Posted on one of the other forums from turkey member and what he thinks about all this:
"Rather than staged, it was a desperate attempt by a certain sect in the military which didn't have the support of the core. Back in 2002, when AKP won the elections, they were hand in hand with the Gulen movement.. Both were Islamists and both saw the Kemalist bureaucrats/military as the common enemy. So, AKP happily let Gulenists take over the police force and infiltrate into the judicial system. Gulenists brought on investigation after investigation, convicting almost half the high-ranking officials in the military of -oh, the irony- attempted coups or corruption charges, usually based on fabricated evidence. (Nobody suspected the evidence much back in those days, because the military was indeed anti-AKP and had a long history of real coups.) But in 2013, like all Islamists do since the time of the four caliphs of which three are assassinated, in the end, they couldn't share the power and turned on each other. The Gulen movement started to leak secretly recorded tapes of AKP politicians, which presented bribery, corruption, and other sort of scandalous material. Yet, AKP still won the elections that year despite everything that surfaced and in return, started a man-hunt, removing and arresting anybody in the police force or judicial system that was linked to Gulen. Erdogan started to accuse any political opposition or journalism of working for the Gulen movement which he now called "the parallel state." It is known that a similar house-cleaning was just about to take place in the military and the Gulenist officers were going to be discharged. So, this was their last resort. Hoping the Kemalist core of the military would back them against Erdogan once they start the coup, they went ahead. But of course, the Kemalist officers hate the Gulen movement even more than they hate AKP, since it was Gulen's people who convicted them back in the 2000's. Also, this is not 1980 anymore, there are hundreds of TV stations, the internet, cell phones... So, they couldn't prevent communication and Erdogan's "call of duty" to his conservative Muslims, and once they got that call, they flooded the streets with "Allah-u Akbar" jumping on tanks, blocking the roads etc.
Overall, AKP first snowed the state bureaucracy up by filling it with Gulenists and when they turned on each other, what was completely lost in chaos and greed was the establishment and reputation of this state. This failed attempt will only strengthen Erdogan's hand and I'm afraid "his Islamist crowds" will be much more aggressive from now on. "