Clash Report, Unmasked.
The conflict news and conspiracy-peddling account, trusted by Western politicians and journalists, is the English-language arm of a Turkish media operation with ties to the Erdoğan family
Clash Report presents itself as a neutral conflict news aggregator, but it is the English-language division of a Turkish media company with deep ties to the Erdoğan family and Turkish state agencies. The company behind it, Monolog Medya, was a contractor for two branches of the Erdoğan political family — his personal charitable foundation and the flagship festival of his son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar, Turkey’s drone billionaire. Monolog Medya’s director is a veteran of TRT, Turkey’s state broadcaster.
Clash Report’s editors are TRT alumni, its only advertiser is a Turkish state defense contractor, and its podcast host promotes Muslim Brotherhood leaders. When Western politicians and journalists share Clash Report, they are amplifying an Erdoğan-adjacent influence operation dressed up as breaking news. To be more specific:
Clash Report is the name of a prominent English-language news aggregator X account. The account frequently goes viral, with its content shared by U.S. senators, congressmen, prominent influencers, podcasters, and tech figures. Interspersed among its news posts, however, are numerous instances of conspiratorial, antisemitic, and anti-American content.
A Turkish company called Monolog Medya Bilişim Eğitim Reklam ve Organizasyon Ltd. Şti. runs a Turkish-language news platform called GDH (”Gündeme Dair Haberler” — “News About the Agenda”). Clash Report is GDH’s English-language division. The three are the same operation: one company, one editorial team, two brands in two languages.
Monolog Medya’s director and owner, Cüneyt Polat, is a former Digital Media Director at Turkey’s state broadcaster TRT. His company lists a client called TÜRGEV — the personal charitable foundation of the Erdoğan family, marking one of two separate Erdoğan family connections — the second, the Bayraktar contracting relationship, is described below.
Monolog Medya operated backend servers for Teknofest — Turkey’s state-backed technology festival run by Selçuk Bayraktar’s T3 Foundation. Selçuk Bayraktar is Erdoğan’s son-in-law and owner of Baykar, Turkey’s flagship drone manufacturer.
Clash Report’s Chief Editor is Kamer Kurunç. Among its staff is Mehmet A. Kancı, a TRT Haber Special Reports Coordinator and writer for Anadolu Ajansı (another state-run outlet).
The Clash Report X account sat dormant for five years, then activated on February 28, 2020 — the night Turkey launched Operation Spring Shield in Syria. By the next day it had 49,200 followers.
Why Clash Report Matters
Spend any time on X following politics and military conflicts, and you’ve undoubtedly encountered Clash Report. Drone footage, conflict maps, breaking strike updates, political developments in America and Europe, all in English, all timestamped within minutes of events. Major Western reporters quote it. Wire services reference it. Politicans retweet it. Even national governments engage with it. The brand presents itself, in its own words, as your source for unbiased, data-driven news and analysis on global conflicts.
Anyone familiar with influence operations will recognize Clash Report for what it really is. After some old-fashioned sleuthing, I’ve identified the company behind it, the people running it, and their ties to the Turkish state media apparatus — including one operator who pushes a Muslim Brotherhood agenda — even as the brand takes deliberate steps to obscure its Turkish origins.
The Company Behind Clash Report
Let’s start with the most important find — the one that closes the loop on who actually owns this operation.
Apple’s App Store maintains a public database of every app developer. When you look up Clash Report’s iOS app by its App Store ID (6748907974), Apple’s own system returns a single legal developer name: MONOLOG MEDYA BİLİŞİM EĞİTİM REKLAM VE ORGANİZASYON LİMİTED ŞİRKETİ — Monolog Media Informatics Education Advertising and Organization Ltd. This is not inferred or guessed. It is a machine-returned field from Apple’s own database.
The same developer record lists not one app, not two, but three: Clash Report, Clash Report Map, and GDH: Haberin Dijital Medyası (”GDH: The Digital Media of the News”). Apple’s metadata also includes a “seller URL” field for the developer account, and that field does not point to clashreport.com. It points to a different website entirely: gdh.digital.
