US struggles to curb Turkey’s TB2 killer drone exports

Kedikesenfare2 · Jul 13, 2022

US struggles to curb Turkey’s TB2 killer drone exports

Turkey’s cutting-edge armed drone is changing the nature of modern warfare and proliferating at alarming speed
by Umar Farooq July 13, 2022

Turkey's TB2 drones have been deployed to strategic effect by Ukraine armed forces in their war with Russia. Image: Twitter

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was in a tough spot last August when he paid a visit to Turkey. For nearly a year, his government had been at war with rebels from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which was now pushing south from its stronghold near the Eritrean border and threatening to move on the country’s capital of Addis Ababa.

Thousands had already been killed, and the United States and the United Nations had accused all the warring parties of blockading aid, committing sexual assault and deliberately targeting civilians.

With only a small, aging fleet of Soviet-era military jets, Abiy needed a way to quickly — and cheaply — expand his air campaign against the rebels. Turkey had just the solution: a military drone known as the TB2 that could be piloted from nearly 200 miles away. China and Iran also supplied drones, but the TB2, outfitted with cutting-edge technology, had fast become the new favorite of the world’s embattled nations, helping to win wars even when it was pitted against major powers.

On August 18, Abiy met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to sign a military pact. It’s unclear whether drones were part of the agreement. But two days after the signing, publicly available flight records showed that an Ethiopian Airlines charter flight took off from Tekirdag, an hour’s drive west of Istanbul, at an airstrip known for testing and exporting the Turkish drones.
It was the first of at least three such runs over roughly a month, the records show. Neither the Turkish nor the Ethiopian governments responded to questions about the flights, but officials in Turkey have previously acknowledged drone sales to Ethiopia.

Within months, Turkish-made drones, as well as ones made by China and Iran, hovered over crowded town centers across rebel-held Ethiopia, watching those below before launching missiles at them. News seeped out of towns like Alamata and Mlazat that the drones’ missiles were killing not just suspected rebels but dozens of people, many of them civilians, as they rode buses or shopped in markets.

Human rights groups took note of armed drones in the skies and examined images of missile fragments from airstrikes to try to identify exactly what aircraft were involved, hoping that publicly naming their origin would prompt the sellers to reconsider their actions.

As the death toll mounted, the Biden administration, which had authorized sanctions against any party involved in the fighting, said it had “profound humanitarian concerns” over Turkey’s drone sales to Ethiopia.

And US officials meeting with their Turkish counterparts raised reports of drone use in the conflict. But there the warnings stopped. Unlike its decisive actions targeting drone programs in China and Iran, Washington took no further action against the program in Turkey, a NATO ally.

So the Ethiopian air campaign continued, including a strike by a Turkish-made drone on a camp for displaced civilians in Dedebit that killed 59 people and attracted widespread condemnation. The bloodshed again drew a rebuke from the US, this time directed at Ethiopia.

President Joe Biden called Abiy and “expressed concern that the ongoing hostilities, including recent air strikes, continue to cause civilian casualties and suffering,” according to a White House summary of the conversation. Little changed, and by late February, about six months after Abiy’s visit to Turkey, at least 304 civilians were dead from airstrikes, according to the United Nations.

The Ethiopian government did not respond to requests for comment, but authorities have previously denied targeting civilians in the war.

Today, much of the discussion around the TB2 drone centers on Ukraine, where it is playing a pivotal role in the war against Russia. Ukraine has put out a steady stream of propaganda videos that show TB2s taking out equipment like surface-to-air missiles and helping other aircraft and artillery target Moscow’s forces.

Some lawmakers in Congress have even cast the drone as a crucial weapon and are pushing for the US to help Ukraine buy more. In Lithuania, a recent crowdfunding campaign raised US$5.4 million in three and a half days to help Ukraine purchase another TB2.

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