Türkiye, UAE, and the Imperialist Chain: African Ports and War

In March 2021, the Ever Given — a 400-metre-long container vessel flying the Panamanian flag, operated by a Taiwanese company, owned by a Japanese firm, and crewed by Indian seafarers — ran aground in the Suez Canal. For six days, it choked one of the world's most vital maritime arteries. The immediate losses were staggering: an estimated $88.79 million in direct costs, with inventory-carrying costs alone reaching $76.29 million. Industry experts calculated that $9.6 billion worth of trade was held hostage each day. Over 450 ships were stranded.^[1]

Beginning in 2023, again, the Ansarallah attacks in the Red Sea in solidarity with Palestinian peoples, created significant trade disruptions and increased trade costs. By 2024, there was a 76% drop in traffic through the Gulf of Aden, whereas traffic through the Suez Canal itself fell by 70%.^[2] With Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the Zionist Entity being among the most affected – Egyptian president stated 60% loss of revenue from the Suez Canal^[3] and the UAE’s DP World announced a 59% decline in net profit in 2024^[4] – trade routes were extended and shipping costs skyrocketed.^[5] 

These disruptions revealed what the Suez Canal and the Red Sea waterway mean for global capitalism. The Red Sea, stretching nearly 2000 kilometers from the Bab el-Mandeb Strait in the south to the Suez Canal in the north, facilitates roughly a tenth of global maritime trade and a significant share of Gulf energy exports destined for Europe. Together with the Strait of Hormuz, these passages constitute a backbone for a global economy in which 80% of world trade volume is carried by sea.

Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, and Eritrea are littoral states on the African side of the Red Sea while Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Jordan constitute the West Asia counterparts. With sustained pressures from Ansarallah (referred to as the Houthis) and their success in seizing most of the Red Sea access from coastal Yemen, African shores become increasingly important. 

For the peoples of Africa and West Asia, these waterways have never been neutral conduits for commerce. Once arteries that sustained flourishing civilizations, they are now the arteries through which the lifeblood of extractive capitalism flows — oil, gas, minerals, and the surplus value extracted from super-exploited labour. Control over these choke points has always been a site of imperial contestation and human trafficking. Today, the contest has heightened in scale and impact as the rise of weaker states within the global economic system with their own regional ambitions are deepening Africa’s subordination to global capital and incentivizing political fragmentation.

Even before the pressures on the global economy emanating from the imperial war on Iran and limited movement in the Strait of Hormuz, Türkiye and the UAE have emerged as competing forces in the Red Sea region. Türkiye, as a NATO member with deep integration into Atlantic security architecture, and the UAE, as host to one of the largest U.S. military presence in the Middle East, function as regional bulwarks within the broader imperialist apparatus.⁶ Considering the sustained impacts from the war on Iran in the Red Sea region, Pambazuka News exposes the duplicitous role of the UAE and Türkiye in Africa.

The UAE: Ports, Mercenaries, and the Dismantling of States

The UAE’s Africa strategy is perhaps the most aggressive and consequential of any regional actor. With an estimated $47 billion in projects across eastern Africa — roughly 60 percent of all Gulf capital inflows into the region — the UAE is the fourth largest source of foreign capital in Africa, following only the European Union, China, and the United States. It maintains active investments in all 12 African jurisdictions in the region, across infrastructure, energy, mining, port development, agriculture, and security.^[6]

The centrepiece of this strategy is control over strategic ports that can service not only its extractive needs but extends Abu Dhabi’s reach and role in global trade. Through Dubai-based DP World, the UAE has already secured port agreements in many African countries, stoking division and servility when necessary. The latter has resulted in Mogadishu’s open conflict with the UAE’s unilateral relations with autonomous parts of Somalia, materialised through DP World’s $442 million investment that bypasses the Federal government to develop and operate the Port of Berbera. The UAE is also fingered in the smuggling of bloody minerals from war zones and elsewhere in Africa.

With the highest global prices for gold we have ever seen, much of Sudan’s gold controlled by both the RSF (and SAF), ends up in the UAE. In 2024, the UAE imported significant volumes of gold through its smuggling networks across Africa: 29 tonnes directly from Sudan, plus 27 tonnes from Egypt, 18 tonnes from Chad, and 9 tonnes from Libya. Beyond the Sudan corridor, the UAE also imported 31 tonnes from Uganda, 19 tonnes from Rwanda, and 52 tonnes from Togo (worth $4 billion) — all countries that produce little gold themselves but act as hubs for smuggled gold, notably from the Democratic Republic of Congo.^[7]