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.
The proof does not stop at Apple’s database. It is sitting in the operation’s own infrastructure.
Examination of GDH’s domain name records — the public technical records that describe how a website is hosted — reveals an internal subdomain called clashreport.gdh.digital. In other words, the operators of GDH set up a server inside their own GDH domain, named it after Clash Report, and run Clash Report’s content through it. Clash Report exists, technically, as a sub-component of gdh.digital. Companies do not configure their infrastructure this way unless one is a part of the other.
The shared technical fingerprints continue:
Both domains use the same Cloudflare nameservers (milan and wanda.ns.cloudflare.com), meaning they are managed under one Cloudflare account.
Both websites load images from the same content delivery network bucket, named image-gdh.b-cdn.net. Clash Report’s photos are served from a CDN bucket with “GDH” in its name.
Historical hosting records show both domains running on the same Istanbul-based hosting provider, TTEN Teknoloji A.Ş., on consecutive IP addresses. Earlier records place Clash Report on Çizgi Telekomünikasyon, also in Istanbul. The operation is hosted out of Istanbul.
There is also direct human evidence that GDH and Clash Report share staff, not just servers. Several editorial team members have user accounts registered on both domains’ content management systems. Email addresses matching Mehmet A. Kancı’s name — mehmet.kanci@clashreport.com and mehmet.kanci@gdh.digital — appear in the platform’s own source code, indicating registered user accounts within both systems. Gayesude Kayışlı, another editorial staffer, similarly appears in both systems. These are the same people, working for the same operation, under two different brand names.
Monolog Medya is a registered Turkish limited liability company with a website at monolog.com.tr and a business directory listing at Cumhuriyet Mah. Kıbrıs Cad. Sakız Sok. 17 D:14, Bahçelievler, İstanbul. It presents itself as a generic digital media and advertising agency. It is, in fact, the company that has been running one of the most widely-cited conflict news accounts on the internet.
Clash Report’s own contact page lists its address at Çobançeşme Mh. Sanayi Cad. No: 44 D-D:21, Bahçelievler, İstanbul. The phone number listed beside the address is +90 (000) 000 00 00 — a placeholder that was never filled in.
Monolog Medya’s registered business address is on a different street in the same Bahçelievler district. In other words, the company has at least two Istanbul addresses associated with its operations.
The Corporate “Shell”
As of April 2026, Monolog Medya’s public-facing business appears dormant. The company’s website at monolog.com.tr serves static content last updated around 2020-2021. The blog contains zero posts — the RSS feed is completely empty. All social media accounts (@monologmedya on X, Facebook, Instagram) have been inactive for six or more years. The company’s listed contact emails — info@monolog.com.tr and contact@monolog.com.tr — return SMTP “550 No Such User” errors, indicating no active mailboxes exist.
Yet the domain is renewed through November 2026, and the corporate entity remains the registered publisher of Clash Report’s iOS app in Apple’s records. This is not a dissolved company — it is a maintained legal shell. The actual operational work simply happens under the GDH brand. Monolog Medya serves as the corporate vehicle for contracts, app store registrations, and legal filings, while GDH and Clash Report handle public-facing operations.
Attempts to reach Monolog Medya for comment via all listed channels were unsuccessful.
The Man Running Monolog: Cüneyt Polat
Monolog Medya did not spring from nowhere. It has an owner, a director, and a face — and that face has a documented history inside Turkey’s government media apparatus that goes well beyond what the Clash Report brand would ever want its Western audience to know.
Turkish corporate registry filings identify Cüneyt Polat as Monolog Medya’s co-founder, primary shareholder, and current sole director, a position he has held on a continuous or near-continuous basis since the company’s founding in November 2014. He is the controlling figure behind the company that runs Clash Report. Monolog Medya’s registration number with the government is 944999. Polat is also publicly identified as the owner of GDH.
