What Does Turkey Want in Africa?
Turkey is not the largest power interested in Africa. Its economic engagement, arms sales, and foreign aid are dwarfed by one or more of the major powers. However, its position as a minor player is often a major advantage. Having a more modest presence on the continent than the US, China, Russia, or the EU means that Ankara can invest deeply in core areas of interest. Even though it is a NATO member with historical enmity toward Russia and a history of colonialism in North Africa under the Ottoman Empire, Ankara has positioned itself, its NGOs, and its contractors as fairly neutral actors compared to the competition. Where some countries might be worried about dealing with Russia or China for fear of backlash from the US or EU, Turkey often delivers security and economic benefits without upsetting the Great Powers.
So, what does Turkey want out of its partnerships in Africa? Unlike the larger powers, Ankara sees Africa as a core part of its global political and economic engagement, following in the footsteps of its Ottoman forefathers. Turkey could benefit from such new relations by expanding diplomatic support at the UN, becoming a pressure reliever for Syrian political and refugee issues, and negotiating favorable economic trade deals. Growing its political and economic influence in Africa also establishes an avenue to compete with regional rivals in the Middle East. To grow its economic and political clout, Turkey often pairs its projects with military elements through security and resource protection activities or arms sales.
Political and Economic Projects
Turkey sees much to gain in its near south. President Erdoğan’s establishment hopes to improve diplomatic relations to gain preferred status and international backing for Ankara’s own projects. New political ties provide Turkey with potential support in the UN General Assembly and at the Security Council. Much like the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and other regional competitors, such support can be invaluable when a state conducts unethical military activities. In Turkey’s case, its ongoing war with Kurdish armed groups inside and outside its borders has invariably caused civilian deaths. For these reasons and within President Erdoğan’s broader project, Turkey is also seeking African partners to help build global South-South cooperation, especially through bilateral trade and investment. Turkish companies have expanded into Africa, including innovative energy projects run by companies like Karpowership, which operates ship-based natural gas power plants near major African cities like Dakar and Freetown.(1) Turkey funds major infrastructure projects, including the new Addis Ababa airport and road and port projects in Senegal. Turkish charities contribute indirectly to its influence. Ankara maintains close relations with its NGOs working in Africa to gain local knowledge in exchange for promotion and support. Turkish government organizations also win goodwill through high-profile actions like providing COVID-19 relief across most of the continent.
Economic engagement does more than build influence. Many of Turkey’s new projects offer immense economic benefits for the states and companies willing to go abroad at its behest. Total trade volume between Turkey and African nations increased over seven times between 2003 and 2023—from $1.35 billion to $12.4 billion USD—with the government aiming for even more ambitious goals in the future. As of September 2024, it has signed free trade agreements with Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, and Mauritius. Turkey is also pursuing Africa’s natural resources, including oil, uranium, and gold. In particular, Turkey—producing only 25 percent of its own energy as of 2022—hopes to make a dent in its energy importer status through the establishment of Turkish-based nuclear power plants, including the four-reactor project under an agreement with Russian energy giant Rosatom. However, Rosatom’s agreement to provide fuel for the project is limited, given sanctions on Russian businesses due to the war in Ukraine. Turkey likely needs an alternative source of uranium for this project, explaining its increased interest in uranium reserves on the continent, particularly Niger.
However, Africa’s natural resources are not always located in stable countries. Turkish firms must sometimes engage in conflict-ridden environments to extract resources. Niger is in the midst of a political crisis, but deals to secure gold from Burkina Faso and oil from Somalia also put Turkish companies amid conflict.(2) Extracting resources from war-torn areas is no easy feat and draws Ankara into security commitments. Turkey’s next element of African foreign policy reflects these threats and mimics those of many of its rivals, particularly Russia and the UAE.
Military Contractors
SADAT is Turkey’s version of Wagner Group. Like Wagner, it is a politically connected Private Military and Security Company (PMSC) that acts at the behest of the state but maintains some level of formal separation.(3) SADAT’s debut in 2013 was as one of many external forces intervening in the Libyan Civil War. Subsequent US Department of Defense Inspector General reports stated that SADAT trainers supervised, trained, and paid five thousand Syrian mercenaries, while also training other fighters supporting the Turkish-supported Government of National Accord (GNA). Since then, the company has grown across Africa, doing everything from training soldiers in Somalia to direct security services in the Sahel. SADAT has allegedly taken contracts in Burkina Faso and Niger, this time using Syrian mercenaries within their ranks. Ankara’s political flexibility puts it in a unique position vis-à-vis Moscow: SADAT’s contracts in the Sahel are concurrent with the deployment of Russian contractors, even as the nations supported opposite sides in Libya and Ukraine.
