Turkey plans to restore military hospitals 9 years after post-coup closures

Turkey is moving to restore military hospitals nine years after shutting them down following a coup attempt in July 2016.

The plan centers on returning the Gülhane Teaching and Research Hospital, formerly the Gülhane Military Medical Academy (GATA), in Ankara to full military hospital status.

Turkey revoked the military status of its military hospitals in 2016 and placed them under the Health Ministry by emergency decree.

The decision covered 32 military hospitals and one rehabilitation center in 26 provinces.

Officials said in 2016 that a single civilian authority would improve efficiency and oversight after the coup attempt.

Critics say the change erased specialized military medical capacity and weakened frontline care.

The 2016 closures followed the coup attempt and were part of a wider post-coup restructuring that brought military education and logistics under tighter civilian control.

Deputy Defense Minister Şuay Alpay told a parliamentary defense committee this year that Turkey faces a shortage of military surgeons.

Media reports say the government has begun work to return GATA to military status.

Opposition lawmakers and former military physicians say the number of surgeons trained for combat injuries has declined since 2016.

Many of the 2,043 military doctors then in service retired or moved to the private sector in the years after 2016.

Recent cross-border operations have sharpened the debate over medical support for deployed units.

The Sözcü newspaper reported that during Operation Claw Lock, which ran from April 2022 to February 2024 in northern Iraq, 145 Turkish soldiers were killed and that 47 died after evacuation to hospitals inside Turkey.

The Health Ministry has sent civilian doctors to support operations at times, but security experts say civilian training does not replace unit-level military medical practice.

Analysts also say the absence of dedicated military hospitals separates Turkey from its peers, pointing to Austria with three military hospitals, Germany with five and France with eight, while smaller European countries without recent wars still train military surgeons.

The planned return of GATA to military status would mark the first formal step toward rebuilding a military medical system in Turkey since 2016.

Ankara also operates a new Turkish military hospital in Kyrenia in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (KKTC) that opened in 2024 to serve the Turkish troops stationed there.