“The New Scramble: Turkey, Somalia and the Battle for the Red Sea,” discusses Turkey’s growing influence in Somalia, particularly focusing on the evolving relationship between Ankara and Mogadishu.
Here’s a breakdown:
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Historical Context: The piece starts by highlighting Turkey’s initial engagement with Somalia through humanitarian aid in 2011, led by President Erdoğan. This visit fostered goodwill and strengthened ties.
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Evolution of Turkish Influence: Turkey’s involvement has evolved from soft power initiatives (education, brands) to infrastructure management (ports, airports) and military cooperation (Camp TURKSOM).
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Geopolitical Rivalries: The commentary explains how Turkey’s relationship with Somalia is intertwined with regional rivalries. It contrasts Turkey’s approach with that of the UAE and Ethiopia, who engage with Somalia’s regional administrations, while Turkey primarily works with the federal government. The piece also mentions the impact of the Qatar blockade on regional alliances and how Somalia sided with Turkey and Qatar, which strained relations with the UAE.
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Hydrocarbon Deal: A significant part of the commentary focuses on the recent agreement between Turkey and Somalia for oil and gas exploration. The author points out the potential benefits for Somalia but also raises concerns about the terms of the deal, which are perceived by some as being too favorable to Turkey. Issues include the lack of parliamentary scrutiny, the high percentage of cost recovery for Turkey, and the low royalty rate for Somalia.
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Military Involvement: The military aspect of the relationship is growing, with Turkey providing military equipment and training to Somali forces. This is seen by some as a guarantee of Turkey’s commercial interests.
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Domestic Politics: The commentary raises concerns about Turkey’s increasing influence in Somalia’s domestic politics, including accusations of interference in regional elections and the modeling of the ruling party after Erdoğan’s own.
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Regional Ambitions: Somalia is portrayed as a platform for Turkey’s broader regional ambitions. The piece mentions plans for a Turkish military base in Laas Qoray, which would counter the growing Israeli and Emirati presence in Somaliland.
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Broader Context: The commentary places Turkey’s involvement in Somalia within the context of a larger competition for influence in the Red Sea region, involving various countries like Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. This competition is contributing to instability in the Horn of Africa.
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Conclusion: The author questions whether Turkey’s engagement will bring positive change to Somalia or simply perpetuate existing patterns of external interference and insecurity. The piece emphasizes the importance of Somalia leveraging these rivalries for its own benefit but expresses skepticism about the current trajectory.
The complete piece is as follows:
The New Scramble: Turkey, Somalia and the Battle for the Red Sea
The abundance of oil deposits in Somalia has lured interest from Turkey, deepening the Mogadishu-Ankara relationship.
By Matthew Chandler de Waal
In August 2011, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his family travelled to Mogadishu amidst a grueling famine, becoming the first non-African head of state to visit Somalia in almost two decades.
Rallying humanitarian support, Erdoğan’s visit spurred an outpouring of affection for Turkey, with the white crescent and star on red subsequently adorning much of the country. Some Somali children were even named after the Turkish leader. Flash forward nearly fifteen years, and much of the regional and global political landscape has changed almost beyond recognition – as have Turkish geostrategic stakes in Somalia. What followed has been a transformation in kind and scale, spanning military bases and now deepwater drillships, and situated in a broader geopolitical contest for the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea.
Ankara’s engagement has passed through several distinct phases over the years, shifting from soft power and humanitarian diplomacy through infrastructure management to becoming Mogadishu’s foremost foreign ally today. Since Erdoğan’s visit, Turkish soft power has proliferated, with thousands of Somali students in Istanbul or Ankara, the Mogadishu elite holidaying in Turkey, and Turkish brands such as Enza Home becoming markers of middle-class aspiration in the capital.
At the same time, Turkish companies have assumed control of the management of the Mogadishu port and airport, whilst Camp TURKSOM – Ankara’s largest overseas military base – has facilitated the training of thousands of Gorgor special forces since 2017.
Throughout, Turkey has channeled its support exclusively through the federal government in Mogadishu, a posture that distinguishes it from the UAE – a geostrategic rival of Ankara’s in the Horn of Africa – and Ethiopia, which both have cultivated ties with Somalia’s semi-autonomous regional administrations of Puntland and Jubaland, as well as Somaliland.
Today, it is Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that are grappling for ascendancy over the Red Sea, but in 2017, simmering tensions within the Gulf Cooperation Council erupted into the open, with a Saudi-Emirati-led coalition seeking to blockade Qatar, aligned with Turkey, due to its alleged ties with Iran and various Islamist movements.
