Turkey in the Sahel

Since labelling 2005 the “year of Africa”, Turkey has built political and economic ties across the continent through aid and trade, part of an agenda to extend its reach around the globe. Spearheading this push, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, first as Turkish prime minister until 2014 and since then as president, cultivated relations with African leaders, helped Turkish companies gain access to new markets and bankrolled projects casting Turkey as a custodian of Islamic culture in heavily Muslim African countries. In its attempts to gain influence in Africa, Ankara is jockeying with not just Western but also Arab states. The latter competition has transposed the rivalry between Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), on one side, and Turkey and Qatar, on the other, onto conflict-prone regions like the Horn of Africa, often worsening instability. But it is Turkey’s overtures to another region – the Sahel – that have recently rattled Western and Gulf Arab governments, which fear that Turkey’s presence might threaten their geopolitical interests in a place many view as a crucial battleground in the war with jihadist insurgents.Already the military-heavy French-led approach in the Sahel is faltering. As Crisis Group has written previously, communal killings, Islamist militancy and popular frustration with governments seen as ill equipped to quell the violence and protect citizens are on the rise. Jihadist attacks have increased fivefold since 2016 and intercommunal conflict has surged. The three central Sahelian states – Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – struggle to hold territory, let alone assert state authority, in areas contested by militants. Meanwhile, jihadists are entrenching themselves, mounting rural insurgencies, tapping local grievances to recruit fighters and expanding their operations. Disappointment with the failure to stem insecurity has given rise to anti-French sentiment in Sahelian capitals. A big push by Turkey, which has a fraught relationship with France, to present itself as an alternate security partner could aggravate tensions. In November 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron accused Turkey of undercutting France’s West African ties by playing on “post-colonial resentment”. (Separately, in June 2021, he announced plans to halve the number of France’s 5,100 troops in the Sahel by 2023.)In reality, Turkey’s forays into the Sahel have so far been mainly an exercise in soft-power projection. Ankara’s activities in the region are mostly focused on development support and commercial engagement. True, it has signed a defence accord with Niamey. It is also the case that in Somalia, Turkish aid and business subsequently led to more military engagement, though for the most part Turkish involvement there has been constructive and not in conflict with Western aims. Sahelian states and external powers would be better served by taking the best of what Turkey has to offer rather than seeing it as an inherent threat – especially as Macron and Erdoğan, who held a private discussion on the sidelines of the NATO summit in June, appear to be mending ties. Recent efforts to quell tensions between Turkey and Egypt and between sparring Gulf states suggest a broader rapprochement may be on the cards. Instead of competing in the Sahel, external powers should find ways of cooperating for the troubled region’s benefit. Soft power Turkey’s motives in the Sahel thus far appear primarily economic. Indeed, according to Ankara, expanding trade is its main priority in the region. But some observers look at Turkey’s role in Somalia and in the wider Horn of Africa, and wonder how far its engagement in the Sahel might go.Turkey’s rivals often cast its growing presence in Muslim African countries like Somalia and Sudan as motivated by ideology – in particular the goal of boosting prospects for the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamists – or by desire to increase its geopolitical heft. This perception is not wholly inaccurate. Ankara’s extensive support for Somalis facing a devastating famine in 2011 earned Turkey enormous good-will. It then used this clout to bolster the interests of local allies, sometimes drawn from the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2017, Ankara opened a military base in Mogadishu, the biggest training base of its kind outside Turkey. It has also established a firm foothold in a Mogadishu seaport it views as critical to its strategy of projecting military power across key nodes of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Turkey is now one of Somalia’s most influential foreign actors, a role many Somalis view in a positive light. It does not coordinate its activities with the Somali security forces, for example, with Western powers, but neither is it at loggerheads with them.Still, focusing on those angles alone risks overlooking what seems to be a key part of Ankara’s engagement in the Sahel to date – capitalising on shared religious identity to advance its economic interests. True, such engagement could also lead to further bilateral security cooperation, as it has in Somalia, and fuel competition with Turkey’s Gulf rivals. But, for now, Ankara’s main focus seems to be pursuing projects and investments in the Sahel that won public support, paving the way for Turkish exporters in a new market.As it opened embassies in Bamako (2010), Ouagadougou (2012) and Niamey (2012), Ankara set out to woo religious and political elites as well as appeal to the needs of struggling populations. In Mali, for instance, it built a mosque in an upscale neighbourhood of the capital for the High Islamic Council of Mali, the country’s most powerful religious association, and rehabilitated another in former President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta’s hometown. In Niger’s northern city of Agadez, it restored the Grand Mosque and the Sultan of Aïr’s palace. This allowed it to stress Turkey’s historical links with the region’s sultans, the first of whom oral histories say was born in Istanbul in the 1400s. At the same time, Turkey rolled out much-needed assistance in health care, water and education. It built hospitals in Bamako (completed in 2018) and Niamey (in 2019) and dispatched mobile clinics to provincial Malian towns such as Koulikoro and Sikasso. The Turkish International Cooperation and Development Agency (TIKA), Turkish charities and NGOs also stepped in to improve rural dwellers’ access to religious schooling and water.As they have elsewhere in Africa, locals welcomed the projects, helping to open up markets for Turkish consumer goods and boosting Ankara’s efforts to secure contracts for Turkish construction, energy and mining companies. While Turkish trade with the Sahel is still small compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese and French exports to the region annually, it has grown substantially over the last decade. Trade between Mali and Turkey, for instance, increased more than tenfold, from just $5 million in 2003 to $57 million in 2019. Crucial to boosting commerce was the launch of direct Turkish Airlines flights from Istanbul to Bamako, Niamey and Ouagadougou, which opened new trade routes for Sahelian entrepreneurs deterred by Europe’s increasingly strict border policies. Meanwhile, a direct Turkish Airlines flight from Bamako to Jeddah has proven popular with African pilgrims.