KISMAYO, SOMALIA – Hundreds of demonstrators filled the streets of Jubaland’s interim capital on Sunday 6 September carrying images of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with blood painted on his hands, beneath placards saying Somalia does not need him, fifteen years after he landed in a famine-stricken Mogadishu that no other head of government would enter. Ankara holds the deepest reserve of public goodwill any foreign power has ever accumulated in Somalia, built through hospitals, scholarships, an airline route, a military academy and a decade of attention that arrived when nobody else came. That reserve is now being spent on a domestic quarrel at the request of a federal government whose own term expired on 15 May, and the bill for that spending is arriving at President Erdogan’s door in Ankara.
What President Erdogan Built Between the Famine and the Base
On 19 August 2011 President Erdogan flew into Mogadishu with his family, half his cabinet, Turkish businessmen and a delegation of aid organisations. He was the first leader from outside Africa to enter the city in almost two decades. A famine was killing roughly a quarter of a million Somalis at the time, and the international agencies were administering the relief by remote control from Nairobi. The sight of a Turkish prime minister walking through those camps did more for Ankara’s standing than any agreement signed since, and the appeal that followed raised more than 105 million dollars in Turkish donations.
Turkiye reopened its embassy that November as the first non-African state to do so, and Turkish Airlines restored direct flights to the capital in March 2012. Two decades in which Somalis had reached the outside world only through third countries came to an end. Digfer hospital reopened in January 2015 as the Recep Tayyip Erdogan Training and Research Hospital, a two hundred bed teaching institution rebuilt by Turkiye’s development agency and inaugurated by both presidents, and it remains the largest medical facility the Turkish state operates beyond its own borders.
Camp TURKSOM followed on 30 September 2017 at a cost of about fifty million dollars, the biggest Turkish military installation anywhere abroad. It was built to hold fifteen hundred trainees at a time and to put ten thousand Somali soldiers through a single curriculum. Thousands of officers and men have passed through it since, including the Gorgor commando brigades and the Haramcad special police units that both Mogadishu and Ankara treat as the professional core of the Somali security forces.
The commercial concessions arrived on the same terms, with Turkish capital going where no other investor would follow it. Favori has operated Aden Adde International Airport since 2013 and the Albayrak group has held the Mogadishu port concession since 2014, both on thirty-year contracts awarded without competitive tender and without a vote in parliament. Under the amended airport agreement of May 2019 the federal treasury keeps a quarter of gross revenue and the operator keeps the remainder until 2028. Somalis tolerated arrangements of that kind because the alternative on offer was a shuttered airport and an idle harbour.
The Agreements That Turned a Patron Into a Stakeholder
Somalia’s parliament endorsed the framework agreement on defence and economic cooperation by 213 votes to three in February 2024, committing the government of President Erdogan for ten years to build, train and equip a navy able to police a coastline of nearly four thousand kilometres. The accompanying memorandum granted Turkiye privileged access to the exclusive economic zone against that pledge, and Somali officials have said publicly that Ankara’s share of the resulting revenue runs as high as thirty percent. Turkish estimates put six billion cubic metres of proven gas and as much as thirty billion barrels of potential reserves inside the offshore acreage concerned.
The hydrocarbons agreement that President Erdogan’s energy ministry signed in Istanbul on 7 March 2024 became public only in April 2025, when it went before the Turkish parliament for ratification. Somalia’s House of the People has still never been shown the text. Article 4(7) allows the Turkish operator to recover up to ninety percent of annual production as cost petroleum, Article 4(5) waives every signature, development and production bonus along with surface and administrative fees, and the royalty owed to Somalia is capped at five percent. Article 6 permits Turkiye to take supplementary security measures on Somali territory and to charge the expense against the petroleum, which converts a commercial contract into a standing warrant for armed presence.
