Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

January 4, 2023

Turkey’s Growing Influence in Africa

Oil, drones, military bases, and mosques.

For many years, Ankara has been an important player in the Libyan civil war, backing one of the primary belligerents. But Turkish influence extends far further across the African continent, in keeping with a strategy developed in the 1990s and adopted by Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he came power in 2003. Erdogan has visited 33 African countries in the past twenty years; Turkey is a partner of the African Union and has extensive trade relations with numerous African states, which include arm sales. Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak explains:

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