The control over ports allows the UAE to capture a portion of the surplus generated in Africa while ensuring that African production remains oriented toward meeting the needs of external markets.^[8] After the recent announcement that Algeria is cutting diplomatic ties with the UAE, Algerian President Abdelmajid Tebboune, summarized what we have witnessed across Africa: “Wherever they set foot, blood flows”.^[9] The commercial advance of the UAE  is increasingly maintained by militarization in the region, which includes extensive use of mercenary forces. Among other rights groups, Human Rights Watch has documented in an 83-page report how the UAE facilitated the deployment of hundreds of Colombian private military contractors to support Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).¹¹ Recruited by the Abu Dhabi-based Global Security Services Group (GSSG), these contractors transited through Emirati military facilities — including bases in Ghiyathi and Al Wathba — where they received training from Emirati nationals. They were deployed to Sudan to “provide the RSF with tactical and technical expertise, serving as infantry and artillerymen, drone pilots, vehicle operators, and instructors.”^[10]

The consequences have been catastrophic. The UN International Fact-Finding Mission on Sudan has said that atrocities committed during the RSF's assault on El Fasher bore “the hallmarks of genocide.”^[11] Over 150,000 people are believed to have died from the violence, and more than 12.9 million have been displaced. Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the mercenaries “spectres of death” and described their recruitment as “a form of human trafficking.”^[12] The RSF “was born out of feared Arab Janjaweed militias that were notorious for atrocities in the early 2000s.”^[13] The UAE’s support for this force instrumentalizes the war to ease forms of extraction when the state becomes hampered by a geopolitical war imposed on it.

This is not the UAE's first venture into mercenary warfare. Earlier, alongside Saudi Arabia, the UAE used Sudanese troops in the Yemen war against the Houthis. Today, the UAE's support for the RSF in Sudan serves multiple functions: it weakens a sovereign Sudanese state, secures access to gold and other resources, and positions Abu Dhabi as a decisive player in the Horn of Africa by providing it with labor, land and sea access beyond its internal capacity. It also deepens the UAE's rivalry with Saudi Arabia, which has veered on the side of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF).

Türkiye: Drones, Division, and Ottoman Nostalgia

Türkiye's African strategy, while less financially dominant than the UAE’s, is no less consequential. Ankara has pursued a multi-dimensional African policy, combining economic engagement, development assistance, and security cooperation. In Sudan, Turkey attempted to get a foothold in the Red Sea as early as 2017, by securing a 99-year lease on Suakin Island.^[14] In the ongoing war, Türkiye has provided the Sudanese Armed Forces with Bayraktar TB2 and Akıncı drones.^[15] The SAF has used these drones to attack RSF supply convoys. Meanwhile, the UAE supplies weapons to the RSF. In this sense, Sudan’s war is partially sustained through Turkish-Emirati rivalry, with the two competing powers backing opposing sides in a war that has already killed over 150,000 people. 

Across Africa, the number of Turkish embassies has grown from a handful to several dozen in recent years.^[16] Türkiye has expanded security initiatives in many African countries, sometimes under the guise of religious solidarity as the Pambazuka article written by Professor Abdi Samatar on Somalia demonstrated. Samatar explains how Turkey used humanitarian aid during Somalia's 2011–2012 famine and an Islamic-brotherhood framing to build goodwill and leverage that trust to secure control over Somalia's most strategic economic assets — the Mogadishu airport and seaport, oil exploration and fishing rights, a banking foothold, and multiple military bases — that were largely based on opaque agreements hidden from parliamentary scrutiny. Turkey publicly frames its involvement as faith-based solidarity while, in practice, pursuing exclusive economic exploitation and expanding military presence, without training Somalis to take over operations. Politically, Turkey has backed the Somali president's controversial extension of power and used Turkish-trained troops and political maneuvering (including installing an allied parliamentary speaker) to entrench its influence.

The centrepiece of Türkiye's military strategy is its base in Mogadishu — TURKSOM — which can accommodate up to 1,000 troops.^[17] The base serves as a hub for Turkish military engagement in the Horn of Africa, linked to broader economic interests including Turkish management of Mogadishu Port.^[18] As one analysis notes, "Turkey engages deeply in Somalia through both military cooperation and public works projects."⁹ Yet this engagement is deeply contested. The abundance of oil deposits in Somalia has "lured interest from Turkey, deepening the Mogadishu-Ankara relationship," but "the nature of Ankara's bilateral — often clandestine — dealings with Villa Somalia is causing growing concern."^[19]

In Libya, Türkiye has played a decisive role in perpetuating the country's division. During the 2014-2020 civil war, Türkiye supported the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord, while the UAE, Egypt, and Russia backed Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army. Turkish-supplied Bayraktar TB2 drones and air defence systems helped turn back Haftar's assault on Tripoli in 2019-2020. Yet Türkiye's role was not confined to the western government. Recently, its detente with Haftar has cooled and now Haftar has acquired Turkish military equipment. 