The survey vessel Oruc Reis covered roughly 4,500 square kilometres of Somali water before the drillship Cagri Bey arrived off Mogadishu in April 2026 to open the Curad-1 well some 370 kilometres offshore. President Erdogan told an audience in Istanbul on 30 December 2025 that Turkiye would also build a spaceport in Somalia. The Turkish parliament renewed the naval mandate covering the Gulf of Aden and Somali territorial waters in January 2026 and extended the wider military mission in July, carrying the deployment to 27 July 2028. Ankara consequently holds a base, a runway, a harbour, an oil concession, a naval task group and a satellite programme inside a country where its only formal counterparty is the presidency in Villa Somalia.
From Patron to Party in a Somali Quarrel
Turkish drones reached Somalia in 2021, and by September 2022 satellite imagery had placed a Bayraktar TB2 on the apron of an airport a Turkish company had been running for nine years. On 18 March 2024 two strikes using MAM-L glide bombs released from those aircraft killed 23 civilians of the marginalised Gorgaarte clan, among them women and children, in an episode an international human rights investigation concluded should be examined as a war crime. Letters sent to both governments on 5 April 2024 asked which military force was flying the drones, and neither the government of President Erdogan nor the government in Mogadishu replied. Each capital had told the public in 2022 that the other was in the cockpit.
Turkish F-16 aircraft were first observed operating from Aden Adde in January 2026, and on 30 June the defence ministry credited strikes in the Godey area of Lower Shabelle with killing about thirty-five al-Shabaab fighters. A later version of the same statement replaced the name of President Erdogan’s country with unspecified international partners. Aircraft that no government would claim killed fishermen on the Puntland coast on 18 and 20 August, and others flew over Baidoa during the fighting of 3 September. That same night an aircraft struck the Doolow compound of General Mahad Abdirahman Aden, an attack the federal government insists never occurred because the explosions came from material stored inside the house.
General Mahad commanded the Somali Custodial Corps until March 2026 and is the father-in-law of the Southwest president whom federally backed militias drove out of Baidoa at the end of that month. His quarrel with President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud concerns who governs which Somali city, so an air strike on his compound is an intervention in that quarrel whoever ordered it. Ankara has never claimed a single strike in Somalia by name, and its foreign ministry answered the Puntland killings by saying it had no information indicating Turkish aircraft were involved. Silence of that kind cost Ankara nothing while the targets were al-Shabaab. A Somali crowd that has just buried its own now reads the same silence as consent.
The Street Presents Its Bill to Ankara
Thousands marched in Kismayo and Afmadow on Sunday 6 September, a day after Doolow and Garbahaarrey had produced the same scene. The crowds burned Turkish flags, carried the bloodied-hands posters and chanted that they used to love President Erdogan and Turkiye and now hate them. Jubaland’s minister of information, culture and tourism, Abdifatah Mohamed Mukhtar, marched with them and accused the federal government of a fresh attempt to invade the state. The security minister, General Dhuumaal, told the crowd that Jubaland answers for its own security and would permit no violation of it, while Kismayo’s district governor, Omar Faraweyne, described Turkiye at the rally as a new coloniser that had occupied the country.
Southwest State burned the same flag in August over drone strikes near Baidoa, and Puntland accused Ankara of killing its fishermen on the Nugaal coast. Jubaland has now asked the Security Council to consider restoring the arms embargo that Mogadishu spent years lobbying to have lifted. Three of the five federal member states have reached the same verdict about the same partner inside a single season, and the two that have not are the two whose elections Villa Somalia has spent the year administering. Al-Shabaab has been attacking Turkish convoys in Mogadishu since 2019, and the case it has made about foreign occupation for a decade is now being put from public platforms by serving ministers of Somali states.
Fifteen years of hospitals, scholarships and restored flights bought Ankara something no other capital has ever held in Somalia. It is denominated in a currency Ankara does not control, because public affection is granted by Somalis and withdrawn by them without notice or appeal. The officials who requested the aircraft carry none of the cost, since President Erdogan’s face is on the posters, the Turkish flag is in the fire, and the presidency that issued the invitation ends in May 2027 at the latest on its own account. Whoever governs from Villa Somalia after that will inherit a public trained to associate Turkish aircraft with Somali dead, and Ankara will have to rebuild its position with the same federal states that now accuse it of bombing them.
