Turkish Wagner: Sadat mercenaries are part of Ankara’s great game in West Africa

Mercenaries from a Turkish private security company, dubbed “Turkish Wagner,” are part of Ankara’s projection of military power in the Sahel, experts say, adding that these could also play a growing role in countries such as Mali and Niger.

Sadat is a private military company reportedly with close ties to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that has been carrying out missions in Libya since 2013. According to an 2022 analysis published by the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation, since the launch of the offensive on Tripoli in April 2019, the so-called “Turkish Wagner” has backed the government in Tripoli, including through its experts who advised the militias or commanded the Bayraktar drones. Following their operations in Libya and also Azerbaijan, Sadat mercenaries are the hidden faces of Turkey’s global strategy in Africa and North Africa, and as the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (OSDH) recently announced, they could play a growing role in Mali and Niger.

The suspicion that pro-Turkish Syrian mercenaries are operating in Niger was first raised last month, when OSDH reported the first repatriations to Syria of dead Syrian fighters who had previously been deployed in the Sahel region in the name of Turkey’s geopolitical designs. Since then, the OSDH has regularly reported arrivals in Niger of “over a thousand” of these Syrian fighters from Sadat. In 2020, one of two founders of Sadat, Adnan Tanriverdi, stated without hesitation that “if Turkey sends mercenaries to Libya, it will be more effective than Wagner or Blackwater.“ OSDH director Rami Abdel-Rahman says that while “in Niger, Syrian mercenaries are supposed to guard mines, oil installations or military bases … but they then find themselves involved in fighting against jihadist groups.” Disturbingly, “Russians and Turks are cooperating in Niger,” Abdel-Rahman added. According to some report, Sadat was reportedly deployed also in Chad, Somalia and Ethiopia.