ISPI
5 Aug 2026
Nebahat Tanrıverdi Yasar
From Bilateral to Regional: Turkey’s Repositioning in the Horn of Africa
Turkey's Horn of Africa policy is evolving from a set of bilateral partnerships into a regional strategy centred on preserving sovereign state structures amid intensifying geopolitical competition.
Commentary Africa · Middle East and North Africa
The US-Israel conflict with Iran and the intensifying MENA competition in the Red Sea have made the Horn of Africa more strategically consequential for Turkey. The shift is not that Ankara has suddenly discovered the region’s importance. The Horn has been central to Turkey’s Africa policy for more than a decade. What is changing is how Ankara reads the region. A policy once framed mainly through bilateral engagement, humanitarian diplomacy, development assistance and middle-power activism is increasingly understood through overlapping security complexes, from the Red Sea to the Gulf, the Eastern Mediterranean, Libya, Sudan, the Ethiopia-Somalia-Somaliland dispute and the growing strategic footprints of Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Turkey’s mediation ambitions are shifting accordingly. Ankara increasingly acts as a security-embedded mediator, seeking to preserve the sovereign-state framework on which its regional influence depends, while testing renewed alignment with former rivals Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
From humanitarian foothold to strategic heavyweight
Turkey’s earlier Horn policy was never purely humanitarian or less strategic. Since a first phase more focused on development cooperation and humanitarian assistance – marked by President, then Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s 2011 visit to Mogadishu during the famine –, Ankara evolved from a relief actor into a political, economic and security heavyweight across the Horn and Red Sea in less than two decades. Though geographically external and territorially absent, Turkey functions as a resident power, whose security and political actions carry direct regional consequences.
What this footprint had not yet produced was a regionalised strategy. Relations with Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Djibouti developed through distinct bilateral channels, each with its own logic and momentum. The Horn was central to Turkey’s Africa policy and middle-power identity, but the operational focus stayed on individual partner states rather than on the Horn as an interconnected security theatre. The bilateral assets were real; the regional architecture connecting them was not yet Turkey’s own.
Emerging regionalisation in Ankara’s strategic mindset
The Ethiopia-Somaliland Memorandum of Understanding of January 2024, under which Ethiopia sought Red Sea access near Berbera in exchange in exchange for signalling its readiness to recognise Somaliland’s independence, reveals the limits of Ankara’s bilateral engagement model in the Horn of Africa. Not because it created a regional problem but because it forced Ankara to recognise that its bilateral nodes were already interdependent, and that their interdependence could become a source of strategic vulnerability in the changing region.
The consequences cascaded at once. Ethiopia, Turkey’s largest regional economic partner in the Horn of Africa with growing defence relations, positioned itself against Somalia, Ankara’s primary security anchor in the region. Somalia, under pressure, deepened ties with Egypt, linking the Horn crisis to Nile and Red Sea rivalries. The UAE have backed the Ethiopia-Somaliland deal, and Israel’s December 2025 recognition of Somaliland, the first by any UN member state since Somaliland’s declared independence in 1991, inserted itself into the Horn’s geopolitical architecture, in ways turning Somalia and the wider Red Sea into another arena of Israeli-Turkish rivalry. In turn, Ankara read this as a direct threat to its presence in the region. Its mediation between Mogadishu and Addis Ababa produced a framework agreement in December 2024, under which both parties reaffirmed Somalia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity while committing to negotiate arrangements granting Ethiopia reliable access to the sea under Somalia’s sovereign authority. The initiative was therefore driven not only by the need to manage tensions between two of Turkey’s closest regional partners, but also by a desire to contain the growing influence of the UAE and Israel in the Horn.
