Turkey in Africa, the arms-and-influence strategy of a middle power that arrived while the West argued about leaving

I. The shape of the strategy

The numbers tell the first half of the story. Turkey's trade with Africa, roughly 4.3 billion dollars in 2002, exceeded 37 billion in 2024, with Ankara targeting 40 billion for 2025.^[1][2] Turkish contractors have completed an estimated 100 billion dollars of construction across the continent.^[3] The diplomatic build-out matches the commercial one: Turkish embassies in Africa rose from twelve in 2002 to forty-four, and the number of African embassies in Ankara climbed from ten in 2018 to around thirty-seven.^[4][5] This is not opportunism. It is a sustained, two-decade project, and it has a doctrine: presence first, conditions never.

What distinguishes the Turkish approach from the European one is the absence of the governance lecture. Ankara sells, builds and trains without attaching demands on democracy or human rights, the same quality that makes it attractive to coup-installed governments in the Sahel and unsettling to its NATO allies. The instruments are four: commerce, soft power, arms, and basing. Taken separately they look modest. Taken together they form the most integrated external influence strategy on the continent.

II. Soft power: the airline, the agency, the mosque and the school

Before the drones came the everyday infrastructure of presence. Turkish Airlines flies to dozens of African destinations, the figure is commonly given as sixty or more, one of the widest African networks of any non-African carrier, turning Istanbul into a hub for African travel and trade.^[6] The development agency TİKA, which opened its first African office in 2005, now runs some twenty-two offices on the continent and reports having carried out 1,884 projects there in a recent five-year span.^[7]

Faith and education are the deeper layers. Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs, Diyanet, financed the Abdülhamid II mosque in Djibouti, inaugurated in November 2019 and billed as the largest in East Africa.^[8] After the 2016 coup attempt, Ankara created the Maarif Foundation to take over schools linked to the Gülen movement, which it designates a terrorist organisation, acquiring an initial 118 schools across sixteen African countries and now operating in around twenty-five, with some thirty African states having transferred or closed Gülen institutions at Ankara's request.^[9] These figures come largely from Turkish state sources and should be read with that in mind, but the direction is not in doubt: Turkey has built a civilian footprint that long predates and underwrites its military one.

Ankara's genius was to arrive as a builder and a believer before it arrived as an arms dealer. By the time the weapons came, the relationships were already there.

III. The drone that changed the market

The single most consequential Turkish export to Africa is the Bayraktar TB2, an armed drone built by Baykar, the firm run by President Erdoğan's son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar. Its appeal is brutally simple: at a unit cost commonly put in the low single-digit millions of dollars, it delivers a fraction of a Western drone's capability at a fraction of the price, with none of the export conditions.^[10] That combination has reshaped the African market.

The proof of concept came in Ethiopia. Addis Ababa ordered TB2s in August 2021 and used them, from late that year, to halt the Tigrayan advance on the capital, a battlefield reversal widely attributed in part to Turkish and other drones.^[11] The orders followed. Morocco contracted for thirteen armed TB2s in 2021 and by December 2024 had agreed to local production; Niger received at least six by 2022; Mali built one of the continent's larger fleets; Togo, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and others joined the customer list.^[12][13][14] By 2024 an estimated eighteen African states operated Turkish drones.^[15] The aggregate picture is captured by SIPRI: Turkey's share of global arms exports rose 103 per cent between 2015–19 and 2020–24, and in the latter period Turkey was the third-largest arms supplier to West Africa, level with Russia, and the fourth-largest to sub-Saharan Africa.^[16]

IV. Libya: the intervention that announced the strategy

If the drones reshaped the market, Libya announced that Ankara would fight. In late November 2019 Turkey signed two memoranda with Libya's Tripoli-based Government of National Accord, one delimiting a maritime boundary in the eastern Mediterranean, the other on military cooperation.^[17] On 2 January 2020 the Turkish parliament authorised intervention, and Turkish drones, air defences and advisers, alongside transported Syrian fighters, helped the GNA push Khalifa Haftar's forces out of north-western Libya, retaking Tripoli's environs and the stronghold of Tarhouna by June 2020.^[18] The Syrian National Army deployment is the darker side of the ledger: the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated some 18,000 fighters were sent, a figure that is widely cited but monitor-sourced and not independently verifiable.^[19]

Libya mattered beyond Libya. It demonstrated that Turkey would convert commercial and diplomatic presence into decisive military effect when its interests, here, eastern Mediterranean gas rights and a friendly Tripoli, were at stake. Every African government that has since signed a Turkish defence deal did so knowing what Ankara is willing to do.

