Newsletters
On Valentine's Day 2023, days after earthquakes killed more than 33,000 people and leveled entire cities across Türkiye, Madonna posted to her global following on Instagram, telling them "The Best Place to Donate is Ahbap." The post pushed an already growing wave of American donations toward the charity.
That wave included corporate money. Ahbap's benefactor list from the earthquake period names TikTok, Uber, LG, Bitfinex, McDonald's and Amazon among the companies that routed disaster relief funds through the charity rather than through Turkish state channels, part of more than ₺1 billion, about $21 million, in benefactor contributions.
It also included American internet culture at street level as even Darren Watkin, better known by the online alias "IShowSpeed," pledged $50,000 to the efforts led by Haluk Levent, a Turkish rock singer and activist.
Just six months ago, Levent stood before a United Nations gathering in Kenya and gave a speech on humanitarian aid to Gaza. The U.N.'s relief chief, Tom Fletcher, thanked him publicly for using his platform to fund OCHA's operations.
On Sunday, Turkish police pulled the same man off a highway outside Bursa, intercepting what prosecutors say was an attempt to leave the country. The gap between those two moments is the story now consuming Türkiye.
Levent built his public identity over three decades, first as a rock musician who helped revive interest in Anatolian folk-rock in the 1990s, later as the founder of the Ahbap Association in 2017. The charity grew into something closer to an informal emergency-response network, mobilizing volunteers and donations during floods, wildfires and the February 2023 earthquakes.
That speed built trust. Polling after the earthquakes repeatedly placed Levent among the most trusted public figures in the country for six years consecutively, and Ahbap positioned itself as a channel for donations that many Turks said they trusted more than official disaster-relief bodies. Levent leaned into the role: he pledged, in his own words, to account for the earthquake donations "penny by penny."
That pledge is now the center of an Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office investigation. On July 12, Levent was detained on the Bursa-Izmir highway. Investigators say he had first gone to Istanbul Airport for a flight to Germany, learned of a travel ban against him, then turned toward Bursa with what prosecutors describe as a planned onward route to Izmir and a sea crossing. Twenty people were detained in the same operation, including a lawyer, Ece Guner, who claims to have lent the singer money.
Levent faces three sets of allegations: violating Türkiye's Law on Associations, laundering assets derived from criminal activity and membership in a criminal organization. As of this writing, no arrest decision has been issued; his police statement was still underway, with a referral to the prosecutor's office and a subsequent hearing before a magistrate expected to follow.
A Financial Crimes Investigation Board (MASAK) report submitted to the investigation examined the accounts of three people linked to Ahbap, identified in the document only by initials.
One, listed in social security records as a musician with a declared monthly income near ₺20,000 ($425.26), moved ₺779 million in and ₺671 million out of personal accounts between 2020 and 2024.
A second, described as an organization coordinator, handled inflows of ₺1.47 billion against outflows of ₺1.54 billion in the same period.
MASAK concluded the pattern broke sharply from what it called the ordinary course of life, starting in the first quarter of 2020, and flagged that Ahbap's name appeared repeatedly in transfer descriptions, including phrases such as "loaned to the Ahbap Association" and "for use in Ahbap activities."
The report alleges Levent personally placed roughly ₺990 million in bets between 2020 and 2026, losing about ₺390 million of it. One of the three individuals named in the MASAK report is separately alleged to have lost ₺190.27 million through a betting company.
Investigators also allege that donors were, at points, directed toward a personal account belonging to Levent's assistant, Yeliz Kaya, rather than Ahbap's official accounts, and that ₺120 million from that account went toward personal spending and gambling.
MASAK further noted that Kaya, who the report says held no formal position at Ahbap, carried out 45 property transactions in 2025 and 55 in 2026 through a company, and that municipal tenders were allegedly routed through a separate commercial entity, Sur Muzik, using invoices investigators describe as inflated.
A separate strand of the file, opened after a criminal complaint, centers on Huseyin Basaran, chairman of Basaran Holding, who lost his daughter Mina in a 2018 plane crash.
According to the complaint, Levent and Kaya approached Basaran proposing that Ahbap purchase 22 of his properties, worth an estimated $60 million, to build a dormitory for university-aged women in his daughter's memory.
When Basaran rejected a proposed payment by promissory note, the complaint alleges the pitch shifted: the properties would need to be registered to Kaya's name to receive funding from the United States and the European Union.
Deeds were allegedly transferred through a longtime Basaran employee, then moved again within roughly a day to other names. Basaran has not been paid, according to the complaint underlying the investigation.
None of these financial allegations have been tested in court, and Levent has not been convicted of any offense connected to them yet.
When Twitter officially rebranded as X in July 2023, and the iconic blue bird was replaced by a single letter, anyone looking at Turkish-language tweets calling for disaster relief would have almost certainly seen Ahbap’s official account tagged first.
This massive popularity and visibility made the association a symbol of ultimate trust, quickly mobilizing the Turkish diaspora. Eager to contribute to relief efforts back home, Turkish citizens living abroad teamed up with Ahbap volunteers to establish international fundraising channels. One of these was Ahbap America.
Created to streamline aid and bypass complex regulatory hurdles in the United States, Ahbap America never quite matched the public profile of its parent organization in Türkiye.
Yet, when state regulators did not step in to audit its finances as it remained under the threshold, the organization proactively hired private auditing firms and successfully cleared their independent reviews.
Levent addressed the broader financial scrutiny before his detention, after public pressure pushed him to itemize the roughly ₺7 billion, about $158 million at the time, that Ahbap collected during the earthquake period. Levent said the association's accounts had already been reviewed by Interior Ministry inspectors and promised to post a full, item-by-item breakdown on social media.
He had also separately acknowledged personal financial strain, including a roughly ₺70 million lira judicial fine over bounced checks earlier this year, while insisting his private business dealings were entirely separate from the charity. Following his detention, Levent told reporters to "wait for the real bomb."
Ahbap has been audited seven times since its founding, a point Levent has cited as evidence of the charity's transparency. He had also said, before his detention, that he planned to step down as chairman once current projects were finished. Whether that transition now happens on his own terms or under a criminal judgment is a question the courts, not the headlines, will have to settle.
Set as preferred source
Set as preferred source
1 min read
1 min read
