From Famine Ally to Reluctant Enforcer
When Turkey first arrived in Somalia during the devastating famine of 2011, it was hailed as a friend. Its doctors, aid workers, and engineers were seen as saviors in a country where international promises had often failed to deliver. Turkish charities built schools, Turkish firms paved roads, and Turkish doctors staffed hospitals that carried the name of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. This humanitarian opening gave Ankara a unique moral authority in Somalia—an authority most Western powers lacked.
But the story did not end with charity. What began as soft power soon hardened into something else: security infrastructure, military bases, and armed drones. By 2017, Turkey had established its largest overseas military base in Mogadishu, training thousands of Somali soldiers. By 2023, Turkish Bayraktar drones hovered in Somali skies, hunting al-Shabab militants. Ankara became not just a partner but a co-combatant in Somalia’s decades-long war against al Qaeda’s most powerful African affiliate.
For many in Mogadishu, this shift was not subtle. It was a transformation of Turkey’s image—from compassionate ally to shadow power. The Quracley strike of January 2023 captured that transformation in brutal detail. Seven young people were killed, including three sons of Mohamed Ahmed Nur, a grieving father who returned from a funeral to find his children’s remains scattered around a tree. The strike, Somali intelligence officials confirmed, was conducted under a joint arrangement: Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency supplied the target coordinates, and Turkey executed the strike.
The Turkish government has not admitted responsibility. But on the ground, families bury children in sacks. The humanitarian partner has become a military executioner, and for Somalis caught between al-Shabab and Ankara’s drone diplomacy, the promise of friendship has curdled into fear.
The Shadow Economy of Power
Turkey’s military presence in Somalia is only part of a larger story. Parallel to drones and bases is a web of contracts, concessions, and leases that give Ankara control over Somalia’s most strategic infrastructure. Turkish firms hold 20-year leases over Mogadishu’s seaport and airport, both won in the early 2010s. Airlines departing the Somali capital fly through an airport run by a Turkish state-backed company, while ships docking at Mogadishu pay fees to another Ankara-based conglomerate.
On paper, these agreements were framed as investments in Somalia’s recovery. In practice, they created deep dependencies. Somalia’s attorney general accused the Turkish firms in 2024 of violating profit-sharing agreements by withholding financial reports. The missing revenue—potentially millions of dollars—could have been vital for a government struggling to rebuild. But Somalia’s weakness leaves it little leverage to challenge Ankara. When infrastructure is controlled by foreign firms backed by a foreign military presence, sovereignty becomes a fragile concept.
This is not unique to Somalia. The concept of the “resource curse”, coined by British economist Richard Auty in the 1990s, describes how resource-rich but institutionally weak states often trade sovereignty for foreign investment. Somalia, resource-poor in traditional terms but rich in geostrategic positioning, is living through its own version. Turkish oil exploration deals, signed in 2024 and 2025, extend Ankara’s reach from infrastructure to natural resources. What began with food aid during famine has become a layered form of dominance—economic, military, and political.
For Turkey, this is geopolitical calculation. Somalia sits on the Horn of Africa, overlooking sea lanes critical to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Control here means leverage not just over Mogadishu but over the wider region, where Gulf powers, Western militaries, and rival insurgents all compete. For Somalia, it means that decisions about war, peace, and profit are increasingly made in Ankara.
Drone Diplomacy and Civilian Costs
The human toll of Turkey’s drone campaign is not collateral—it is central to how this strategy plays out on the ground. Strikes rarely occur in Mogadishu, where Turkish hospitals and schools are visible symbols of goodwill. Instead, they fall in contested or al-Shabab-controlled regions where neither the government nor the insurgents hold full control. Civilians in these areas are trapped between two kinds of power: insurgents who recruit by fear and drones that kill by mistake.
In 2022, a Turkish strike hit a bus station in Mubarak during a labor dispute meeting. Nine people were killed and seventeen wounded. In 2024, Amnesty International reported that Turkish drones killed 23 civilians, including 14 children, in a farming settlement. Turkish munitions were found at the site. Yet there has been no accountability. Drone warfare thrives in ambiguity—strikes are launched with intelligence that may or may not be reliable, in regions where investigations are impossible, under agreements shielded from public scrutiny.
Analysts describe this as “drone diplomacy,” a strategy where armed drones are used not only to fight insurgents but also to project influence, secure contracts, and strengthen alliances. The United States pioneered this model in the Middle East; Turkey is adapting it to Africa. Its Bayraktar drones, once symbols of national pride at home, are now exported across the Sahel, Libya, and Ethiopia. Somalia is both a testing ground and a showcase.
But drone diplomacy comes at a cost. Al-Shabab exploits civilian deaths to fuel propaganda, framing Turkey as a foreign occupier aligned with NATO and hostile to Islam. Each strike that kills children strengthens al-Shabab’s recruitment pitch. Each funeral weakens the legitimacy of the Somali government, which is seen as complicit in allowing Turkey to wage war on its soil. The very strategy meant to weaken insurgents risks giving them new life.
The Future of Somalia’s Sovereignty
Turkey’s entrenchment in Somalia reveals the delicate balance between survival and sovereignty. The Somali government, dependent on Ankara for security and investment, cannot afford to push back too hard against Turkish overreach. Without Turkish troops and drones, al-Shabab’s threat to Mogadishu would be far greater. Without Turkish infrastructure projects, revenue streams would dry up. Yet the price of this dependency is high: a slow erosion of state control over its own affairs.
For Ankara, Somalia is more than a battlefield. It is a laboratory for a foreign policy that blends humanitarian aid, military power, and economic dominance into a single package. This package carries echoes of Ottoman ambition but is shaped by modern tools: drones, contracts, and bases. Turkey’s rise as the fourth-largest arms exporter to sub-Saharan Africa is part of this trajectory, as is its steady push into energy exploration deals.
For Somalis, the question is simpler but more urgent: who decides their future? The civilians who bury children after drone strikes do not see strategy—they see loss. The farmers whose lands are targeted in error do not measure geopolitical leverage—they measure survival. The Somali state may still hold the flag of sovereignty, but the levers of power are increasingly in foreign hands.
History suggests that once such arrangements take root, they rarely unwind. Whether in the Middle East, Central Asia, or Africa, external powers rarely relinquish military bases, economic contracts, or security partnerships once established. For Somalia, this means Turkey’s shadow is likely to remain, long after the famine that opened the door has faded from memory.
For readers seeking a deeper grounding in the Horn of Africa’s complex geopolitics, the Britannica overview of Somalia offers a historical lens that shows how external involvement has repeatedly shaped its trajectory. Today, the pattern continues, with Ankara as the newest actor in a long line of foreign powers to claim Somalia’s future. The tragedy is that ordinary Somalis, caught between insurgents and occupiers, continue to pay the highest price.
