Turkish arms firm helped fuel Sudan’s brutal civil war

Katharine Houreld, Elizabeth Dwoskin

Washington Post

Washington Post  –  A trove of documents and communications provided to The Post reveals how a Turkish company covertly funneled weapons to the Sudanese army.

The secret shipment of Turkish drones and missiles had just been delivered to the Sudanese army in September, and a team from Baykar — Turkey’s largest defense company — was on the ground to make sure the deal went smoothly.

Once the drones were in action, a Baykar employee sent a series of messages to his boss.

“Today’s attack,” he messaged on Sept. 12, alongside a video of an airstrike on an unfinished concrete shell of a building. “2nd attack” read his message three days later, as a missile slammed into the front of a large warehouse. In another video he shared, a person walks through the frame seconds before the explosion.

The remarkable exchange was captured in a trove of text messages and phone intercepts, photos and videos, weapons documents and other financial records provided to The Washington Post and partially authenticated using phone records, trade records and satellite data. The cache reveals in startling new detail how a well-connected Turkish defense firm covertly fueled Sudan’s devastating civil war, which has dragged on for 22 months and created what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe. It also shows how Turkey’s defense industry has built relationships on both sides of the conflict.

Baykar, co-owned by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law, sent at least $120 million worth of weapons — including eight of its signature TB2 drones and hundreds of warheads — to the Sudanese army last year, according to a contract and end user certificate viewed by The Post, along with other messages and flight tracking information supporting the sale.

Baykar is the principal provider of drones to the Turkish military and the country’s leading defense exporter. Its top-of-the-line TB2 model can carry more than 300 pounds of explosives and is built with many U.S.-made components.

Baykar, the Sudanese military and the Sudanese government did not respond to requests for comment.

An official from the Turkish Embassy in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said in a written statement to The Post that “Having witnessed the consequences of outside intervention in Sudan, Turkey has, from the outset of the conflict, refrained from providing any military support to the parties.”

Alper Coskun, the former director general for international security at the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that while he could not comment on specific cases, Turkey had a robust and well-established system in place to review weapons sales, involving the foreign ministry, the ministry of defense and the general staff.

The presence of Turkish weapons on the battlefield in Sudan has been previously reported, but never in such detail — including who brokered the deal, the extent of the shipments and how they were delivered to an active conflict zone despite a web of international sanctions. The documents also detail the inducements Sudanese authorities appear to be offering foreign companies in exchange for military assistance, a rare glimpse into the murky world of wartime dealmaking.

The conflict in Sudan has increasingly devolved into a proxy battle between foreign powers, including Russia, Iran and, most prominently, the United Arab Emirates, but the role of Turkey has been largely overlooked.

Reporting restrictions have made it impossible to quantify exactly how much military support has been smuggled into Sudan by outside powers, but a State Department-funded report in October concluded with “near certainty” that 32 flights between June 2023 and May 2024 were weapons transfers from the UAE to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary — which is battling the army for control of the country. The New York Times reported that the Emiratis were piloting Chinese drones from across the border in Chad to furnish the RSF with intelligence and escort weapons shipments to paramilitary fighters.

Iran, meanwhile, was secretly providing drones to the Sudanese military, the Sudan Conflict Observatory found in its October report. Amnesty International said last year that small arms sent to Sudan by Russian companies were being used by fighters on both sides.

The UAE has repeatedly denied providing weapons to the RSF. Russia and Iran have not commented on the reports.

The trove also shows that competition is intensifying among regional governments over the spoils of war. During discussions after the drone sale, Baykar executives told their colleagues that leaders in the Sudanese military were considering offering Turkish firms access to copper, gold and silver mines, company documents show, as well as development rights to Abu Amama — a key Red Sea port that was previously promised to the UAE and is also coveted by Moscow. Last month, the Russian and Sudanese foreign ministers said a deal had been reached allowing Russia to establish a naval base in Port Sudan, another strategic foothold along the Red Sea.

Baykar’s shipments to the Sudanese army appear to be in violation of several rounds of U.S. and European Union sanctions, illustrating the risks run by Turkish companies as they seek to deepen their influence across Africa. The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously in October to extend an arms embargo on Darfur, but it has not sought to take action against any of the outside powers accused of violations.

