Turkey’s role in the liberation of Silvia Romano

the Turkey Post a photo of Silvia Romano wearing a Turkish bulletproof vest and therefore claims an important role from the Italian cooperator, who landed in Rome yesterday after 18 months in the hands of the kidnappers, first in Kenya and then in Somalia. The Turkish news agency Anadolu, citing a source of Turkish services, confirms the “close collaboration” between Ankara and Rome intelligence, with Italy “asking” Mit to cooperate in the rescue operation, obtaining approval from the services Turks, who started working on Silvia’s case last December.

The first step allowed circumscribing the area where Silvia was captive. In addition to the use of military and satellite technologies, the fact that in Somalia local intelligence is primarily made up of trainers from Ankara.

This work, again according to Anadolu, allowed the Mit (Turkish secret services) to confirm that Silvia was in good health, identifying the position, although no other details about it were revealed. According to Anadolu, it was MIT who took care of the girl (as the photo would confirm) and then turned her over to the Italian authorities for Mogadishu.

Turkey-Somalia, 10 years of friendship

The clear and fundamental role of the Turks 007 in the liberation of our Silvia Romano finds political explanations with consolidated roots. To understand the origins of the proximity of two countries like Turkey and Somalia, in fact, we must take a step back towards 2011, when the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan He visited the Somali capital devastated by a terrible famine, becoming the only non-African political leader to appear in Mogadishu in more than two decades.

Erdogan was impressed by the conditions in the country and was ordered to provide extensive humanitarian aid, which became the Trojan horse for diplomatic agreements, with the opening of the largest Turkish embassy in Africa in 2016, commercial (exchange of $ 250 million commercial plus 100 of Turkish investments), logistics (Turkish companies manage the port and the airport), education and healthcare (in Mogadishu the hospital center “Recep Tayyip Erdogan” is active).

A separate chapter deals with military and intelligence collaboration, with a military base in the capital where Ankara’s men train local security forces, who use Turkish equipment, weapons, drones and vehicles. A collaboration as important to the Somali government as it is inappropriate for Al Shabab, with al-Qaeda-inspired Islamic terrorists attacking Turkish companies and engineers with two different attacks in the past 5 months.

What impressed was the number of commercial, military and construction projects carried out by Turkey, a figure in stark contrast to the strategies undertaken and abandoned by Western countries in the recent past. Turkey’s successes and Somali potential have led the Turkish President to increase political influence and appoint a special envoy for Somalia in 2018, the first in Turkey’s history, with the aim of directly influencing the local political agenda and trying to recompose the rupture between the federal government of Mogadishu and the Somaliland region.

Another important form of Turkish soft power rests on the numerous scholarships guaranteed to local university students, who go to study in Turkey and then become the Somali ruling class of the future, keeping an eye on Ankara. Another form of invisible influence for Islamists, who in recent years have affected students receiving Turkish scholarships in at least two different attacks.

Latest act of Turkish influence, Somalia’s invitation to Turkey to conduct oil exploration on its seabed. “We received a proposal from Somalia – Erdogan said – we were told (the editor of the Somali government) that there is oil in Somali waters and we could carry out investigations, exactly as in Libya.” It would only be the last act of relations than between Ankara and Mogadishu They have grown exponentially in the last 10 years, both commercially as well as diplomatically and militarily. The strategy applied in Somalia follows the pattern already followed in Sudan and, in part, in Libya.
Three pieces of a puzzle with which the Turkish President reaffirms his influence in Northwest Africa by making a rude gesture to the Egyptian enemy, General Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, whom Erdogan does not forgive for “murdering” Mohamed Morsi, close to him for the common adhesion to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Turkish military influence in Somalia, therefore, has grown in the past ten years under the umbrella of a soft power that through the construction of roads, hospitals, schools, and commercial exchanges, has enabled Ankara to further its influence in the Horn of Africa to become one of the main players in the area.

Military cooperation between the two countries made possible the supply of arms and equipment and was based in the first phase on the training of 1,500 soldiers from Mogadishu, prepared by Ankara for the fight against Islamic terrorism in Al Shabab, but clearly with a view to to boost their influence to a point already in the orbit of the Ottoman Empire.

Returning to areas in the past under the protection of Sublime Door has always been one of the cornerstones of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s strategies. The training programs were blessed by Mogadishu, who had seen similar projects by Western powers fail, allowing Somalia to fight Al Shabab in the long term and break free from bureaucracy and slow Union of African Countries.

As Turkey’s investments in the country grow, what the Turkish government wanted to avoid is that the points of interest of the Somali and Turkish government, as well as engineers, cooperators and doctors, become targets for terrorists, as already happened in the recent past with the projects ofAfrican Union Mission (AMISOM), launched by the United States and other international actors and experts under pressure from Islamists.

An outcome that Erdogan was able to avoid through training and equipment provided to local troops, with long-term plans that later resulted in the opening in 2017 of the large military base in Mogadishu. With the opening of the base, Erdogan directly avoided the risk, already in the past, that the capital could end up in the hands of Al Shabab and guaranteed a structure capable of training up to 1,000 soldiers at a time and with the aim of leading to 10,000 total Somali soldiers trained by Ankara. An important fact, if you believe that there are 2,000 soldiers in the country who have received US training. USA In the last decades.

The facility, Turkey’s largest overseas military base, powered the Somali Prime Minister Hassan ali Khaire thanking Turkey for “rebuilding Somali forces” and has allowed a Muslim leader like Erdogan to take a kind of moral-religious leadership against an organization that makes its most radical adherence to Islam its flag and inspiration in impositions in the areas under your control. Turkish President’s next goal is to provide Somalia a fleet of warplanes, destined to become a determining factor in the control of the vast rural areas of the African country.