Turkey Has More Air Strikes on Muslim Countries Than Any Country Besides Israel

It was the holy month of Ramadan, a little after 8 p.m., when the first bomb fell on the Jaffey farm. The families sheltering there had fled a drone strike on a mosque in the nearby Somali village of Bagdad half an hour earlier. The second bomb came about 30 minutes after the first, as neighbors from two other villages ran in to pull out survivors. By morning, 23 civilians were dead, 14 of them children. The weapon, Amnesty International later established from the fragments left in the soil, was a MAM-L glide bomb, built in Turkey and dropped from a Turkish-built Bayraktar TB2 drone. Two and a half years on, no one has said who was flying it.

That silence is the thread running through Turkey's air wars. Across Iraq, Syria, Libya and Somalia, independent monitors count civilians killed by Turkish strikes in the hundreds to the low thousands. The Turkish military's own confirmed count of civilians it has killed, in any of those countries, is zero. And the further the victims are from a government that can make Ankara uncomfortable, the less Turkey has to say.

Fragments of the Turkish-made MAM-L glide bomb that struck the Jaffey farm, photographed after the March 18, 2024 strikes. Amnesty International's weapons investigator identified the munition from these pieces. Photo: Private, via Amnesty International.

A farm, a mosque, and two bombs

The Jaffey farm sits about three kilometres west of Bagdad, a Somali farming village that shares its name with Iraq's capital, in the Lower Shabelle region, a strip of farmland southwest of Mogadishu where the Somali army and al-Shabaab have fought for years. On March 18, 2024, ground fighting between the two broke out near Bagdad and the neighboring village of Jambaluul. Around 7:30 p.m., according to an eyewitness interviewed by Amnesty, a drone struck a mosque on Bagdad's eastern edge, destroying it and damaging nearby homes. Civilians ran for the farm.

The first strike on the farm killed and wounded several of them. The second, roughly half an hour later, killed and wounded people who had come from the villages of Alifow and Gaalgube to rescue the survivors of the first. All of the dead and injured belonged to the Gorgaarte, a marginalized clan. Five families were destroyed.

Maalim Adan Hussein Hassan Adow, a 49-year-old farmer, was in Afgoye that night. His wife, Asli Buule Hassan, 40, was killed at the farm, along with his son Dahir, 14, his daughters Ishwaq, 7, and Asma, 6, and two nephews aged 7 and 9. His sister, struck in the head, died later in a Mogadishu hospital.

"I identified the bodies of my wife and children at the scene," he told Amnesty. "My wife and children were buried in one mass grave in Gaalgube village, while my nephews were buried in Alifow village. I don't know why my family was targeted during the holy month of Ramadan. I am heartbroken."

Mohamed Ali Deerey was in Alifow when he heard the first blast and learned his brother Ismail had been hit. He and his son hurried to the farm. "Upon reaching the farm, another blast targeted us, covering the area in a cloud of dust," he said. "The scene was chaotic. There were screams, blood, and bodies all over the ground." His brother and his nine-year-old nephew were dead. His own 22-year-old son was seriously wounded in the back.

The next day, Somalia's Ministry of Information announced that its forces, "in coordination with international partners," had killed more than 30 al-Shabaab militants in Bagdad and Baldooska, 15 of them "in an airstrike in Bagdad." It did not mention civilians.

The toll as documented by Amnesty International: 23 killed, including 14 children, five women and four men, and 17 injured, 11 of them children. Graphic: Amnesty International.

The weapon is Turkish. The pilot is a secret.

Amnesty's investigators interviewed 12 people remotely, among them four victims and eyewitnesses and four relatives of the dead. They reviewed satellite imagery and medical reports, examined photographs of victims and weapon fragments, and geolocated video from the farm and from Mogadishu's airport. The scrap metal was enough for the organization's weapons investigator to confirm the munition: MAM-L glide bombs, which are dropped from TB2 drones. Both are made in Turkey.

What Amnesty could not establish was who was at the controls. One Somali government source told the organization that the country's National Intelligence and Security Agency flies the TB2s in combat. But in 2022, the United Nations Panel of Experts on Somalia reported that, according to the Turkish government, Turkey had not transferred the drones to Somalia at all, and instead operated them itself "in the fight against terrorism." The same year, Somalia's then interior minister and now defence minister, Ahmed Malim Fiqi, was reported as saying that Turkish forces operate the drones while Somali commanders supply the targets.

