Erdogan’s rivalry with Israel has a new front: Africa - opinion

BySINAN CIDDIJULY 29, 2026 07:49There is a temptation to read a deepening Turkey-South Africa relationship as a story about trade diversification and multipolar hedging – two “middle powers” finding common cause in a post-Western world.That framing misses what is actually gluing the two governments together. Ankara joined Pretoria’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in 2026.The coordination has merely deepened since: Turkish submissions are explicitly intended to strengthen South Africa’s legal framework, and both governments now anchor The Hague Group’s campaign to hold Israel accountable through international law.This is not an incidental overlap between two states that happen to disagree with Jerusalem; instead, it is a coordinated diplomatic architecture, and it is worth asking what Turkish strongman and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gets out of it beyond virtue signaling.The answer becomes clearer once the South African relationship is placed inside Turkey’s broader African buildup, which has been running for two decades and has little to do with Israel at all.People gather over the Galata Bridge in solidarity with Palestinians, amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, following the first morning prayer of the New Year in Istanbul, Turkey January 1, 2024 (credit: REUTERS/DILARA SENKAYA)Turkey’s embassy count on the continent grew from 12 in 2002 to 44 today; trade climbed from roughly $5.4 billion in 2005 to nearly $41 b. by 2025; Turkish Airlines now touches down in dozens of African cities across some 40 countries. None of this happened organically. It was sequenced using diplomacy first, then capacity-building (military academies, police training academies, health infrastructure, and university scholarships that now bring tens of thousands of African students to Turkish campuses), and then defense exports layered on top once trust and access had been established.It’s that last layer that should concern Washington most. Sinan Ciddi and William Doran, writing in Foreign Policy, traced how Baykar’s drone exports – roughly $1.8 b. in 2024 alone – have put Turkish armed drones in the hands of 18 African militaries, several of them in the midst of civil war. Turkey’s SADAT private military contractor, founded by an Erdogan-linked former general and openly Islamist in its self-description, now operates in nine African countries, recruiting Syrian mercenaries for deployments in Libya, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Niger.The correlation Ciddi and Doran flag is hard to dismiss as a coincidence: nine of Africa’s last 10 successful coups happened in Sahel states, and five of the seven affected countries had already bought Turkish drones, with three hosting SADAT personnel on the ground.Separate reporting on Sudan quotes Doran describing Turkish weapons already bleeding from the Sudanese Armed Forces into South Sudan, a spillover that could just as easily reach Sahelian jihadist groups next.Building loyalty and extending rivalryWhat makes this more than an arms-sales story is the method underneath it. Turkey isn’t simply selling hardware to whichever government will buy it; it’s building the kind of patient, local loyalty that Boston University anthropologist Jenny White documented inside Turkey itself. In Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, and in her earlier work on Islamist mobilization, White described how the AKP built an indestructible domestic base.It did not do this through top-down ideology but through vernacular, neighborhood-level relationship-building: mosque networks, local associations, and economic patronage that created belonging as well as dependency at once.Nowhere does this playbook come together more completely than in Somalia, which functions as a kind of proof of concept for everything Ankara wants Africa to become.Turkey’s TURKSOM facility in Mogadishu, its first overseas military base, has trained roughly 16,000 Somali troops since 2017, and Turkish troop numbers there have doubled from roughly 400 to 800, with parliamentary authorization to go as high as 2,500.Additionally, Ankara has deployed tanks and F-16’s to Somalia, with the stated intention of helping the Somali government fight against al-Shabaab.That is capacity-building, arms transfers, and direct military presence operating simultaneously, in one country, under one flag – the same three-layer model visible piecemeal elsewhere on the continent, only fully assembled.And Somalia is where Ankara’s Africa strategy and its Israel strategy stop being separate stories: Turkey is preparing to begin offshore energy drilling in Somali waters this year, at the same time that Israel has recognized Somaliland’s independence, which signals a direct challenge to the sovereignty claim that Ankara’s entire Mogadishu investment depends on.Erdogan has called Israel’s recognition “illegitimate,” and the wording is not incidental; Somalia is the one place where Turkey’s economic appetite, its military footprint, and its rivalry with Jerusalem are the same fight.It is a preview of what Ankara would like South Africa’s diplomatic cover to eventually protect elsewhere on the continent - not just legal solidarity at The Hague, but freedom of action on the ground.TIKA projects, Maarif Foundation schools, and health partnerships in Niger, Sudan, and Somalia appear to be further exports of the Turkish model highlighted by White.Scholarships for African students are, on this reading, less a soft-power afterthought than a long-horizon investment in a future generation of sympathetic elites. This is the kind of influence that survives a change of government in a way a single defense contract never does.None of this works without willing partners, of course. African governments have their own reasons to say yes: Turkey is a lower-friction alternative to China’s debt-heavy lending and Russia’s Wagner-style security guarantees, NATO-adjacent enough to confer legitimacy without Western conditionality attached.Ankara, in turn, is growing its own resource base – uranium and oil exploration interest in Niger and Somalia – while its Mogadishu base gives it a foothold on the Red Sea precisely as Israel has moved to recognize Somaliland, extending the Turkey-Israel rivalry onto African soil for the first time.Seen against that backdrop, Pretoria is less a peer partnership than a capstone: the prestigious, ICJ-credentialed validator for a strategy built mostly through drones, mercenaries, and classrooms elsewhere on the continent.The trade numbers between Ankara and Pretoria are modest by design (approximately $2 billion); the strategic ambition behind them is not.Sinan Ciddi is a senior fellow and director of the Turkey program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, DC.Follow us on Google