“No country should be fueling and profiting from Sudan’s civil war,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who has tried to block arms sales to the UAE over its weapons transfers to the RSF.

The revelations come at a delicate time for Erdogan, who has often been at odds with the United States during his two decades in power. He has recently offered to host peace talks between Russia and Ukraine, amid faltering ties between Kyiv and the Trump administration, and is seeking to deepen Turkish influence in Iraq and Syria at the expense of Iran.

Erdogan has also worked to expand Turkey’s military and diplomatic ties across the volatile Horn of Africa. He is a staunch supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood political movement, which is allied with the Sudanese army and opposed by the UAE.

In a Dec. 13 call with Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s military chief, Erdogan offered to “step in to resolve the disputes between Sudan and the United Arab Emirates,” according to an official readout.

But the trove shows that while Ankara was publicly positioning itself as a mediator, Turkish defense contractors with government ties were engaging with both sides.

As Baykar negotiated the arms deal with the Sudanese army, a second Turkish arms company, Arca Defense, was in extensive contact with a senior figure from the RSF.

In phone calls and other correspondence, an Arca executive discusses weapons sales with Algoney Hamdan Daglo Musa, in charge of arms procurement for the paramilitary and the brother of its leader. The Post could not determine if Arca, a Pentagon contractor, had provided arms to the RSF.

The Arca executive said the company had never sold weapons to the RSF but did not answer questions about her contacts with Musa. Mohamed Almokhtar, an RSF adviser, said he was unaware of the conversations. The group had never received arms from Turkey, he added, but had good relations with the government in Ankara.

The Sudanese civil war began in April 2023 when the country’s two leading generals turned on each other. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the RSF chief, had worked hand-in-hand with Burhan to crush a fledgling pro-democracy movement, but the men fell out over how to integrate paramilitary forces into the regular army.

The consequences have been catastrophic. At least 150,000 people have been killed. Around two-thirds of Sudan’s 50 million people need aid; more than 13 million have fled their homes. Sudanese civilians have been raped, tortured and beheaded; hospitals and markets have been bombed and burned. The U.S. government has accused both sides of war crimes. But weapons have kept flowing in.

The $120 million contract between Baykar and the Sudanese military’s procurement agency, known as Defense Industries System (DIS), was dated Nov. 16, 2023, five months after the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on DIS. The Post could not independently confirm the date of the signing.

The contract included 600 warheads, six TB2s drones and three ground control stations, and it promised that 48 personnel would deliver the weapons and provide “in-country technical support.” Two additional drones were delivered in October, messages show, and weapons shipments continued into November. The contract was signed by Mirghani Idris Suleiman, director general of DIS, later personally sanctioned by Washington for “being at the center of weapons deals that have fueled the brutality and scale of the war.”

The first munitions arrived by plane in August 2024 at Port Sudan, a Red Sea city on Sudan’s eastern coastline, according to messages between Baykar executives. The last flight arrived on Sept. 15, messages show. The Post used publicly available aviation data to identify two of the flights matching those described in the calls; both were routed through the Malian capital of Bamako and piloted by Aviacon Zitotrans, a private airline designated for sanctions by the United States in 2023 for being part of “Russia’s war machine.”

After each shipment, Ozkan Cakir, a mid-level Baykar employee, informed Esref Evliyaoglu, the company’s vice president of business, that the plane had arrived and would be routed to Shendi and Atbara, towns with military bases north of Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, according to messages between the two men.

On Sept. 8, Cakir sent Evliyaoglu a photo of himself with Burhan. The two are flanked by Sudanese flags; there are gold-tinted tissue boxes on the marble tables. Over the coming week he would send his boss the videos of the drone strikes, which he appeared to film on his phone from inside a military command center.

Neither Cakir nor Evliyaoglu responded to a request for comment.

Using partial coordinates visible in the camera of the drone, The Post was able to geolocate one of the strikes to Hillat ed Dareisa, a village roughly 50 miles north of the capital.