Though publicly neutral, Mogadishu allied itself with Qatar and Turkey in the fallout– infuriating the UAE, which subsequently broadly steered its considerable financial and military support away from Mogadishu. In this period, however, Ankara was broadly considered the ‘junior partner’ in Somalia for Doha, helping to steer patronage and aid on Qatar’s behalf.
Drill, Baby, Drill
During Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s second administration, though, it is Turkey that has stepped into the fore, with the more recent prospect of hydrocarbon extraction marking the most significant expansion of the Somali-Turkish relationship to date. Though a NATO member, Turkey has simultaneously taken an increasingly assertive posture across the Middle East, North Africa, and, more recently, the Horn. And as part of this independent foreign policy, Ankara has similarly sought to diversify its reliance on hydrocarbon imports from Azerbaijan, Iraq, Kazakhstan and Russia, significantly expanding its domestic extraction capacity in recent years.
In a country as impoverished as Somalia, there is discernible excitement about the prospect of a transformative injection of oil money, but the nature of Ankara’s bilateral – often clandestine – dealings with Villa Somalia is causing growing concern as well
In turn, the decades-old promise of oil and gas – onshore and offshore – in Somalia has proven particularly enticing to Ankara, with the two countries striking a rapid deal in early 2024 for Turkey to exploit Somalia’s latent resources. For its proponents in Somalia, it offers the realization of a long-awaited dream, with seeps of oil first formally identified by British and Italian geologists in the colonial era.
Agreements with Chevron and Shell in the 1950s never translated into formal extraction, and the collapse of the Somali state in the early 1990s – leading to decades of persistent instability and conflict – has left the reserves untapped. And they are believed to be substantial, with more recent seismic studies suggesting around 30 billion barrels, around a quarter of the UAE’s current proven crude oil reserves.
Such a Turkish rationale is likely to grow only further amid the conflagration in the Middle East, with the Gulf energy architecture set ablaze in the US-Israeli assault on Iran. The repercussions of this war – and the selective blockade of the Strait of Hormuz – will reverberate through globalized energy and trade networks for years to come, placing fresh urgency on Ankara’s search for self-sufficiency.
However, a number of criticisms from Somali parties have been levied at the lopsided deal, not least that it was rushed through Somalia’s parliament without scrutiny. The agreement came as Mogadishu sought to rally its foreign allies against a promised deal between Ethiopia and Somaliland, for sovereign recognition in exchange for sea access. Though Addis eventually backed away from its pact with Somaliland following Turkish-mediated negotiations with Mogadishu, Ankara is still permitted to recover up to 90% of the cost of Somali oil or gas produced before any sharing of profits, and its state-owned petroleum company is exempt from production bonuses.
Somalia’s royalties, on the other hand, are capped at just 5%. In a country as impoverished as Somalia, there is discernible excitement about the prospect of a transformative injection of oil money, but the nature of Ankara’s bilateral – often clandestine – dealings with Villa Somalia is causing growing concern as well. Furthermore, Somalia’s federal government has been repeatedly accused of monopolizing and politicizing funds, withholding support for Jubaland and Puntland after they severed relations over its electoral agenda.
But the hydrocarbon deal is moving ahead and, in April, Turkey’s latest deepwater drillship, the Çağrı Bey – the first deployed outside Turkish territorial waters – arrived at Mogadishu Port amidst much pomp and fanfare. Exploratory drilling is expected to begin in the coming weeks at the Curad-1 well-site, 370 km from Mogadishu, at a depth of 7,500 m. Substantial infrastructure will still need to be constructed, but Ankara is making headway.
Turkey’s Growing Military Stakes
In the past two years, the military dimensions of the Somali-Turkish relationship have grown in lockstep, with some considering them a guarantor of Ankara’s commercial stakes. Jets, drones, helicopters, warships and more have appeared in Mogadishu in recent months, showcasing Turkey’s impressive homegrown military technology. Such aerial support, too, has played a role in operations against Al-Shabaab, the jihadist insurgency and Al-Qaeda affiliate that has waged a grinding war against the Somali state for two decades.
The political will of the Somali government, though, is more questionable. Emboldened by its foreign allies’ support, Villa Somalia has monopolistically sought to consolidate power at home, overriding historic guardrails to rewrite much of the Provisional Constitution earlier in 2026 under the guise of restoring direct democracy. Simultaneously, the gradual penetration of Turkish interests and advisors into parts of the Somali state has become considerable, epitomized by the government’s new Islamist-flavored ruling Justice and Development Party in Mogadishu, having been modelled on Erdoğan’s own movement.