V. The Horn: base, navy, and the broker's chair

Turkey's Somalia relationship is the strategy in miniature. Camp TURKSOM, opened in Mogadishu on 30 September 2017, is Turkey's largest overseas military base; it trains the Somali "Gorgor" commando units, reportedly cost around 50 million dollars, and was built to train thousands of Somali soldiers.^[20][21] In February 2024 the two states signed a defence and economic framework under which Turkey will help build and protect a Somali navy across one of Africa's longest coastlines, and a March 2024 energy agreement sent the Turkish survey vessel Oruç Reis to explore Somali waters.^[22][23] Reporting on the petroleum terms, including a leaked document said to grant Turkey up to ninety per cent of output as cost recovery, is unconfirmed and should be treated as contested.^[24]

The most striking move was diplomatic. On 11 December 2024 Erdoğan hosted Somalia's president and Ethiopia's prime minister in Ankara and brokered the Ankara Declaration, defusing the crisis triggered by Ethiopia's January 2024 memorandum with Somaliland by committing the parties to respect Somali sovereignty while securing Ethiopia "reliable, secure and sustainable" sea access under Somali authority.^[25][26] A power that can sell the drones, train the army, explore the oil and then mediate the region's most dangerous dispute is operating on a different level from a mere arms exporter.

VI. The Sahel: filling the same gap, on different terms

Where Russia entered the post-Western Sahel as a protector-for-resources, Turkey entered as a supplier-with-discretion, and the two are not the same. Turkey signed a military training agreement with Niger in 2020 and deepened cooperation after the 2023 coup, signing a military-financial agreement in July 2024 and expanding into energy, mining and intelligence; Niger has unveiled Turkish Aksungur combat drones and operates TB2s.^[27][28] Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger have all taken Turkish drones since 2022, with Mali and Burkina Faso moving up to the larger Akıncı in 2024.^[29] There are also troubling reports, denied by the company and based on monitor sources, that the Erdoğan-linked private security firm SADAT sent around 1,100 Syrian fighters to Niger.^[30]

The contrast with Russia is the analytically important point. Turkey sells capability and training but has not, in the Sahel, planted a praetorian guard inside the presidency or seized mines as payment. Its model is lighter, more deniable, and more compatible with eventual Western re-engagement, which is precisely why it should worry European planners less as a rival to be expelled and more as a channel that may, in time, be worked with.

VII. The Institute's assessment

Three judgments follow, offered as the Institute's appreciation rather than as fact.

First, Turkey's strategy is coherent in a way the West's is not. Brussels and Washington present Africa with a bundle of conditions, fragmented instruments and shifting attention. Ankara presents a single, legible offer: we will trade, build, train and arm, and we will not lecture. In a continent weary of the governance sermon, that offer wins. The West's disadvantage is not resources; it is coherence.

Second, the arms relationship is a double bind for Turkey's allies. The TB2 has democratised airpower for African states, including juntas and governments fighting insurgencies with little regard for civilian protection. Turkey gains influence with every sale; it also acquires partial responsibility for how the weapons are used. The Institute judges that the reputational and legal exposure of unconditioned drone sales will rise, and that Ankara will face growing pressure, including from within NATO, to attach end-use scrutiny it has so far avoided.

Third, Turkey is a NATO member running an independent Africa policy, and that contradiction is becoming strategically material. Ankara arms states the West sanctions, mediates disputes the West cannot reach, and bases forces where the West is retreating. This is not hostility; it is autonomy. But it means the Atlantic alliance now contains a member whose African footprint may cut across allied policy at any moment.

VIII. Conclusion, three propositions to 2028

The Institute closes with three operational propositions, each with a marker to test it against.

Engage Turkey as a security interlocutor on Africa, not a competitor to be contained. The marker of success would be a standing NATO–Turkey consultation channel on African deployments and arms transfers by end-2027. Treating Ankara as a rival guarantees friction without leverage; treating it as an interlocutor is the only way to influence its end-use practices.

Make drone end-use the test case for a common standard. Turkish, Chinese and increasingly other suppliers have ended the West's monopoly on armed drones in Africa. A credible, multilaterally negotiated end-use and civilian-harm standard, one Ankara could plausibly sign because it would bind its competitors too, is the realistic ceiling on the harm. The marker: any joint framework, even minimal, agreed among major drone exporters by 2028.

Watch the Horn as the bellwether. Turkey's ability to be simultaneously arms supplier, base host, energy partner and mediator in Somalia is the clearest test of whether its integrated model scales. If the Somali navy is built and the Ankara Declaration holds through 2027, Turkey will have demonstrated a form of influence the West has not matched on the continent in a generation. If both falter, the model's limits will show. Either way, the era in which Turkey could be filed under "junior partner" is over.