IHH - Humanitarian Relief Foundation

Born of war and its exigencies, the Anatolia-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH) has been shaped by the pressures of war to take sides in the fratricidal conflicts to which it has been drawn since its formation in the Balkans wars of the early 1990s, the Iraq war, the conflict in Israel, and the continuing war against the Islamic State.  Yet war may have had a compromising effect too upon self-understanding of the Turkish founders and administrators as well, since as Philip Snowden aptly observed, “Truth is the first casualty of war.” In that sense, IHH is as complex and conflicted as any organization produced by Turkish civilization in the late Twentieth Century. No observer can doubt its noble intents, its humane services to the hapless victims of war, and the wounded survivors of conflict. Its reach is vast over five continents, and its respect at the United Nations is evinced by its high status. By the same measure, its dual role in the cause of jihadism whether by the instrumentality of its Sunni variation in al-Qaeda, or Islamic State, or its collaboration with the Shia variation in Tehran, cannot be ignored. The evidence cited in the foregoing study should give the student of counterterrorism or the foreign policy practitioner pause before taking the noble self-understanding of IHH at face value.

The IHH has found itself fulfilling the needs of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the government of President Tayyip Erdogan, who himself has played a dual role in the fight against terrorism in Syria and Iraq. The scope of the IHH’s activities cannot be explained simply by its declared budget and resources. The IHH has served as a key humanitarian player in the Middle East region, collaborating with internationally recognized NGOs or the United Nations, yet without doubt – and despite public denials -- also serving as an ideological enabler of terrorist organizations. It is time to halt the illicit activities and connections of the IHH by listing it as a terrorist entity until at least the organization clearly and openly disconnects itself from terrorist groups and stops acting as an intermediary for jihadists.

https://www.ict.org.il/Article/2397/IHH#gsc.tab=0

Insight Turkey, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 193-215.

The IHH delivers relief aid to 140 countries worldwide. Quite recently, as a novel humanitarian practice, the IHH has begun acting as a mediator in intra-state conflicts and even accumulated considerable experience in it. In the Bangsamoro peace process, for instance, the IHH was invited to play a mediator role as part of the internationally crewed Third Party Monitoring Team. Similarly, the IHH has been called upon to play mediatory roles in resolving kidnapping incidents in Syria and Pakistan, and has done so by negotiating with armed groups for the release of kidnapped and captive civilians. This paper, therefore, aims to explore the dynamics of and the motivations behind the IHH’s extension of its international humanitarian mission beyond providing relief and to examine the place of such civilian mediator role in the broader humanitarian turn in Turkey’s contemporary foreign policy.

Those who consider the current corruption investigations as a shadow war between Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan trace the breaking away of Fethullah Gülen's support for Erdoğan specifically to the Gaza flotilla incident.
I don't believe there was ever an alliance between Fethullah Gülen and Erdoğan of the type imagined by some commentators, far less that this incident was the cause of the split/separation of that alliance.
Fethullah Gülen, who may be considered to have derived his interpretive framework from civil/cultural Islam, supported the Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) democratization efforts and benefited from the resultant freedoms that this process brought about. The flotilla incident can, however, be useful in demonstrating the difference of Fethullah Gülen's mindset from political Islam.