Using PMSCs like SADAT is appealing for several reasons. SADAT can protect Ankara’s economic interests. Reports suggest that this could already be happening in Niger, where SADAT may even be protecting Russian Nordgold’s mines, again demonstrating a symbiosis with Russia in the Sahel. Like its Russian PMSCs, SADAT can also offer a package of regime security services, including bodyguarding, training, and counterterrorism operations, in exchange for resource extraction guarantees from host governments. This is likely an appealing prospect, particularly for Niger and Burkina Faso that host small Africa Corps deployments but lack experienced fighters, heavy equipment, and significant foreign support. There is also the ancillary benefit of repurposing Syrian fighters. In Ankara’s view, sending Syrians abroad provides a useful pressure valve release for armed actors who could otherwise become problematic for the new government in Syria or Turkey.
Finally, Ankara values SADAT’s religious component. The organization’s founder, Adnan Tanriverdi, was expelled from the Turkish army in 1997 for Salafist tendencies, but he later returned to serve Erdoğan as a military adviser to the president’s cabinet while promoting an ideology supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. Tanriverdi hoped to foster intra-Muslim military cooperation, establishing what he called a “Muslim Superpower”—a combination of participating Muslim countries that would only trail the US and China in aggregate defense spending. While this statement may be grandiose and unbelievable, it points to the inherently religious focus of SADAT and its focus on fostering Muslim international relations. The organization’s name itself comes from the suffix given to families who were descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Thus, SADAT has been pitched as a sort of “holy” mercenary organization—explaining its connections with Muslim Brotherhood-led forces in Libya and its alleged training for Islamists in Somalia and Qatar. However, these religious roots could be problematic in its Sahelian deployment, particularly if the group is indeed fighting fundamentalist Sunni jihadist forces such as Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM), Boko Haram, and Islamic State-Sahel Province (ISSP).
Sub-Saharan Africa offers a variety of appealing options for the Turkish state. France’s withdrawal from many of its former colonies over the past five years has left a great power gap that the United States, China, and Russia have yet to comprehensively fill. After coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, France was unceremoniously forced out of major Sahelian military deployments by the new junta governments of these countries, creating vacuums for others to fill. These gaps exist most clearly in the military assistance sector, particularly as West Africa suffers a significant uptick in jihadi violence. However, this violence also reflects limited investment, both internal and external, in economies, infrastructure, and education. Turkey has many of the tools to build these new relations.
On the other hand, security operations create several different problems for Turkish foreign policy. President Erdoğan’s supposed mission of leading Muslims worldwide is complicated by his support for Sahelian regimes that often explicitly target and retaliate against local Muslim populations, including civilians, for alleged ties with terrorist groups. Will Turkish civilians and soldiers working in the Sahel continue supporting regimes that attack Muslims? Will SADAT’s Syrian troops continue fighting against other Muslims? Both of these are open questions and invite potential blowback against the Turkish state. While discussing the latter operation, this confusing distribution of values is pushed to the extreme. Former Syrian rebels are expected to work alongside or even report to their former adversaries—Russian mercenaries and veterans of the Africa Corps and former Wagner Group members—in battle against other Muslims. BBC reporting has already identified friction between Syrian and Russian troops, so it may only be a matter of time before this partnership fractures.
Arms Sales
Turkey’s expanding military sales in Africa go hand in hand with its PMSC activity. Ankara has become the continent’s fourth largest arms exporter despite being a small player globally. While China has recently taken the mantle from Russia in terms of total arms sales to African countries, there is still enormous demand for Turkish defense equipment, which has a reputation for being cost-efficient.
Drone exports, a particularly touchy field for the US and China, make up a significant portion of Turkish trade. The TB2 Bayraktar and Akinci are particularly valuable to junta leaders in Niger, Burkina Faso, and Mali, given their acute need for ISR and air support, but have also been sold to countries like Togo and Djibouti. Drones are not the only area of growth: Turkish companies also export small arms, trainer aircraft, helicopters, and armored vehicles to a growing number of governments across Africa.