Türkiye's engagement in Africa is also cultural and ideological. Ankara mobilises “Ottoman nostalgia” as both a soft power instrument and a mechanism for differentiating itself from Western colonial legacies. Türkiye constructs a narrative of Islamic solidarity and historical continuity positioning itself as a unique actor in Africa and the Arab world with historical ties predating European colonialism. But this whitewashing neglects how the Ottomans sold all these alleged principles of Islamic unity when colonial powers arrived on the African continent.  Türkiye did not put up an existential fight, rather retreated to Istanbul and gave away its alleged Islamic principles. Albeit, this Ottoman nostalgia narrative serves to legitimize Türkiye's contemporary ambitions while obscuring the extractive and coercive dimensions of its engagement. Yet beneath this rhetoric of solidarity lies the same logic of accumulation and control that drives the UAE's more overtly militaristic approach.

Africa’s Waterways and Imperial Ambitions: Tasks for African Peoples 

The ports that Türkiye and the UAE are acquiring or seeking to control — Berbera, Bosaso, Mogadishu, Aden, Suakin, and others — serve multiple functions. They are sites where commodities are loaded and unloaded, where value is measured and transferred, and where the connection between African production and global markets is mediated.¹⁰ Foreign control over these ports ensures a portion of the surplus generated in Africa is captured while sustaining that African production remains oriented toward meeting the needs of external markets rather than domestic development.

But ports are also sites of political control. By investing in secessionist regions like Somaliland, the UAE deepens the fragmentation of African states, weakening their capacity to resist extraction. By securing military bases alongside port concessions, Türkiye and the UAE create a structure of coercion that disciplines any challenge to their operations. The mercenary-port nexus is not merely economic but profoundly political: it is a mechanism for the "development of underdevelopment," in Andre Gunder Frank's famous formulation, ensuring that Africa's integration into global capitalism is violently perpetuated rather than overcomes dependency.^[20]

For Gulf countries with very little internal food and water security, and landlocked African countries with limited industrialization, these ports are also a lifeline. For a landlocked country like Ethiopia, with over a 100 million people, imports dependency is not only limited to industrial inputs, but also basic necessities like pharmaceuticals and fertilizers. The ports in Djibouti, whose coast makes up the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, are pivotal for Ethiopia in this regard. The Ethiopian regime, currently fighting internal armed struggles, fought the devastating Tigray war with drones from the UAE.^[21] The Abiy regime’s recent attempt to recognize Somaliland, where the UAE sought to bypass the Somali government to make deals, demonstrates not only the UAE-Ethiopia alliance, but shows the UAE-Zionist interdependencies (with the latter recently recognizing Somaliland). The Ethiopian attempt was met with rejection and reactionary alliance from Egypt, Somalia, and Eritrea.^[22] 

Saudi Arabia’s most recent initiative among countries around the Red Sea – the Multinational Maritime Defense Alliance^[23] – which excludes the UAE and Ethiopia demonstrates how the Saudi-UAE struggle will continue to influence global politics. The recent capture of Yemen’s Red Sea coast by Ansarallah and their offensive on Saudi oil capabilities has now added pressure on one of the top global suppliers of oil. Access to both Straits is fundamental to countries like Saudi and the UAE who not only depend on food imports, but whose economies are largely dependent on oil, tourism, and trade. For Iran, whose heightened U.S. led economic and military aggressions have become an existential threat, influence over the Strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb provides leverage by controlling a significant share of global trade routes and oil supply. 

As the imperial ambitions of Türkiye and the UAE are increasingly constrained by the broader imperialist war on Iran, the need to find tutelage or create them in the Red Sea region by enabling brutal and secessionist regimes will likely increase. Much like the UAE saw fitting to support and produce allies that are genocidal in their practices, Türkiye will provide weapons and seek to influence African politics despite the cost on African lives and sovereignty. Neither of these powers, nor those benefitting from the imperialist order, will choose African lives over geopolitical interests and existential threats. The immediate challenge for progressive Africans is to ensure that elite relations with imperial powers does not trickle down to people to people relations rendering Africa a proxy. In the long run, the challenge is how African states can ensure sovereignty over ports and trade routes in a manner that satisfies not the interests of capital but of the people in the region. The actions of the RSF/SAF and Khalifa Haftar, and those of the Ethiopian and Egyptian states, have footprints of compradorial elites seeking to survive by integrating Africa in a failing system. These actions should not dictate the relations of the peoples in the region. We must understand and struggle against the imperial chain that seamlessly incorporates compradors from Libya, Sudan, and Ethiopia, to formations like the UAE and Turkey. 
 

Endnotes