A Bayraktar TB2 drone on the apron at Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu on September 12, 2022, geolocated by Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab. Image: Planet Labs, via Amnesty International.

On April 5, 2024, Amnesty wrote to both governments asking for details of the operation, including which country's forces controlled the drone that night. Neither replied. "The Somali and Turkish governments must investigate these deadly strikes as a war crime, and put an end to reckless attacks on civilians," said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty's regional director for East and Southern Africa, when the findings were published that May. Later Amnesty reporting found that neither government had opened an investigation, and that the survivors had received no truth, justice or reparations.

Turkey has not confirmed, denied or commented on Jaffey Farm since.

When Iraq complains, Ankara answers within a day

Turkey is perfectly capable of responding to an accusation of civilian harm. The proof is Zakho.

On July 20, 2022, artillery fire hit a tourist resort in Iraq's Dohuk governorate, in the Kurdistan Region near the Turkish border. Iraqi officials said at least nine people were killed, children among them, and between 22 and 33 were wounded. Iraqi sources identified a Turkish howitzer as the source.

Within a day, Turkey's foreign minister at the time, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, denied that Turkish forces had carried out the attack and blamed "terrorist organisations," adding that Ankara would cooperate with Iraqi authorities. Iraq summoned Turkey's ambassador, recalled its own chargé d'affaires from Ankara and lodged a formal complaint at the U.N. Security Council. Masrour Barzani, the Kurdistan Region's prime minister, blamed "Turkish shelling" directly and announced a joint investigation with Baghdad. Turkey disputes the attribution to this day.

That is what accountability pressure looks like when the aggrieved party is a state that can take its complaint to the Security Council. The irony is hard to miss. Iraq is not Turkey's partner but its longest-running target: Turkish aircraft have been striking Iraqi territory for a decade, and Baghdad still got its answer within a day. Somalia, whose army Turkey built and trains, got a letter that went unanswered.

File photo: smoke and flames rise over Kobani, in northern Syria. The town, just south of the Turkish border, has been hit repeatedly since 2014. In August 2022 a Turkish airstrike just west of it killed at least 11 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Photo: AFP, via Ahram Online.

A decade of strikes across the border

Somalia is the newest theatre, not the largest. Since 2015, Turkey has run a sustained air campaign against Kurdish armed groups in northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, and has launched three major cross-border ground operations into Syria since 2016, each with its own name. Airwars, the London-based monitor that tracks civilian harm from air power, has logged 985 incidents involving Turkish military action in Iraq and Syria. Its estimate of the civilian dead runs from 1,015 to 1,499, with 2,443 to 3,355 injured. Between 215 and 242 of the dead were children.

A single day in August 2022 shows how routine the killing has become. On August 16, a Turkish airstrike west of Kobani killed at least 11 people, including Syrian government soldiers, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported; Kurdish outlets put the toll at 16 or 22. Turkey's defense ministry, the same day, announced that its artillery had killed 13 suspected Kurdish militants in retaliation for an attack on a border post that killed a Turkish soldier. In Ankara's account there were no civilians and no strike on Syrian troops, only "terrorists."

Libya adds another layer. In the year from April 2019, Turkey supplied and openly deployed drones in support of the Tripoli government during the siege of the capital. Airwars counted 402 air and artillery strikes by that government and Turkey combined in those twelve months, and between 55 and 75 civilian deaths. It could not separate the two actors' share. Turkey has never acknowledged a civilian toll in Libya either.

Set the numbers side by side and the pattern is stark. Independent counts: more than a thousand civilians dead in Iraq and Syria, dozens in Libya, 23 at one Somali farm. Turkey's count: zero, everywhere.

Somalia, where Turkey built the army and then the silence

Turkey's presence in Somalia is not a footnote. TÜRKSOM, its largest overseas military base, has trained Somali soldiers on the edge of Mogadishu since 2017. Turkey's ambassador has said Ankara trained roughly a third of Somalia's military. TB2 drones have flown in support of Somali operations against al-Shabaab since at least 2022, when Amnesty's analysts found one parked on the apron at Aden Adde airport. In February 2024, weeks before Jaffey Farm, the two governments signed a defense and economic cooperation agreement. A month later came an offshore energy exploration deal; Nordic Monitor later reported, citing leaked documents, that Turkey secured rights to 90 percent of any resulting output. In April 2026 the Turkish drillship Çağrı Bey began drilling in Somali waters.

