Türkiye stood with Somalia; Somalia remembers

In August 2011, while famine tore through the Horn of Africa and much of the world was still debating what to do from a safe distance, a plane landed in Mogadishu. On board was President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with his wife, his ministers, and a government that had decided to come to a place most capitals considered too dangerous to visit.

The photographs from that day, of a Turkish cabinet walking through tented camps of the starving, were not diplomacy as the world then understood it. They were something we in Somalia had almost stopped expecting from anyone: solidarity.

That visit changed our country. It also changed what others thought was possible in a place like ours.

Nearly fifteen years on, as I travel to Türkiye to attend Antalya Diplomacy Forum and to strengthen our bilateral partnership, I want Turkish readers to know, plainly and in our own words, what their government and their taxpayers have made possible, and what we intend to build with them next.

A nation helped back onto its feet

When Turkish Airlines landed at Aden Adde International Airport on March 6, 2012, it was not just a new route. It was the first international carrier to come back to our capital after the collapse of the state in 1991, and it said something the rest of the world had not been saying: Mogadishu is open again. That flight is now a daily artery of trade, family, and diplomacy.

Turkish companies rebuilt Aden Adde to international standard. They modernised the Port of Mogadishu, which today generates a decisive share of our federal revenues. Turkish engineers paved the first proper roads through our capital in a generation.

The Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Training and Research Hospital, the largest tertiary facility in the country, now treats more than a thousand Somalis a day. Many of them would have had no specialist care at all.

Tens of thousands of Somali students have studied in Türkiye on Turkish government scholarships, from secondary school through the doctoral level. They come home as doctors, engineers, teachers, civil servants, diplomats. An entire generation of our professional class was educated in Turkish classrooms, and most of them still speak of Istanbul or Ankara as a second home.

At Camp TURKSOM in Mogadishu, the largest Turkish military training facility anywhere outside Türkiye, the future officer corps of the Somali National Army is being trained to defend our people and our territory.

The patient work of Turkish instructors has made possible battlefield gains against al-Shabaab that were unthinkable a decade ago. The recent delivery of F-16 fighter jets and T-129 ATAK helicopters, together with continued support for our naval and air forces, is carrying that partnership into the next generation of Somali security.

And in the rooms where it matters, at the United Nations Security Council, at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Türkiye has been an unflinching voice for Somalia’s sovereignty and unity. Where others have hedged, Ankara has been direct.

We name our partners plainly

Türkiye has not done this alone, and we would not write an honest account if we suggested otherwise.

The African Union mission in Somalia, sustained by European Union funding and by the real sacrifice of African troop-contributing countries, has given our federal institutions the time and space to consolidate. We do not forget any of those partners, and we remain grateful to every one of them.

The United States has stood with us through a different set of challenges, and deserves to be named for what it has done.

American humanitarian assistance, beginning with the 2011 famine response and continuing through every drought since, has kept hundreds of thousands of Somalis alive when the rains failed. Somali mothers and children are alive today because the American people paid for them to be fed.

And the partnership between U.S. Africa Command and our own forces, conducted in close coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, has done something no other partner has been able or willing to do at that scale: it has kept sustained pressure on al-Shabaab terrorists across the south, and on Daesh-Somalia terrorists in the Golis Mountains.

The security gains we are now consolidating would not exist without that American contribution, and we do not take it for granted.

These partnerships do not compete with one another. They complement one another. Türkiye’s breadth and steadiness, the multilateral framework built by the AU and EU, and the American role in humanitarian response and counterterrorism have together given Somalia the space to recover.

But the shape of the Turkish contribution, its scope, its constancy, and the personal engagement of Turkish leadership from the very first day remains a thing of its own.

The next chapter

Our partnership with Türkiye is now entering a phase neither side could have imagined in 2011. This month, the Turkish deep-sea drilling vessel Çağrı Bey docked in Mogadishu to begin Somalia’s first-ever offshore oil drilling at the Curad-1 well, after months of seismic survey by Oruç Reis.

In January, we broke ground on a Türkiye–Somalia spaceport along our Indian Ocean coast. It is a project that uses Somalia’s equatorial geography to give Türkiye sovereign access to orbit, and gives Somalia a foothold in one of the highest-value industries of this century.

These are not gifts. They are investments in a real partnership: agreed between sovereign equal governments, shaped by mutual interest, and designed to deliver jobs, revenue, skills, and technology transfer to Somalia while serving Türkiye’s own national interests.

That is what a modern partnership between equals looks like. It is also precisely what the cynics of fifteen years ago said could never happen in a country like ours.

Shared stakes, shared future

To the Turkish people, allow me to say this clearly: Somalia’s recovery is almost impossible to imagine without you. The hospital beds, the scholarships, the repaired runways, the trained cadets, the diplomatic support we have received time and again: all of it was paid for by your work and delivered by your institutions. Our people know this. Our government says so openly, and without qualification.

We come to Türkiye this week not as a country in need, but as a partner ready to build. The next chapter will be written together: in the drilling logs off our coast, in the satellites one day launched from our shores, in the students moving between our universities, and in the steady deepening of trade and security ties between Ankara and Mogadishu.

Somalia remembers and Somalia is ready.

 The author, HE Ali Omar, is the State Minister for Foreign Affairs, Federal Republic of Somalia