Not quite an alliance: Inside Egypt and Turkey’s new military ties

Last June, the Egyptian and Turkish air forces held a joint exercise at Egyptian bases involving multirole fighter jets. In July, Egyptian fighters flew to Turkey for the “Anatolian Eagle 2026″ exercise alongside Turkish and Azerbaijani air forces and a NATO early-warning aircraft.

A few days later, Egypt hosted the “Golden Eagle” exercise, bringing together Egyptian paratrooper and commando units with Turkish special forces. The armed forces said the goal was to “achieve integration and cohesion” and exchange tactical expertise. Days after that, Egypt’s defense minister traveled to Ankara, where he signed a letter of intent on defense cooperation with his Turkish counterpart, part of a broader framework for joint defense-industry development.

Beyond the exercises, media reports revealed in February, citing open-source information, that Turkish Bayraktar drones had been deployed at the East Oweinat base near the Egyptian-Sudanese border and used against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in support of the Sudanese army.

This military cooperation, whose pace has clearly picked up this year, didn’t start there. Since 2025, the two countries have signed joint-production agreements for unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and the “TOLGA” drone. The head of the Arab Organization for Industrialization (AOI) has said Egypt produces drones in cooperation with Turkey and China with at least 50% local content, alongside production of the “Al-Aqrab” UGV.

So how did this close military partnership strengthen within months, after nearly a decade of estrangement between two countries that once came close to direct confrontation?

After a decade of rivalry

“Historically, relations between the two countries have been complicated, swinging between cooperation and tension, but they’ve never reached this level of cooperation before,” says Ayman Zaineldine, a former deputy assistant foreign minister and former Egyptian ambassador to Spain, describing the relationship. What governs it, he adds, goes beyond any particular leadership or ideological orientation.

Zaineldine tells Al Manassa that understanding the current shift requires first placing the years of estrangement within the longer arc of the two countries’ relationship. Part of what complicated relations, he explains, “relates to how each state sees its regional role. Egypt is a leading actor in the Arab world, while Turkey, a non-Arab power, has sought a role of its own in the region.”

Relations reached a high point of tension after Ankara rejected the July 2013 removal of the late President Mohamed Morsi. Both countries downgraded relations to the level of chargé d’affaires and expelled each other’s ambassadors. The rivalry quickly spread beyond the bilateral relationship into broader regional disputes, especially over Libya and the eastern Mediterranean.

But Zaineldine says this issue “receded” over time, once Ankara recognized that a return to Egypt’s pre-June 30 status quo was no longer possible, and that its broader foreign-policy calculations couldn’t stay frozen at one historical moment.

Samir Ragheb, head of the Arab Foundation for Development and Strategic Studies, sees it differently: the current development can’t be tied to a single factor. Turkey reassessed its Egypt policy as part of a broader review of its regional moves, he says, and gradually stopped treating its ties to political Islam as a defining factor in the relationship.

Ragheb also points to the economic ties that persisted through the estrangement as evidence of this. “Proof of the strength of popular ties with Turkey,” he says, “is that even during the period of tension, Turkish investments were untouched.”

Economic relations did grow despite the political rift. Bilateral trade rose from $4.35 billion to $7.8 billion between 2013 and 2022, before approaching $9 billion in 2026.

The two countries began ending the estrangement with consultations in 2021. Ambassadors returned in 2023, and presidential visits followed in 2024, capped by the first meeting of the High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council.

But 2026 brought a notable shift in the relationship’s nature. At the council’s second meeting in Cairo in February, the two countries signed a defense memorandum of understanding, embedding military cooperation within a wider coordination network covering Libya, Gaza, Sudan, Somalia, the Horn of Africa, and Red Sea security.

A notable shift

Libya illustrates the scale of this shift better than anywhere else. Years ago, Ankara backed Tripoli’s government militarily and politically, while Cairo built close ties with eastern Libya and Khalifa Haftar’s forces. As fighting escalated in 2020, Libya became the likeliest arena for a real clash between the two countries.

Zaineldine considers Libya to have been a far more dangerous flashpoint in the two countries’ dispute than the maritime border or East Mediterranean gas issue.