Sudan’s civil war deepened this conviction. Ankara was confronting the same dynamic there that it faced in Somalia: a UAE-backed actor expanding at the expense of a recognised state, that its weakening could institutionalise competing centres of power and ultimately produce Sudan’s de facto partition and that pattern wore down Turkey’s initial caution. Ankara had sought to remain a neutral mediator between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). As the RSF expanded its territorial gains during the first year of conflict, however, this position gave way to more direct alignment with both the SAF and Egypt. Bayraktar TB2 drones went to the SAF in October 2024 and then, after the RSF’s seizure of el-Fasher in October 2025, Ankara allowed Egypt to operate Turkish Akinci drones from East Oweinat against RSF convoys inside Sudan. Turkey, later, established a direct air corridor to resupply the SAF on a regular basis.
This shift suggests that Turkey increasingly views the conflict not simply as a power struggle between two armed actors, but as a contest over Sudan’s territorial integrity and the international legitimacy of the state institutions led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. From Ankara’s perspective, territorial fragmentation that is internationally accommodated as a political reality would strengthen the pattern of externally backed alternative centres of power already visible elsewhere in the region.
In line with this perspective, during the mediation attempts, Turkey aligned with Egypt and Saudi Arabia to block language granting the RSF standing equal to the SAF. That dispute crystallised at the April 2026 Berlin Sudan conference, where talks over a unified communiqué collapsed for the second consecutive year. The UAE refused wording on “the preservation of state institutions”, which was endorsed and backed by Egypt and Saudi Arabia precisely because it recognised the SAF as Sudan’s legitimate authority rather than one faction among equals. Although the SAF-led authorities lack broad legitimacy following the 2021 coup and failed transition, this formulation treated the SAF as the principal bearer of Sudanese state continuity rather than as one-armed faction among equals. This position broadly aligned with Ankara’s approach. The conference, with over fifty participants, closed without a joint declaration. For Turkey, fully aligned with Cairo and Riyadh, the conference confirmed that Sudan’s sovereignty question is structural: a contest over whether the UAE and its partners can reshape regional order by legitimising externally backed armed actors as alternative centres of authority.
Turkey’s push for institutional military unification –reflected in Libyan participation in the 2026 Flintlock and EFES exercises under a “one Libya, one army” framework – applies the same logic of order to a context where the principal risk is not state fragmentation, but the permanent partition of state institutions. Across all three theatres, Turkey does not defend any particular government, but the principle that recognised sovereign states must remain the primary unit of regional politics.
Sovereignty as the basis for the regional order-building
Support for Somalia’s territorial integrity is often read as either principled commitment to international law, domestic political driver emerging from its own historical anxiety over Kurdish separatists within Turkey or protection of Ankara’s Mogadishu investment. Both are partially true, yet jointly insufficient. Sovereignty, in Turkey’s current strategic thinking, has become a guiding principle applied consistently across Somalia, Sudan and Libya. By preserving recognised state structures, Ankara seeks to safeguard its regional partnerships, facilitate new alignments and limit the influence of competing regional actors.
What Ankara fears and aims to prevent, therefore, is the gradual consolidation of a loose regional pattern: UAE-backed infrastructure and port politics, Israeli security outreach, Somaliland’s recognition-seeking diplomacy, RSF legitimisation in Sudan and an internationally legitimised divided Libya. Taken together, these developments risk bypassing the sovereign frameworks in which Turkey is embedded. This concern is reinforced by the growing strategic connection between the Red Sea, Bab el-Mandeb, the Suez route and the Eastern Mediterranean, where Gulf, Israeli and Emirati alignments increasingly intersect with Turkey’s maritime and regional-security interests.
On top of that, the most consequential dimension of Turkey’s repositioning concerns Washington, and it is more paradoxical than a simple rivalry narrative suggests. Another significant driver that pushed Ankara to recalibrate its regional perspective around a more integrated, regional approach is that operational complementarity coexists with strategic anxiety across the wider Red Sea-Somaliland theatre. Ankara’s concern is not the absence of US cooperation in Somalia. Operationally, Ankara and Washington are aligned where it counts most. Both back Somalia’s Federal Government against al-Shabaab, with Turkish training, drones and naval presence complementing rather than competing with United States Africa Command (AFRICOM). In Libya, shared interest in limiting Russian influence and preventing partition makes Turkey a useful partner.