Moreover, the drawing down of a wearied diplomatic corps – particularly the United States and the UN – from Somalia has opened space for such consolidation. In March, during the violent ousting of a regional leader in southern Somalia after he broke ranks with the government’s electoral agenda, Ankara was accused of facilitating his removal with military and fiscal support. Such an assertive role in Somalia’s fraught domestic politics represents precisely the kind of internal deployment that its critics had long cautioned against, and may yet signal Ankara’s willingness to underwrite Villa Somalia’s own controversial adventurism at home.
In the Regional Contest
But Somalia is far from the limit of Ankara’s ambitions in the region, rather a broader platform for them. It was no coincidence that President Hassan Sheikh’s first visit following Israel’s unilateral recognition of Somaliland in late December 2025 – a bombshell development facilitated by the UAE – was to Ankara. Agreed during his trip and now coming into sharper focus are plans for a Turkish military base in Laas Qoray, located in a contested region on the Gulf of Aden, the strategic, narrow waterway that connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and through which roughly 12% of global trade passes.
The Laas Qoray base would serve as a direct riposte to the growing Israeli and Emirati presence in Somaliland, further along the coast. Though a direct armed conflict between Ankara and Tel Aviv remains unlikely, the theatres in which their geostrategic interests diverge – from Somalia to Syria to the eastern Mediterranean – are multiplying.
That rivalry is part of a broader and accelerating reconfiguration of influence across both sides of the Red Sea; a vast, interlocking theatre, in which the fates of littoral states are being shaped by competition between Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the UAE. Each state has pursued interests along the Horn’s coastlines and hinterlands, driven by a combination of imperatives, including securing ports and waterways, hedging against hydrocarbon dependence, and divergent views on the role of political Islam.
To date, such external transactional and militarized politics have wrought immense damage on the Horn, deepening pre-existing fissures and fractures from the Somali peninsula to divergences between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Nile water basin, as well as eroding the region’s fragile multilateral peace and security architecture.
Since 2023, the epicenter has been the war in Sudan, effectively a proxy conflict pitting the UAE, principally backing the Rapid Support Forces, against Saudi Arabia and Egypt, supporting the Sudanese army, with an array of African and Arab states behind either party. Within a divided Somalia itself, the Puntland government has been accused of allowing Abu Dhabi to smuggle weapons through Bosaaso airport, whilst the Sudanese military intelligence has facilitated militia support for Mogadishu.
Even before the continuing US/Israel-Iranian war, the western Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden were bristling with competing navies and interests, ranging from the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen to Operation ATALANTA, the EU mission designed to combat piracy. And a Turkish installation at Laas Qoray would join facilities operated by China, France, Italy, Japan, and the US in neighboring Djibouti, further deepening the concentration of foreign military power near the Bab al-Mandeb, the critical chokepoint between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, whose strategic significance the Iran conflict has thrown into savage relief. Alongside oil, the real estate value of control over these aortic straits has soared in the past weeks.
Turkish interests in Somalia are an expression of a longer history; the blending of commercial and security interests through these arterial waterways is centuries old, be it through Royal Navy frigates or American aircraft carriers. What has changed, though, is the collapse of the multilateral framework that once provided a degree of structure, however imperfect, to the post-Cold War competition and the dying era of the ‘liberal peace.’ In its place, a bluntly transactional geo-kleptocratic logic has stepped forward, in which the scramble for energy is reshaping politics across the globe.
More than most countries in the Horn of Africa, the Somali peninsula’s geographic position has drawn trade, religion, and cultural exchange for millennia with the Middle East and beyond. It is impossible to divorce Somalia’s politics or culture from the broader region, not least with many Somali clans regarding themselves as ‘Arab’ rather than ‘African.’
Instead, the question for Somalia and the Horn writ large remains whether its governments can convert the rivalries from across the Red Sea from a source of instability into positive leverage for their own countries. Whether Turkey’s rising geostrategic investments in Somalia offer a transformative model of engagement or simply more of the same externalized insecurity will have to be seen, but the augurs are hardly positive.
Matthew de Waal is a freelance analyst on peace and security on the Horn of Africa based in Nairobi. Until recently he was the Deputy Head of Research and Publications at Sahan Research, a think-tank focused on conflict and governance in the region, and ran The Somali Wire, The Ethiopian Cable and The Horn Edition newsletters. Matthew has a particular focus on the geopolitics of the Horn and Al-Shabaab.