He explains that even at the height of tensions, Egypt was careful to preserve some margin short of a complete break with Turkey. The Libyan developments, he adds, showed Ankara the limits of its ability to impose its own vision when it collided directly with Egyptian interests and with the Libyan reality as Cairo understood it.

Cairo and Ankara, he says, carried out “a deep review of the reasons for their dispute, recognizing that the region’s current reality doesn’t call for any clash or drain on their capabilities.”

The clearest sign of this, though, is Turkey’s own recent posture: it has expanded ties with the authorities and forces in eastern Libya, an area that stayed closer to Cairo for years. Ankara moved from political dialogue with the Haftar camp to technical and military cooperation, including training officers from eastern Libya.

According to a July Al Jazeera report, an informed Egyptian source said Turkish moves in Libya are coordinated with Cairo in advance. Turkish officials have also stepped up meetings with Saddam Haftar, deputy commander of eastern Libyan forces, even as Ankara’s close relationship with Tripoli continues.

If this level of coordination holds up, Libya becomes a clear model of what’s changed in the relationship as each side has grown more willing to live with the other’s influence, and even to put it to use within a broader settlement.

That’s consistent with the joint official position issued in February, when the two countries announced their support for a Libyan-led, UN-facilitated political process that preserves the country’s unity and sovereignty.

Still, rapprochement doesn’t necessarily mean the differences have ended. Turkey retains extensive security and military ties in western Libya, while Cairo remains more closely tied to the eastern camp. The 2019 maritime boundary demarcation deal Ankara signed with the Tripoli government was — and still is — one of the biggest sources of Egyptian-Turkish friction in the eastern Mediterranean. So far, then, Libya looks less like proof of aligned interests than like a space for managing rivalry.

Who needs whom?

Defense industries reveal one clear benefit Egypt gets from the rapprochement. Turkey has built a fast-growing defense industry in drones, electronics, munitions, and air and naval platforms in recent years, giving Cairo a new source of technology and weaponry as it works to diversify its suppliers.

With cooperation already underway on producing some systems inside Egypt, the question becomes how far it can expand toward greater technology transfer and more advanced manufacturing projects.

Ragheb sees room for cooperation to grow into other projects. “Turkey has advanced projects like the fifth-generation KAAN fighter jet, and Egypt could eventually benefit by taking part in manufacturing or producing components,” he says, arguing that this kind of cooperation also serves Egypt’s policy of diversifying its arms sources.

“I believe in relationships with countries at a comparable level,” he adds. “Working a joint venture with Turkey is better, in my view, than with America — or even Russia.”

In that light, Çaglar Kurç, assistant professor and deputy head of the political science and international relations department at Abdullah Gül University, tells Al Manassa that “Turkey is always ready to share its technology and help other countries build up their defense-industry capabilities. It depends on what Egypt asks for.”

Zaineldine doesn’t see the military benefit flowing in one direction only. “Egypt has programs developing military capabilities and technology that could benefit Turkey,” he explains. “I wouldn’t rule out, for instance, that Egypt has something useful to Turkey in certain types of vehicles and missiles.”

Egypt’s value to Turkey lies in its position. Cairo sits at the intersection of the Gaza, Libya, Sudan, Red Sea, and Horn of Africa files, and it has direct relationships with parties that can either facilitate or obstruct Turkish interests in more than one arena.

Turkey, for its part, has become a direct military player in Libya and Syria, with growing influence in the Horn of Africa, on top of its defense-industrial capacity and its ties within NATO.

In this relationship, Turkey brings industrial and military capacity and growing influence across parts of the region, while Egypt gives Ankara a heavyweight Arab and African partner, as well as a geographic and political position whose interests are hard to bypass on the very same files.

This coordination is visible in the joint statement issued in February, in which Cairo and Ankara agreed on a series of files that were previously closer to arenas of rivalry or parallel policymaking. They affirmed support for Somalia’s unity and sovereignty, rejected the creation of parallel governing structures in Sudan, stressed the importance of securing the Red Sea and restoring normal shipping traffic there, and pledged coordination on Gaza.

Ragheb reads the two countries’ agreement on these files as a sign that Ankara is rediscovering its southward “extension,” after years when its focus leaned more heavily toward Europe.