It is inside that footprint that two more sets of strikes have now been laid at Turkey's door.

The first came in August 2026 on the coast of Puntland, a semi-autonomous region in Somalia's northeast. On August 17, pirates hijacked a cargo ship, the Lutuf, which according to a Somali official quoted by the Associated Press was carrying Turkish weapons, communications and satellite equipment bound for a Turkish military training facility in Mogadishu. Two Turkish-owned ships and Turkish helicopters or drones shadowed the hijacked vessel in the days that followed, the official said. On August 18, a strike at Garmaal killed four people and wounded two, according to Puntland officials, who described the dead as civilian fishermen. On August 23, another strike at Jiifle killed at least nine, the Somali outlet Hiiraan Online reported. Early accounts called the dead "suspected pirates"; relatives and residents insisted they were fishermen. No one has independently verified either description.

No military has claimed the strikes. Puntland's deputy security minister accused Turkey on the record. Turkey's reply, such as it was, came in two forms that do not match: one Somali outlet reported a Turkish denial, while another reported the Turkish foreign ministry telling BBC Somali it "had no information." Neither is the clean, next-day denial Iraq received after Zakho.

The second came in the first days of September, in Doolow, on the Ethiopian border in Jubaland. On the night of September 3 to 4, an explosion hit the residence of Gen. Mahad Abdirahman Aden, known as "Shub," a former commander of Somalia's Custodial Corps who was removed from his post in March. Jubaland's regional government said a Turkish drone had struck the house and five people were hurt, a figure no other source has confirmed. Somalia's federal government denied any role and called it an internal explosion, not a strike. A former prime minister, Hassan Ali Khaire, accused the federal government itself. Turkey said nothing.

Three strikes, one silence

None of the three Somali cases is identical, and only Jaffey Farm has the forensic reconstruction that lets an outside investigator name the weapon. The Puntland deaths rest on regional officials and Somali outlets agreeing on the same core facts. Doolow rests on Jubaland's word, which Mogadishu disputes.

But the shape repeats. In each case there is a Turkish-made weapon, a Turkish-owned ship or a Turkish-operated aircraft close to the scene. In each case, Somalis are dead or wounded, and a Somali authority, whether a human rights investigator, a regional government or a former prime minister, has asked who did it. And in each case, the country that built Somalia's army, trained a third of its soldiers, flies its drones and is now drilling its seabed has declined to say.

Two years after Jaffey Farm, the survivors of five Gorgaarte families are still waiting for an answer to a single question: who was flying the drone that killed their children? Ankara has had every opportunity to give one. It has answered Iraq, a country it bombs. It has never answered Somalia, a country it arms.

Notes on the evidence

Civilian casualty figures for Iraq and Syria are Airwars' ranges for incidents it grades "fair" or that Turkey has confirmed, covering Turkish military action since 2015. Libya's figure covers a single year of the siege of Tripoli and cannot be separated from strikes by the Tripoli government's own forces, so it is a ceiling, not a Turkish count. Zakho figures come from Iraqi officials, including a wounded count of 22 from Iraq's health ministry, with other reports as high as 33; Turkey disputes the attribution. The Jaffey Farm account, names and quotations are drawn from Amnesty International's May 2024 investigation. The August 2022 Kobani strike is reported by the Associated Press, citing the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Kurdish outlets; the accompanying photograph is an AFP file image of Kobani and does not depict that specific strike. The Puntland and Doolow accounts rest on regional-government statements and Somali outlets without independent forensic verification; no source establishes that Turkey's military carried out either, and Mogadishu disputes that the Doolow event was an airstrike at all. Turkey's Somalia energy deal is included as documented context, not as a motive. No figure in this piece was estimated, modelled or invented.

Sources: Amnesty International, "Somalia: Death of 23 civilians in military strikes with Turkish drones may amount to war crimes," May 7, 2024; Airwars, Turkish military in Iraq and Syria, and "A year of living dangerously," Libya, April 2020; Associated Press via Ahram Online, August 16, 2022; Iraq's Health Ministry via Peregraf; Middle East Eye, The New Arab, Rudaw and Al-Monitor on Zakho; Associated Press, Hiiraan Online, Garowe Online and Baidoa Online on Puntland and Doolow; U.N. Panel of Experts on Somalia, 2022; Nordic Monitor; Anadolu Agency.