Clash Report Finally Names Its Editors
Three months after I identified the Turkish operation behind the viral platform, Clash Report has revealed its masthead. Now is the time for accountability.
When I published my investigation into Clash Report on May 2 — revealing that the uber-viral anti-Israel propaganda platform was operated by people closely tied to the Erdoğan family — I noted that the site carried no masthead of any kind. There was no editor-in-chief, founder, publisher, or staff.
Well, it shows them now.
An operation that spent five years refusing to identify a single employee due to its clear ties to the Turkish government, built a full masthead within weeks of being exposed. Now all we need is some long-awaited accountability.
The Editors
Clash Report now has an editors page listing five people. They are Ahmet Koçak, İshak Habeşi, Zülal Merve Bulut, Kamer Kurunç, and Sadık Can Gençer.
Ahmet Koçak
Koçak is the most prolific of them, having published over 495 thus far. The second-highest number of articles comes from İshak Habeşi, who has 96. Interestingly, it appears that as Koçak’s count goes up, Habeşi’s goes down. Not sure what that means.
Anyways, Koçak was deputy managing editor at the government-aligned Türkiye Today, having helped launch the platform in 2023. Before that, he spent three years as a senior editor at Daily Sabah.
Daily Sabah belongs to Turkuvaz Media Group, whose vice chairman Serhat Albayrak is the brother of Berat Albayrak, Erdoğan’s son-in-law and former finance minister, and whose parent Zirve Holding sits under the Kalyon Group. Clash Report’s busiest editor came up inside the president’s family media circle.
On his LinkedIn profile, Koçak lists among his professional experiences that he works as a COO & Co-Founder at Stealth Startup — a generic placeholder profile or umbrella company tag that professionals and founders use to list their work experience without revealing their actual company name, product, or business plan. He simultaneously works at Clash Report and GDH.
As I previously noted back in May, GDH is short for “Gündeme Dair Haberler” — Turkish for “News About the Agenda.” It is a Turkish-language news platform that launched in late 2021. Clash Report is its English-language division. Monolog Medya is the company that runs both. This is the chain: Monolog owns GDH; GDH runs Clash Report. One Turkish limited liability company, two public-facing brands, one editorial operation.
İshak Habeşi
İshak Habeşi is almost certainly Isaac Eshetu Aragaw, the on-camera host of Clash Report’s video podcast Clash Point, whom I identified in May as an Ethiopian journalist based in Istanbul and educated at Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University, a state-foundation university run under Turkey’s Directorate General of Foundations. İshak is the Turkish form of Isaac. He’s also a big fan of the Muslim Brotherhood, as his X account makes clear. Habeşi means “the Ethiopian” in Turkish.
Additional Editors
Gençer — another of the newly-named Clash Report team members — used to work as a news editor for GDH.
Then there is Kamer Kurunç, who appears as an ordinary editor. But back in May, Clash Report identified him as the outlet’s “chief editor. He was likely demoted once I managed to unmask Clash Report for what it really is.
Searches for information on Zülal Merve Bulut, the final editor, yielded no conclusive results.
Veteran of CNN Türk Identified
In addition to the newly-named editors of Calsh Report, I identified that the outlet employs a veteran of CNN’s local Turkish affiliate — CNN Türk — named Gaye Sude Kayışlı.
The Need for Accountability
The sudden appearance of a full editorial masthead at Clash Report — after years of deliberate anonymity and only weeks after its Erdoğan-family ties were publicly exposed — does nothing to erase the underlying reality of a coordinated influence operation.
A NATO member cannot continue to run, fund, and staff English-language influence operations that deliberately conceal their state-adjacent ownership, and amplify antisemitic and conspiratorial narratives under the guise of neutral conflict reporting. Until Ankara’s media ecosystem, its defense contractors, and the networks surrounding the Erdoğan family face genuine consequences for this kind of covert information warfare, the next Clash Report will simply appear under a different name.