On 8 October, the European Parliament demanded scrutiny of funding linked to Turkey and Qatar. On 9 October, EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos stood beside President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to inaugurate a railway backed by €275 million in EU grants.
The vote was 381 to 167. It targeted Muslim Brotherhood networks and Islamist entryism: political influence cultivated inside established institutions. Kos criticized Turkey’s democratic backsliding while affirming its growing strategic importance. Ankara seeks deeper access to Europe’s financial and defense systems.
The grant predates the vote. So does the evidence. No common test of state accountability links Parliament’s demands to the Commission’s cooperation with Ankara.
The non-binding resolution links the Council of European Muslims, a pan-European umbrella body, and Europe Trust, a British charity with substantial property investments, to the Brotherhood’s European network. It calls for tracing EU grants to their ultimate beneficiaries, restricting institutional access, scrutinizing foreign financing and assessing linked entities under EU terrorist-listing criteria. Its title promises a strategy; its operative provisions call for none.
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Political influence need not constitute terrorism; foreign funding alone does not establish interference. Legal status does not establish autonomy. Associations, charities and religious institutions can be lawful and foreign-directed, even while claiming to represent entire communities. The test is who directs them, who finances them and who benefits.
After Mohamed Morsi’s overthrow in Egypt in 2013, Turkey hosted Brotherhood exiles. A 2025 study by Austria’s Documentation Centre Political Islam documented ideological, personal and organizational ties between Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), Millî Görüş, a Turkish Islamist movement, and Brotherhood networks in Europe.
The study also documented Brotherhood-linked figures attending the 2019 Meeting of European Muslims, hosted in Germany by the Turkish Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), a German-registered religious umbrella organization institutionally linked to the Diyanet, Turkey’s state religious authority. The Diyanet and the Brotherhood remain institutionally distinct.
Through organizations such as DITIB, which encompasses nearly 900 communities in Germany, the Diyanet appoints and supervises imams abroad. The Turkish state pays many of them. Appointments, reporting duties, directives and financial dependence establish a chain of authority running to Ankara.
In 2017, imams associated with DITIB transmitted information about followers of Fethullah Gülen, whom Ankara blamed for the failed 2016 coup, after receiving instructions from the Diyanet. DITIB acknowledged the transmissions but denied institutional responsibility for espionage. German prosecutors closed the investigations in December 2017 without charges.
On 7 June 2022, Parliament warned that Ankara was using the Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities and DITIB to influence its diaspora, risking interference in member states’ democratic processes.
A state does not cease exercising state power because it exercises it through religion.
European constitutional protections extend to believers, communities and religious institutions. They confer neither political authority over European citizens on foreign governments nor immunity from laws against espionage, unlawful interference and illicit financing.
One of the five draft motions named the Diyanet; the adopted resolution did not. Its provisions address Turkish-linked funding and institutional access, not Ankara’s clerical hierarchy.
The EU Transparency Register generally exempts religious associations, though not offices established to represent them before EU institutions. The Union’s proposed directive on foreign interest representation covers activities intended to influence public decisions on behalf of third countries. Neither treats foreign governmental authority over clergy, by itself, as covered interest representation. Scrutiny of that authority remains largely with individual member states.
Conflating scrutiny of Islamist networks with hostility towards Muslims shields political movements and foreign religious control from accountability. Treating Muslim observance, ancestry or identity as evidence of disloyalty reinforces the Islamist claim that Muslims cannot belong to Europe and lets Erdogan claim to protect them. One mistakes liberty for immunity. The other mistakes identity for guilt.
Europe’s Muslim citizens are not Ankara’s political constituency.
The Austrian study identified Hamas as the AKP’s last major partner within the Brotherhood camp. On 12 March 2026, the US Treasury identified Turkey-based Hayat Yolu as an operational headquarters, banking and financial hub for the Muslim Brotherhood and sanctioned it for materially supporting Hamas’s military wing. On 23 July, Treasury designated Mahmoud al-Abyari, a senior Egyptian Brotherhood official based in Britain, for supporting fundraising for Hayat Yolu and another previously sanctioned organisation in Turkey.
Unlike its direct authority over clergy abroad, Ankara’s responsibility for financiers operating in Turkey lies in enforcement. The financial trail predates 7 October 2023. In 2019, Washington sanctioned Turkey-based Redin Exchange over a $10 million transfer to Hamas’s military wing. In 2022, it exposed a covert Hamas investment portfolio exceeding $500 million, including companies operating in Turkey.
Turkey was also a principal transit corridor for European jihadists travelling to and from Syria during the civil war, including ISIS recruits. On 5 January 2023, Washington and Ankara jointly targeted an ISIS financing network. American authorities imposed sanctions; Turkish authorities froze assets.
In June 2024, the Financial Action Task Force, the global anti-money-laundering watchdog, removed Turkey from its grey list after recognising stronger financial investigations, supervision and enforcement.
Terrorist designations shape enforcement, financial investigations and intelligence cooperation. Erdogan nevertheless legitimises Hamas as resistance, despite its designation as a terrorist organisation by the United States and European Union. Ankara’s refusal to recognise Hamas as a terrorist organisation is a political choice, not an enforcement constraint.
The Hamas threat in Europe extended beyond financing. In December 2023, German and Dutch police arrested suspected Hamas operatives in Berlin and Rotterdam accused of preparing attacks against Jewish institutions. Investigators also uncovered a Hamas-linked weapons cache in Vienna. In November 2025, Mossad disclosed European investigations into suspected involvement of
Turkey-based Hamas operatives in attack planning.
Since 7 October 2023, Mossad, Shin Bet and Israeli military intelligence have intensified collection on Turkey and Hamas, separately and where their networks intersect. Israeli intelligence on Hamas’s overseas command, financing, intermediaries and operational links has informed investigations involving Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) and Austria’s Directorate of State Security and Intelligence (DSN). Denmark’s Security and Intelligence Service (PET) has separately investigated cross-border threats. A 2018 arrangement provides for strategic information exchange between Israeli law enforcement and Europol.
Europe has the record of Ankara’s institutional influence, Washington’s financial evidence and Israel’s operational intelligence.
NATO binds Ankara to collective defence, not to its allies’ designation of Hamas or their counterterrorism policies.
Europe already has terrorist-financing laws, asset-freezing powers, dedicated Hamas sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules. American designations do not automatically trigger European sanctions; European authorities can assess the evidence and impose sanctions where EU law permits.
Turkey seeks access to SAFE, the EU’s defence-financing and procurement framework, and admission to SEPA, the Single Euro Payments Area for standardised euro transfers. SAFE conditions third-country participation on applicable agreements and safeguards concerning foreign control, sensitive information and supply chains. SEPA applies separate payments-system and compliance criteria. Neither offers automatic admission.
Europe cannot demand transparency from grant applicants while treating Ankara’s authority over religious institutions abroad and its response to Hamas financiers at home as irrelevant to strategic cooperation.
Europe knows. It is choosing not to connect what it knows with what it does.
Shay Gal is Founder and Principal of Line of State, a strategic practice advising governments and institutions on strategy, security, risk and statecraft.