I was unable to identify Monolog Medya’s board of directors. However, a Turkish citizen with access to this portal theoretically could do so.
Polat served as TRT Haber Digital Media Director for twelve months, during which he directed the development of new broadcast models for TRT’s digital news platforms. TRT is directly controlled by the Turkish government and has been documented as a vehicle for Turkish state messaging.
Polat attended and reported from a private session hosted by the head of Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities (YTB), a Turkish government agency under direct presidential authority responsible for diaspora relations and soft-power projection abroad. These sessions are not open to the general public. Polat was in the room.
In December 2025, following the arrest of Habertürk’s editor-in-chief, Polat was publicly reported as the likely incoming editor-in-chief of Habertürk — one of Turkey’s largest cable news networks. Just three months prior, the network was seized by the Turkish government. That such a position was publicly associated with his name is itself significant: it means he is considered sufficiently reliable by the media ownership circles aligned with the government to be handed editorial control of a major national outlet.
To summarize in the meantime: The man behind Monolog Medya, the company that owns Clash Report, is a state media veteran, a trusted figure in the government media ecosystem, and — as you will see detailed below — his company is a contractor for the Erdoğan family’s own foundations.
Monolog Medya’s Ties to the Erdoğan Family
The relationship between Monolog Medya and the Erdoğan political family is not a single data point. It runs through two separate institutions, one pre-dating the other by years. Together they describe a company that is not merely adjacent to the Turkish government — it is stitched into the family’s own institutional fabric.
Connection One: TÜRGEV — The Erdoğan Family Foundation
Monolog Medya’s own public references page — a company’s curated list of clients it chooses to advertise — lists only two outside clients in its entire history. One is something called Kolejiniseç. The other is TÜRGEV.
TÜRGEV is not a generic charity. It was founded by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself during his tenure as Istanbul’s mayor in the 1990s, and has been run in close association with his family ever since. Erdoğan’s daughter, Esra Albayrak, sits on its board of directors. His son, Bilal Erdoğan, is a member of the Foundation Assembly. The foundation operates dormitories, education programs, and youth centers across Turkey, and has been awarded government land and tax exemptions through decisions that critics argue required direct Erdoğan family intervention.
TÜRGEV is also not controversy-free. It was named in the December 17, 2013 corruption indictment — Turkey’s largest graft investigation — which alleged that a private courier for an Iranian-Turkish gold trader later sanctioned by the United States, entered the TÜRGEV building carrying bags of cash. The investigation was shut down before charges could be filed; critics allege Erdoğan’s government intervened to kill it.
Monolog Medya lists TÜRGEV as one of its only two clients on its own public references page. For a small Istanbul digital agency, building the web presence of the Erdoğan family’s personal charitable foundation is not a routine commercial transaction. It is an act of institutional proximity. It means the people at Monolog were trusted with the digital face of Erdoğan’s own house.
Connection Two: Bayraktar and Teknofest
The second Erdoğan family connection runs through a different branch of the family, and directly into Turkey’s defense-industrial complex.
Publicly accessible internet certificate records show that Monolog Medya operated a backend server called teknofest-api.monolog.com.tr from February 2022 through November 2024. The certificates were renewed every 90 days, eleven times in a row, over 33 consecutive months. That is sustained, professional infrastructure work — not a one-off project.
Teknofest is Turkey’s largest technology festival, organized by the T3 Foundation (Türkiye Technology Team Foundation) and the Republic of Turkey’s Ministry of Industry and Technology.
The T3 Foundation’s Chairman of the Board of Trustees is Selçuk Bayraktar, who just so happens to also be Erdoğan’s son-in-law, and a billionaire drone manufacturer.
Far from just a simple tech fair, Teknofest operates under direct presidential patronage and is one of the flagship projects of Turkey’s national defense industry drive. And Monolog Medya — the company that operates GDH and Clash Report — was a backend contractor for it for nearly three years.
