Sudan’s war and Turkey’s bid for influence

Sudan’s war is no longer confined to the country’s borders. We saw the shift unfold in August, when Chad accused the Sudanese Armed Forces of carrying out drone strikes more than 100 kilometres inside its territory. The incidents exposed the wider regional contest that has grown around the conflict, drawing in neighbouring states and powers from the Gulf to the Horn of Africa.

Sudanese aircraft hit a vehicle convoy on 20 August in Chad’s Ennedi-Est region, more than 100km from the shared border. Eight days later, Chad accused the Sudanese army of another air strike on a fuel market near the frontier that killed 12 people and wounded seven. Sudan’s foreign ministry has denied responsibility. Neither of these strikes were the first. A drone attack launched from Sudan in March killed 17 people in the Chadian town of Tiné, keeping the border unsettled for much of the year.

The US government has described the August strikes as a regional problem rather than a bilateral one. Massad Boulos, President Donald Trump’s adviser for Arab and African affairs, condemned the attack. “We discussed the recent SAF aerial strike on Chad and underscored our deep concern about the war in Sudan spilling across its borders, fuelling further escalation and threatening regional peace and stability,” he said after a meeting with Chadian President Idris Deby. Boulos also called for an end to the external military and financial support that keeps the war going. The US government has also called for the extension of the existing UN arms embargo on Darfur to the whole of Sudan.

A dozen external suppliers is a large number for a single war and this also helps us understand why the fighting along Chad’s border cannot be treated as an isolated security incident. Sudan’s western frontier opens onto the Sahel, while its Red Sea coast connects it to Egypt, the Gulf and the Horn of Africa. Governments across those regions now have to account for the war in their own security calculations. The ability to project air power deep into neighbouring territory also points to the external networks sustaining the Sudanese army, whose principal partners have become increasingly identifiable.

The fullest recent account of that network came from Le Monde, which reported on 26 August that Sudan had become the first front of the Makkah pact between Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan. The paper described Turkey as the Sudanese army’s principal military backer and reported that Saudi Arabia was financing purchases of Turkish and Pakistani military equipment. Reuters had reported in January that Pakistan was nearing a defence agreement with Sudan worth about $1.5 billion. Middle East Eye also reported that the package included aircraft, drones, air-defence systems and training, with further equipment under discussion.

The precise financing remains disputed. While the Middle East Eye reported that Saudi Arabia helped broker the deal, its sources differed over whether the Saudi government was directly funding it. However, what is clearer is the convergence of three forms of support around the Sudanese army, from Saudi financial and political backing, to Pakistani defence exports and Turkish military technology.

That alignment acquired a formal framework on 7 August, when the three governments signed the Makkah Joint Defence Agreement. The pact provides that an armed attack on one of the three states will be regarded as an attack on all three and establishes a framework for closer defence cooperation. Its significance for Sudan lies less in the agreement itself, which does not mention the war, than in the closer relationship among three governments already supporting the Sudanese army in different ways.

Middle East Eye has described Sudan as the first active war in which all three are engaged on the same side. For the US government, efforts to restrict external military support therefore confront more than individual arms deals. They run into a broader security relationship that the three governments have now committed themselves to expanding.

Turkey’s relationship with Sudan is the oldest of the three and predates the war by several years. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan built close ties with Omar al-Bashir’s government, and during his visit to Khartoum in December 2017 the two countries agreed to cooperate on the development of Suakin Island, including the restoration of its Ottoman-era port. Bashir’s overthrow in 2019 stalled the project and left Turkey’s most visible prospective foothold on the Red Sea in limbo. It did not erase the relationships Turkey had built with Sudanese institutions and military leaders. Those channels were still in place when the war began in April 2023 and extended into a more direct security role after the fighting broke out.

That shift became visible in March 2025, when a Washington Post investigation drawing on leaked contracts, messages and financial records reported that Baykar, Turkey’s leading defence company, had supplied the Sudanese army with military equipment worth about $120 million. The buyer, according to the paper, was a Sudanese state procurement body already under US sanctions. The delivery chain has since become harder to trace. The New York Times reported in February that Turkish-made drones were operating from an airstrip at East Oweinat in Egypt’s Western Desert. Turkey’s defence ministry denied that the Turkish Armed Forces had activities in Sudan, while a senior Turkish official said the equipment had been exported in accordance with international law.

The military relationship has also strengthened Turkey’s access to Sudan’s senior leadership. Erdoğan hosted Abdel Fattah al-Burhan in Turkey on 2 June, where the two discussed cooperation in trade, agriculture, energy and defence. Erdoğan presented Turkey’s involvement as an effort to stop the bloodshed and preserve Sudan’s territorial integrity. No new defence pact was announced. The meeting nevertheless demonstrated the value of the relationship to Turkey: direct access to the leadership at the centre of Sudan’s state structure and a channel into any political process that eventually follows the fighting.

That access fits a wider Turkish strategy around the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa. Turkey runs TÜRKSOM, its major overseas military training facility in Mogadishu, alongside broader economic and security ties with Somalia. In February 2024, Turkey signed a defence and economic framework with Somalia, followed a month later by an offshore energy agreement. That position came under new pressure in December 2025 when Israel became the first state to recognize Somaliland’s independence, a decision condemned by 21 Muslim and African states. The move added another layer to the competition over the waterways linking the Gulf of Aden to the Red Sea. Sudan, further north on the western shore, gives Turkey another point of engagement along the same maritime corridor.

But the same interests that draw Turkey toward Sudan also put limits on how useful a prolonged war can be. A conflict that continues to fragment the country erodes the stability and investment conditions that made Sudan worth courting in the first place. A divided state would also be a less predictable partner on the Red Sea. Suakin remains stalled, reconstruction opportunities remain distant, and a relationship built around wartime access to Burhan cannot guarantee influence over whatever political order eventually emerges.

Turkey’s calculation therefore extends beyond the army’s position on the battlefield. Over the years, it has invested heavily in building a relationship with Sudan’s state institutions and military leadership and has strong reasons to preserve that access through any eventual transition. The challenge, therefore, is to retain enough influence to shape the next phase without becoming so closely identified with the continuation of the war that its own position becomes an obstacle to the settlement it needs.