As the arenas of overlapping interest expand, direct rivalry gets more expensive. Each state can now affect files that touch the other’s security or interests, which makes coordination cheaper than trying to shut the other side out of every arena.

Israel and militarizing reconciliation

“Egyptian-Turkish rapprochement has moved past the stage of tactically managing disputed files, and become closer to a broader convergence in how each side views the regional security environment,” says Gökhan Ereli, assistant professor at Turkey’s İbn Haldun University, describing the current relationship. Today’s regional tensions, he notes, have accelerated the pace of that rapprochement.

He explains that Cairo and Ankara both watched Israel strike targets in Qatar without facing any meaningful US deterrence, pushing the two capitals toward similar conclusions about how fragile the US-anchored regional deterrence system really is.

“Gaza, Libya, and the Red Sea remain the operational arenas where this rapprochement gets tested,” Ereli tells Al Manassa. In his view, cooperation on these files now rests on a broader logic: hedging against unilateral Israeli moves, and diversifying options away from reliance on Washington.

For his part, Zaineldine sees genocidal war on Gaza and Israel’s actions as adding another driver to the Ankara-Cairo rapprochement. “Concern over Israel’s actions forced both sides to build degrees of cooperation and dialogue that didn’t exist before,” he says. “When you see two countries that were on the verge of direct confrontation in Libya seven or eight years ago now running joint military exercises, that’s an enormous shift.”

This explanation carries added weight given rising Turkish-Israeli tension in Syria. This August, Israel bombed the Abu Al-Duhur airbase in Syria, saying it feared the base was being prepared to host Turkish forces. Ankara denied having any forces there and called the strike an “unnecessary escalation.” Egypt condemned it as a “flagrant violation.”

In Gaza, Egypt and Turkey, alongside Qatar, have become mediators working to consolidate the ceasefire and end the war. In August, the three countries issued a joint statement saying Israeli strikes were undermining mediation efforts.

Israeli developments may not explain why the reconciliation began — Egyptian-Turkish consultations started in 2021 and ambassadors returned in 2023, both before the war on Gaza. But they do help explain why the security and military dimension of what already existed picked up speed.

Is it truly an alliance?

During the years of dispute with Turkey, Egypt built close political, military, and energy ties with Greece and Cyprus, and signed maritime boundary demarcation agreements with them. Athens and Nicosia’s own dispute with Ankara remained one piece of the eastern Mediterranean equation.

Zaineldine expects the Egypt–Turkey relationship to affect these partnerships. “The Egypt–Turkey rapprochement is something that may not sit comfortably with Greece and Cyprus,” he says, “but I don’t think Egypt will limit the development of its relationship with Turkey out of consideration for Greece and Cyprus, nor the reverse.” Egyptian state institutions, he adds, will keep developing cooperation with Turkey while working to soften its effect on ties with Athens and Nicosia, preserving the balance of Egypt’s eastern Mediterranean relationships.

The current rapprochement, then, isn’t Egypt trading one alliance network for another. It’s better read as expanding room to maneuver and building parallel relationships with competing regional powers. On the military side, cooperation has moved past political signaling into joint exercises, defense manufacturing, and capability-building, but it still falls well short of an alliance in the traditional sense. There’s no joint defense pact, no operational planning, and no declared, permanent intelligence-coordination mechanism between the two countries.

Deeper differences also set limits on any greater military integration. Turkey is a NATO member, while Egypt relies on multiple arms sources and maintains close ties with countries whose interests sometimes diverge from Ankara’s. The real test, then, will be whether cooperation evolves into something institutional and lasting, through more regular and complex exercises, expanded technology transfer and joint manufacturing, and the emergence of regular operational or intelligence coordination.

For now, the relationship looks closer to a flexible strategic partnership than a military alliance. The sources of dispute between Cairo and Ankara haven’t disappeared. The two sides have simply become more willing to manage them instead of letting them turn into confrontation. Military rapprochement has become one component of the reconciliation itself, and how deep it goes from here will depend on whether both sides can turn today’s overlapping interests into institutions sturdy enough to survive the next time those interests diverge.