To be clear about what this means in full: Monolog Medya has documented client relationships with the personal foundation of the Erdoğan family (TÜRGEV, through his daughter Esra) and with the flagship technology festival of Erdoğan’s son-in-law (Teknofest, through Selçuk Bayraktar). These are not the same institution. They are two separate nodes of the Erdoğan political family. The company behind Clash Report is connected to both.
Clash Report’s Advertising Fingerprint
Clash Report’s homepage features a prominent banner ad for Aselsan, the Turkish state defense electronics giant. That is the only display advertiser visible on the site.
Aselsan is 74.20% owned by the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation, with the rest trading on the Istanbul stock exchange. It was founded in 1975 as a state vehicle for Turkish military electronics. Since 2017, the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation’s board has been chaired by the President of Turkey.
The People Behind the Clash Report Brand
Up until late April 2026, Clash Report did not publicly present any staff, editor-in-chief, founder, managing director, or publisher. Even now, the site has no masthead of any kind. But once I exposed how Clash Report likely used bot swarms to amass its large following on X, its editor revealed himself.
Kamer Kurunç — Chief Editor
Clash Report’s own YouTube channel names Kamer Kurunç by title. A video published on April 28, 2026 carries this description: “Clash Point host Isaac Eshetu and Chief Editor Kamer Kurunc sit down with Timothy Ash.”
Kurunç operates on X under the handle @kamerknc with the display name “Turkish Market.” His profile describes a focus on “Dış Haber / OSINT / U.S. / MENA / Turkey / National Security / Crowdsourcing.” He has 96,000+ followers, nearly 80,000 tweets, and links to a Telegram channel at t.me/realTurkishMarket.
Mehmet A. Kancı — State Media Columnist
Mehmet A. Kancı is part of the editorial staff of Clash Report. His bio, published on TRT Haber’s own author page, explains that he began at a private broadcaster in 1994, moved to TRT — the Turkish state broadcaster with questionable ties — and writes foreign-policy analyses for Anadolu Ajansı, another Turkish state news agency. Both are direct instruments of the Erdoğan government’s communications infrastructure. His verified title at TRT is Special Reports Coordinator, also referred to as Main News Director in TRT's own published materials. As of April 2026, Kancı still works as an editor for TRT.
Crucially, Kancı is not just an outside contributor publishing op-eds. Email addresses matching Kancı’s name — mehmet.kanci@clashreport.com and mehmet.kanci@gdh.digital — appear in the platform’s own source code, indicating registered user accounts within both content management systems. By all appearances, Kancı appears to be simultaneously working for Clash Report and Turkish state media.
It’s in Kancı’s personal writing that his true feelings are shared. He’s written that Israel has a “policy of killing children,” that U.S. President Donald Trump has “lost touch with reality,” that “Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby” have “blackmailed” Trump, that “Jewish lobbies that have bought 90% of members across both chambers of Congress,” and other similarly antisemitic, anti-American, conspiratorial nonsense.
Levent Kemal — Former Anadolu Agency Syria Correspondent
Levent Kemal is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul who confirmed his own Clash Report affiliation in a February 2026 tweet: “For the curious, I’m attaching below the work I did at Clash Report almost a year ago.” His Middle East Eye author bio confirms he was Syria correspondent for Anadolu — the same Turkish state news agency where Kancı publishes.
Isaac Eshetu — Clash Point Host, Islamist Content Network
Isaac Eshetu — full name Isaac Eshetu Aragaw — is the on-camera host of Clash Report’s video podcast, Clash Point. His LinkedIn identifies him as an Ethiopian journalist based in Istanbul, educated at Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University — a Turkish state-foundation university run under the Republic of Turkey’s Directorate General of Foundations.