The tension lies elsewhere. From Ankara’s perspective, Washington’s broader regional posture – primarily its tolerance of UAE-linked arrangements, its evolving relationship with Israel across the Red Sea and the unresolved question of its strategic interest in Somaliland – risks enabling a Red Sea-Horn architecture that bypasses the sovereign-state frameworks in which Turkey is embedded. While the United States continues to recognise Somaliland as part of Somalia, it has also kept alive the possibility of deeper engagement with Hargeisa and Berbera for Red Sea security purposes. It has not pushed back decisively against UAE-linked port and security arrangements that strengthen Somaliland’s external position, nor has it separated its Red Sea policy from its expanding coordination with Israel. Ankara views these trends unfavourably because, taken together, they could allow the Horn’s strategic geography to be reorganised around a regional architecture that serves the US and Israeli strategic depth while narrowing Turkey’s room for manoeuvre. The June 2026 State Department report reaffirming Somaliland as a region of Somalia brought Ankara a reprieve but left the underlying tension intact.
Read together, all these reveal that Turkey’s Horn repositioning is not primarily about any single bilateral relationship, not with Somalia, not with the US, not with the UAE or Israel. Rather, Ankara is seeking to prevent the emergence of a regional order in which the Horn is organised around competing strategic interests that leave Turkey with limited influence. Somalia is the anchor of that effort. But the effort itself is regional. Hence, the lesson Ankara drew is structural, around the conviction that its Horn presence survives only if the region’s sovereign-state architecture holds.
Turkey’s mediation role in the making
This does not mean that Turkey is abandoning mediation. Rather, the nature of its mediation is changing. Ankara has rarely acted as a detached or fully neutral mediator. Even in earlier efforts, including its engagement between Somalia and Somaliland in the early 2010s and its more recent mediation between Somalia and Ethiopia, Turkey mediated as a stakeholder with interests in both sides. What is changing today is the strategic weight attached to that role. Turkish mediation is becoming more explicitly tied to the preservation of sovereign-state frameworks and, where necessary, to coalition-building with like-minded actors.
In parallel, Ankara has merged its humanitarian-developmental toolkit with security-backed instruments including defence cooperation, military training and defence industry exports. Under the ten-year Framework Agreement on Defence and Economic Cooperation signed in February 2024, Türkiye committed to training and equipping Somalia’s naval forces and supporting the protection of its territorial waters from piracy, terrorism, illegal fishing and other external threats, thereby linking Turkey’s diplomatic role directly to Somalia’s maritime security. More broadly, Ankara treats mediation, military assistance, defence industry, energy, reconstruction and connectivity as mutually reinforcing tools of the same strategy.
At the same time, Erdoğan’s February 2026 visit to Addis Ababa, his first in eleven years and coinciding with the centenary of bilateral diplomatic relations, demonstrated Ankara’s interest in preserving Ethiopia as an important political and economic partner. The two sides signed an energy-cooperation memorandum, while Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed sought Türkiye’s diplomatic support for Ethiopia’s access to the sea. The visit thus underscored Ankara’s balancing strategy of defending Somalia’s territorial integrity while keeping Ethiopia engaged in a negotiated framework for maritime access.
Finally, the purpose of mediation itself has been changing for Ankara. Turkey is likely to mediate where mediation helps preserve the state-based order in which Ankara is embedded. Where conflicts involve recognised governments and state-to-state bargaining, as in the Somalia-Ethiopia case, Turkey can still operate as a broker. But where conflicts involve armed non-state actors, secessionist claims or rival external security architectures, Turkish mediation is more likely to become a form of order-building. In such cases, Ankara’s objective is not only to facilitate dialogue, but to prevent the emergence of regional arrangements that bypass sovereign governments and weaken Turkey’s own position within the Horn’s evolving security architecture.
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