When Mohamed Ahmed Nur returned home to Quracley in January 2023, the scene was carnage. Three of his sons, all young boys, lay in pieces after a drone strike. The drones overhead weren’t American this time — they were Turkish.
What began in 2011 as Turkey’s “humanitarian mission” during Somalia’s famine has morphed into something far darker: a drone-driven shadow war. From joint operations with Somalia’s NISA to unilateral strikes across Hiiraan and Lower Shabelle, Ankara has embedded itself in the country’s security machinery. Locals now whisper that al-Shabab isn’t the only force killing Somalis — Turkish drones are, too.
Ankara’s drones — Bayraktar TB2s and Akincis — are not just hardware. They are political leverage. They guard Turkey’s largest overseas military base in Mogadishu. They protect Ankara’s oil exploration blocks in Somali waters. And they silence critics who question why Turkish firms run Somalia’s airport and seaport under opaque 20-year leases. When Mogadishu’s attorney general accused these firms of violating profit-sharing deals in 2024, millions in revenue vanished into the fog.
Al-Shabab has noticed. Its suicide bombers have struck Turkish engineers and embassy staff, calling Turkey “a NATO spearhead in Muslim lands.” Each strike Ankara launches inflames the cycle — giving extremists more propaganda and civilians more graves. Amnesty International already accused Turkey of possible war crimes after a 2024 strike killed 23 farmers, including 14 children. Still, no accountability.
This isn’t just Somalia’s tragedy. Turkey has exported the same playbook to Libya, the Sahel, and Ethiopia. What Foreign Policy calls “drone diplomacy” is really neo-Ottoman militarism: aid wrapped in soft power, followed by military bases, arms exports, and resource deals. For a Somali government too weak to hold its own territory, drones are the price of survival. For Ankara, they are the price of dominance.
And so the funerals pile up. Civilians in Quracley, Mubarak, and Afgoye know the truth: Somalia is the proving ground for Turkey’s empire of drones. The West may have left, but Ankara is here to stay — and it is writing Somalia’s war in the smoke of drone strikes.
