When the mercury rises, tempers can fray, and simmering political tensions can come to a boil.

That's exactly what happened two summers ago in Turkey,

when it witnessed the bloodiest coup attempt in its political history.

Part of the Turkish military launched an operation to topple the government and unseat the

president. Military tanks rolled through Ankara and Istanbul. Fighter jets dropped bombs

on the parliament, and the chairman of Turkey's joint chiefs of staff was kidnapped by his own security detail.

Cool leaders seized the state TV and forced the anchor to read a prepared statement.

But President Richard Taleb Erdogan used Facebook Live to speak to CNN Turk and urged his supporters to resist.

They did. Civilians took to the streets armed in some cases with only kitchen utensils and fought back against the rebel military group as the world's news

consumers took in conflicting accounts from the field. By morning, it was mostly over. The coup had

failed. The chaos of the reporting prompted some of our listeners to tell us on Twitter that

they would have appreciated a breaking news consumers handbook coup edition. We hadn't considered that because we just don't

see many coups anymore. Researchers Clayton Thine and Jonathan Powell looked into this

and found that while in the 60s there were roughly 12 coup attempts around the globe per year,

now there were only three,

if that. Interestingly, we also found that plotters today are generally more successful than in the past. For instance, much of the Arab Spring actually involved military coups in tandem with

popular uprisings.

Many of these coups were messy, but nevertheless successful in bringing down the government.

But not in Turkey.

Nanihal Singh is the author of Seizing Power, the Strategic Logic of Military Coups.

He told us that what happened in Turkey was a textbook fail.

The most important thing is that a coup has to appear to be inevitable.

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