MOGADISHU, Somalia — Barely 12 hours after a failed coup in Turkey, Somalia’s cabinet met to consider a request from Turkey to shut down two schools and a hospital linked to Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim cleric whom the Turkish president blames for the attempted coup.
Teachers and pupils — almost all of them Somali — at the two boarding schools run by Mr. Gulen’s Nile Academy educational foundation were given seven days to pack their bags and leave the school.
Turkey’s ties with Somalia are well established. The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, became the first non-African leader to visit Somalia in nearly 20 years in 2011, when he was prime minister.
The closings in Somalia are part of a wider effort to erode Mr. Gulen’s influence, with Mr. Erdogan going after not only the cleric’s followers at home but also Mr. Gulen’s network of schools and other interests around the world.
Like the two Somali schools, the Deva hospital, a rare private clinic in the battle-scarred capital, Mogadishu, is no longer open.
Somalia is not the only country where Mr. Erdogan has tried to limit the influence of Mr. Gulen, who has denied any role in the attempted coup from his home in exile in the United States.
Turkey has also appealed to countries like Germany, Indonesia, Kenya and Nigeria to shut down institutions backed by Mr. Gulen.
In Kenya, where Mr. Gulen’s Omeriye Foundation has grown from its first school in 1998 in the vast Nairobi slum of Kibera to a nationwide network of academies, the government has for the most part resisted requests by Turkish officials to close them down.
Officials in Germany, which has an estimated 14 high schools with links to Mr. Gulen, were asked by Turkey to examine a list of those institutions. But Winfried Kretschmann, the premier of the state of Baden-Württemberg, said: “We are responsible for these institutions and no one else. We will judge these institutions with our own discretion and we are aware of nothing negative about these institutions.”
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