On his personal X account @isaacEthio, Eshetu posts Islamic scholars and commentators affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood alongside the hashtag #UmmahQuotes. Two of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders he has repeatedly chosen to promote are:
Dr. Tariq al-Suwaidan, whom Eshetu promoted under the headline “We Will Crush Your Business with Boycott If You Support Apartheid Israel,” is an organizational Brotherhood leader, not simply a sympathizer. He publicly identified himself as “one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood” during a lecture in Yemen. Kuwait revoked his citizenship by royal decree in December 2025. In a 2014 sermon directed at Hamas, he urged Palestinian mothers to raise their children “on the hatred of the sons of Zion.” Belgium banned him from entry over antisemitic statements.
Dr. Azzam Tamimi, whom Eshetu promoted under the headline “America is in Decline! Tyranny Can’t Last Forever!”, is a confirmed Brotherhood figure in Britain. He was a prominent official in the Muslim Association of Britain and co-founded the British Muslim Initiative, both of which are Brotherhood-affiliated organizations. In September 2014 the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s own website described him as “a leading member of the Brotherhood in Britain.” He was previously the official spokesperson for the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood. In a 2004 BBC interview, he described becoming a suicide bomber against Israel as “a noble cause... the straight way to pleasing my God.”
These are two of the most prominent confirmed Brotherhood figures in the English-speaking world, and Clash Report’s podcast host is actively and repeatedly amplifying both under a branded content project on his personal account.
There is a further biographical thread worth noting, though it is not yet fully confirmed. CPJ records from 2012–2013 document an Isaac Eshetu who was a copy editor at Ye Muslimoch Guday (”Muslim Affairs”), an Ethiopian Islamic publication whose editors were jailed on counter-terrorism charges. According to ARTICLE 19’s UN submission, “Akemel Negash and Isaac Eshetu, both editors of Muslim Affairs, fled into exile on 31 July 2012.”
The Launch-Day Tweet
The @clashreport handle was registered on X on May 12, 2015. It sat dormant for nearly five years. Its first tweet posted on February 28, 2020.
The day before, Syrian regime airstrikes had hit a Turkish position in Balyun, southern Idlib, killing 33 Turkish soldiers — directly triggering Operation Spring Shield. By the time Clash Report posted its first tweet, Turkish Bayraktar drones were already airborne over Idlib, destroying Syrian armor on a scale the world had never seen from a Turkish platform.
By the following day, as I already exposed earlier, the Clash Report profile amassed 49,200 followers. An account that had never posted a single tweet in nearly five years had the follower count of a mid-tier media brand. No organic growth mechanism explains that number.
You do not register a Twitter handle in 2015, sit on it for half a decade, and then activate it the night your country launches its largest open military operation in a generation, by accident.
Summing All This Up
Clash Report is the English-language division of a Turkish media company called Monolog Medya, whose director is a veteran of Turkish state media and whose client list includes two separate institutions tied to the Erdoğan political family. Its editors and staff are alumni of Turkish state news outlets, its only advertiser is a Turkish state defense contractor, and its podcast host promotes confirmed Muslim Brotherhood leaders.
When American journalists, politicians, or analysts cite Clash Report as a news source, this is what they are citing. Not an OSINT collective. Not citizen journalism. The English-language division of a Turkish-language news brand, run by a company whose owner is a veteran of Turkish state media, whose client roster includes the personal foundation of the Erdoğan family and the flagship festival of Erdoğan’s son-in-law, edited by people trained in Turkish state media, and hosted by someone who promotes confirmed Muslim Brotherhood leaders on his personal feed.
The operators chose, very deliberately, not to put their names on the door.
So I did it for them.
Eitan’s notes:
The following was created using a combination of open-source tools, AI tools, and my own research. Analytical support provided by ThirdLantern (CYBINT/WEBINT)
I asked Monolog Medya, GDH, Isaac Eshetu, Clash Report, and Mehmet Kancı for comment.
None answered.
Beware of Ottoman Aspirations . The New Ottoman Empire is upon us.
I like how everyone associated with clash report openly display their association on their public profiles and Eitan is pretending to have uncovered some secret underground network.