The Houthis shot down a Bayraktar Akinci operated by the Royal Saudi Air Force over northern Yemen on July 26, and in August satellite imagery put two more Akincis at Al-Khadim airbase in eastern Libya, on the side of the war Turkey was bombing six years ago. Those two events bookend a Forbes analysis by Paul Iddon, published Saturday, tallying where Turkish armed drones now fly across the Middle East and North Africa. The short answer is almost everywhere. Of the six Gulf Cooperation Council members, only Oman and Bahrain have not bought one. From Qatar on the Persian Gulf to Morocco on the Atlantic, the customer list now includes most of the Arab world.
The reason that market existed for Turkey to take is the part American readers should sit with. In the 2010s, Washington refused to sell armed drones to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies. They bought Chinese instead, then switched to Turkish. The United States never got back in.
Saudi Arabia Lost an Akinci Over Yemen Within a Year of Training Its Crews
The Houthis announced on July 26 that they had downed a Saudi-operated Akinci over Yemen’s Al Jawf governorate, according to Forbes. The first Saudi air force crews trained on the type graduated in Turkey in October 2025. The kingdom lost one of its most expensive drones nine months later.
The Akinci is Baykar’s heavy platform: twin-engine, larger payload, wider munitions selection and better sensors than the Bayraktar TB2, and priced accordingly. DroneXL covered its air-launched ballistic missile test in November 2024, when it hit a target 155 kilometers (96 miles) out. Riyadh ordered an unspecified number in 2023 under what Baykar called “the biggest defense and aviation export contract” in Turkish history, a deal that included technology transfer and joint production. DroneXL reported in February 2024 that Baykar planned to start production in Saudi Arabia within two years.
The war the Akinci went down in is the one that ended with a ceasefire in early 2022 and has been showing signs of reigniting since early July, per Forbes. The Houthis fire Iranian-designed one-way attack drones and ballistic missiles. Yemen’s internationally recognized government, backed by the Saudi-led coalition, announced drone strikes on Houthi positions on August 23 and has, per a late-July report in The New Arab cited by Forbes, concluded its own drone deal with Turkey. Nothing had been delivered as of late July. Ankara is already training Yemeni pilots, and which models they are training on has not been disclosed.
The Gulf Bought Chinese Drones First Because Washington Said No
Saudi Arabia and the UAE turned to China for armed drones in the 2010s because the United States would not sell them any, Forbes notes. The UAE flew Chinese-made Wing Loong IIs, some over Libya. Once ties with Ankara thawed, Abu Dhabi bought far more from Turkey than it ever had from Beijing.
Reports in 2022 put the Emirati TB2 order at 120 aircraft. The first video of an Emirati TB2 surfaced in late December 2025, and weeks later the UAE’s Edge Group confirmed it had integrated its Desert Sting 16 guided bomb onto the airframe. Abu Dhabi has also acquired the Akinci.
Qatar got there first. Doha bought TB2s in 2018, two years before the type made its name over Libya, Syria and Nagorno-Karabakh, and while Turkey was deploying troops to Qatar during the 2017 blockade led by Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Qatar bought only six. Kuwait ordered 18 TB2s in 2023 under a contract valued at $370 million, with deliveries starting in July 2025. That leaves Oman and Bahrain as the two GCC members without Turkish drones.
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan Are the Holdouts Next Door
Turkey is not known to have sold armed drones to its immediate Arab neighbors. Iraq’s defense minister said in August 2021 that Baghdad had reached a consensus with Ankara on a possible TB2 purchase, plus attack helicopters and electronic warfare gear. Nothing has been reported since, per Forbes.
Iraq has more recently ordered Turkish-made Korkut anti-aircraft guns to deal with drone threats. Whether a Bayraktar order follows is open. Post-Assad Syria, with most of its air force destroyed, has not sought Turkish drones either, though Forbes argues a TB2 fleet would be a cheaper interim option than rebuilding a fighter force. Lebanon is looking at low-cost defensive options that could include Turkish drones, Turkish media reported in July. Jordan does not operate them. Israel, for obvious reasons, never will.
North Africa Went From Turkish Adversaries to Turkish Customers in Five Years
Egypt was estranged from Turkey through the 2010s. Relations improved sharply in the 2020s, and Ankara has resumed arms sales and signed co-production deals to assemble drones in Egypt, which Forbes reports has alarmed Israel. In early 2026, satellite images showed Akincis in southern Egypt striking Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces.
The RSF claims to have shot down at least four of them. Turkey is also known to have supplied Sudan’s military with TB2s after the war began in April 2023. That is the same pattern DroneXL described in April in its Terrahaptix coverage: Sahelian and North African armies stocking Turkish strike platforms faster than anyone is building the counter-drone layer underneath them.
Tunisia bought six Anka-S medium-altitude, long-endurance drones from Turkish Aerospace Industries in 2020. Libya is the reversal case. Turkey’s TB2s broke Haftar’s siege of Tripoli in 2020 and handed the Tripoli government its survival. Six years on, satellite images in August confirmed at least two Akincis at Al-Khadim, inside Haftar’s territory, on top of the TB2s and at least one Akinci already supplied to Tripoli. Turkish drones now operate from both sides of Libya’s divide.
Algeria is the other reversal. When Turkey agreed to sell TB2s to Morocco in the early 2020s, Algiers objected loudly. Ankara’s response was to sell to Algeria too, and Algiers ordered the TAI Anka-S and the larger twin-engine Aksungur.
DroneXL’s Take
Strip away the country-by-country detail and the Forbes tally comes down to one sentence: Turkey built an armed-drone export business across the Arab world because the United States decided, for most of a decade, not to. Washington held the line on Missile Technology Control Regime rules. Gulf capitals shopped elsewhere.
China got the first orders. Turkey got the bigger ones, and the technology-transfer and co-production deals that come with them.
I will concede the case for the original restraint. The buyers on this list are not all governments Washington should be comfortable arming, and the Saudi-led coalition’s air war over Yemen is the reason that argument carried weight. The MTCR reinterpretation under the first Trump administration came late and reluctantly for reasons that were not stupid.
But restraint only works as policy if the customer goes without. Every state on this list found a seller. Saudi Arabia now has a co-production line coming. The UAE integrates its own munitions onto Turkish airframes. Egypt assembles them locally. None of that industrial base is American, and none of the operational data those air forces are generating over Yemen, Sudan and Libya flows back to a U.S. manufacturer. That is the same lesson I drew in February in Turkey’s Drone Industry Faces a NATO Reality Check: Baykar’s advantage was never the airframe, it was a permissive export policy paired with a product that was good enough and available now.
The combat record cuts both ways, and my read is that Baykar’s customers know it. The TB2 that looked untouchable over Ukraine in March 2022 was, by June 2024, the example France’s army chief reached for when describing a drone that Russian electronic warfare had made too easy to jam. The Akinci has since gone down over Mali, over Yemen and, if the RSF is right, over Sudan. What Turkey is selling to the Arab world is not survivability. It is a drone that arrives, with a factory attached, from a supplier who does not attach conditions.
Two things will show whether the map keeps filling in. The first Turkish deliveries to Yemen’s government, which Forbes says had not happened as of late July, would put Bayraktars on both sides of the Saudi-Houthi line by proxy. And Iraq, which has gone from a 2021 consensus on TB2s to a Korkut gun order with no drone deal in between, is the one neighbor whose next purchase decides whether the holdout column shrinks to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Israel.
Source: Forbes
DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.