“You don’t need a lot of drones to turn the tide of war — and these drones are pretty powerful,” said Justin Lynch, managing director at Conflict Insights Group, a data analytics and research organization that helped authenticate the trove of documents using open source data. “You have seen a huge SAF advancement in the past couple of months. These drones are one part of that winning strategy.”

Sudanese authorities told Baykar representatives in a Sept. 9 meeting that “With this move, Turkey has become the country that has supported them the most,” according to an internal Baykar document describing the conversations.

Sudan’s government wanted to “give the construction and management of the Abu Amama port” to Turkish companies, the document said, “otherwise, it will be given to the Russians.” The UAE had previously inked a $6 billion deal to manage the port, but it was canceled by the military over Abu Dhabi’s support for the RSF.

According to Baykar’s summary of the meeting, Sudanese authorities also expressed an interest in working with Turkey to mine the country’s copper, gold and silver reserves, and “to grant licenses to Turkish companies for fishing and fish processing facilities.”

Almokhtar, the RSF adviser, said the group had sought information from the Turkish foreign ministry when Sudan’s army received the TB2 drones, which he described as instrumental in the military’s recent gains.

“They said they did not come from Turkey,” he said. “They said maybe they came from another country that had bought them. They did not say who.”

‘Big big guns’

Musa, the baby-faced younger brother of the RSF leader, was sanctioned by the Biden administration in October “for leading efforts to supply weapons to continue the war in Sudan.”

In the preceding months, according to communications reviewed by The Post, Musa tried to strengthen the paramilitary’s ties to Turkey — speaking frequently with Ozgur Rodoplu, an Arca Defense executive.

While Baykar has established itself as a leading global provider of drones, including to Ukraine and North Africa, Arca is a relative newcomer, established in 2020, according to its website.

Her conversations with Musa were often warm and detailed, recordings reveal.

In March 2024, Musa asked “my sister” for “50 sets” and promised he would provide her with an end-user certificate — a government document required for a weapons sale, which the RSF is not legally able to issue. It is unclear if he provided her with the certificate, or if the conversation resulted in a weapons exchange.

Some discussions between the two seemed to indicate that arms were flowing the other way — out of Sudan. During the summer of 2024, Musa sent her video on WhatsApp of a weapons cache the RSF had recently captured, showing uniformed men entering a reinforced hole blasted into a dusty hill.

“We found new big things today,” he wrote to her. “Big big guns. We can do big sales.”

“Great material you have,” she wrote back. “I am excited.”

She wanted 122mm Grad rockets, she said, sending a picture. But Musa said he couldn’t help: “We have a huge need for it,” he replied.

Later, during another conversation, Rodoplu promises that “whatever quantity you have, we are ready to buy.” He reassures her that “we are family. Any word from you, for us is very precious.”

Rodoplu told The Post that her company had not engaged in any weapons exchanges with the RSF, saying “we know them from before … but we didn’t do any business with them.” Musa declined to comment.

The contacts between Arca and a senior member of the RSF — a group Washington has accused of genocide and ethnic cleansing — could strain the U.S.-Turkey relationship, which has been marked by periods of tension throughout Erdogan’s tenure. And there are military implications as well: The Pentagon purchased 116,000 rounds of ammunition from Arca in 2024.

“In light of these findings that Turkish companies are playing both sides, the U.S. should redouble our efforts to stop the flow of weapons to this conflict and to bring it to an end,” Van Hollen told The Post.

On Sept. 9, after learning of the drones deal between Baykar and the Sudanese army, Musa made an unhappy call to Rodoplu.

“I told you not to trust anyone here,” she told him. “As far as I heard, they also supplied some other equipment — some weapons.” Apparently in a panic, Musa tried through an intermediary to get in touch with Baykar and put a stop to the shipment, messages show.

He was “almost about to cry … he was begging,” Baykar’s CEO recounted in a text to Evilyaoglu. Musa wanted the drones too, according to the CEO, offering double what the military had paid. If Baykar didn’t comply, Musa told him, “we will be finished,” the CEO wrote.

The company was unmoved by his desperate appeal.

“Not a chance,” Evliyaoglu responded by text when Musa’s message was relayed to him. “This is the way of the world.”