While Turkish involvement in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the Sahel, has been painted as a net positive for both partner states and for Turkey itself, significant drawbacks lie just over the horizon. Charlie Werb, an expert on Sahelian security issues, points to a change in JNIM propaganda and public messaging, which now paints Turkey as an enemy and complicit in attacks on civilians. These conclusions are unsurprising given the nature of Turkish counterterror operations and military sales. JNIM has accused Turkey and Burkina Faso of bombing a mosque in Bana. Meanwhile, drone strikes carried out by the Malian army in Kidal against a former UN position allegedly taken over by JNIM in November 2023 killed 14 people, including children and a deputy mayor less than a year after Mali received Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones. Werb suggests that JNIM could retaliate against Turkey by targeting Turkish economic assets and kidnapping Turkish personnel, as the group recently kidnapped two Russian geologists in Niger.
Direct Military Cooperation
Ankara also has more direct security engagements than arms sales and contractors. Turkey is particularly interested in the Horn of Africa due to its importance to trade and access to the Indian Ocean. In 2017, they established a military base in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, worth $50 million USD. Like American and Chinese military bases in Djibouti, Camp TURKSOM provides Turkey with military basing close to the Indian Ocean; although, it focuses more on supporting the federal government of Somalia and competing with the UAE, which opposes the Muslim Brotherhood and supports Somalia’s breakaway states, than basing naval vessels. Turkey aims to train ten thousand Somali troops at the base, roughly a third of the national army, including elite special forces.
Turkey has a variety of economic and political incentives to ensure a united Somalia. In 2024, Turkey signed a memorandum of understanding with Somalia to equip, reconstruct, and train the Somalian navy. In return, the Somalian government exchanged a 30 percent share of Somalia’s Exclusive Economic Zone revenue in a quid pro quo that benefits both sides economically if they can crack down on illegal activity and the informal economy in Somali waters.
In early February 2025, Turkey reportedly entered into a new agreement with the Chadian government to take control of the Abeche military base, which saw its French garrison leave in late January. Turkey’s intelligence agency, Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı, has also established a hub in Niger. These deals demonstrate Turkey’s expanding military presence in the region, its interest in reestablishing Ottoman-era influence on the continent,(4) and how African governments see Ankara as a less controversial actor than its ally France.
Turkey’s Expanding Role on the Continent
Turkey maintains several advantages in sub-Saharan efforts to identify new allies and patrons, advantages that many of its rivals might not possess. The country is not particularly offensive to either Russia, the US, or China, making it unlikely that any of these would oppose Turkish activities in Africa. While this could change depending on potential human rights abuses by SADAT, due to commercial competition with China, or due to PMSC friction or competition with Russia’s Africa Corps, it is unlikely that any of these countries would move to sanction or militarily oppose Turkish activities. Instead, Turkey’s main rival appears to be the UAE, as both are competing in Libya and Somalia. However, the UAE does not appear committed to foiling Turkish ambitions beyond a few flashpoints. Lacking a standing army and relatively population-scarce, the UAE could only hope to compete with Turkey through financing, weapons sales, or general economic aid. Should the UAE choose to stand up a PMSC to conduct operations in Africa, it could potentially pose a threat to Turkish activities, but this is merely a hypothetical today.
While Turkey benefits from limited competition and international pushback on its operations in Africa, sooner or later it will need to face the internal contradictions of this project, particularly its military operations. As Russia, France, and the US have found, growing security commitments strain resources and relationships with African nations. Given the importance of Ankara’s economic engagement to its trade and energy security, Erdoğan may have to literally pick his battles to ensure that Turkish influence is still seen as a net positive by its African partners. As more global powers see African states as beneficial political and economic partners, Turkey’s semi-neutral position will come under pressure. How Erdoğan navigates the coming years will play a big part in whether the US and Europe see Turkey as a partner in Africa—or a rival.
Image: Turkish marine forces stand guard aboard the Turkish Navy Ship F514 after it docked at the Mogadishu Sea Port following the signing of a defense and economic agreement between Somalia and Turkey in Mogadishu, Somalia April 23, 2024. REUTERS/Feisal Omar
(1) This project has come with some backlash, as the company received negative publicity for shutting off power to Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau after authorities did not pay the company’s bills.
(2) There appears to be pushback from the Burkinabe junta, which has withdrawn licenses of Turkish mining operators in-country, demonstrating the push and pull between different conflict actors around natural resources.
(3) Other organizations such as the Suleiman Shah Division exist, but they fill almost the same role as SADAT and can be functionally grouped together.
(4) Turkish intelligence has confirmed its interest in reestablishing “Osmanlı Turkeysi” (Ottoman Turkey) in North Africa through public academic reports. In Niger, this includes Agadez, the location of a key uranium mining site and home to the Ottoman Sultanate of Agadez in the 1300s.
