safe'; it is state-led discrimination, politics of fear and the dismantling of civil society."

Worth sitting with the timing more broadly, too. This lands in the same week that Hungary's new prime minister named the first Orbán-era anti-gay rule he intends to undo, and a few days after we wrote that nine out of ten queer organizations on earth have lost funding since 2025. Europe is not moving in one direction. It is moving in two, quite fast, and the groups getting raided in Ankara this weekend are the same kind of small, underfunded outfits that spent the last year watching their budgets evaporate. A movement you have already defunded is a cheaper one to arrest.

The operation is called My Family is Safe. Somewhere in Istanbul there is a family whose son was taken out of his apartment before dawn, and nobody has offered them the name.

Correction, September 14, 2026: An earlier version of this story said the raids began in the small hours of Saturday. They began in the small hours of Sunday, September 13.