By Michael Tanchum
With record-breaking arms exports globally, Turkey’s growing market share in the Arab monarchies holds the potential to greatly expand Ankara’s role as a security provider across the Middle East and North Africa. At the same time, Turkey faces growing competition from Israel and India, which have significantly expanded their own weapons sales to the Arab monarchies, notably the UAE and Morocco. Deepening defense cooperation in ways that Turkey has not, Israel and India have engaged in the co-development of weapons systems with Arab defense firms and have established local weapons manufacturing in the Arab world. The next phase in the competition for the MENA weapons market share, as well as the regional geopolitical clout that accompanies it, could be determined by Saudi Arabia, raising Ankara’s geopolitical stakes in securing a sizable purchase of Turkish weapons by Riyadh.
The 2025 deal builds upon Saudi Arabia’s 2023 agreement to buy high altitude drones from Baykar, but would be much larger in scope, including Turkey’s Altay main battle tank, missile defense systems, and perhaps even Turkey’s Kaan fighter jet, which passed its first test flight last year but still is far from operational readiness.
The Turkish-Saudi arms deal would be the capstone to Turkey’s prior advances in arms sales to the Arab monarchies, outside its strategic partnership with Qatar. One year ago, Aselan opened an office in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which had been a staunch geopolitical rival to Turkey for much of the previous decade. Signifying the marked turn around in relations between Ankara and Abu Dhabi, Aselan signed a cooperation agreement with the UAE defense firm Calidus. In the western end of the MENA region, Morocco has been increasing its arm purchases from Turkey, with Rabat having ordered 200 Cobra II armored vehicles from the Turkish defense firm Otokar in 2024. In early 2025, Morocco took delivery of its first consignment of Baykar’s Bayraktar Akıncı combat drones. Rabat’s 2024 purchase of these sophisticated high-altitude, long endurance drones builds upon its 2021 purchase of 13 Bayraktar TB2 drones from the company. Morocco’s arms purchases represent an important geopolitical nod toward Ankara, given Turkey’s relationship with Morocco’s neighbor and bitter regional rival Algeria.
IMPLICATIONS: Despite Turkey’s impressive expansion of its arms exports to previously more estranged Arab monarchies, the sales also indicate the limits of Turkey’s appeal and the power of competing arms exporting countries to provide a compelling alternative. Morocco is a case in point. While Baykar established a subsidiary in Morocco to provide maintenance and spare part services for its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the scale of the company’s investment shows no indication of joint Turkish-Moroccan co-production or co-development. In contrast, Morocco has developed a deep and multi-variegated arms purchasing relationship with Israel including co-production.
Even before the December 2020 renormalization of relations between the two countries, Israel was Morocco’s third largest arms supplier, covering 11% of its military needs. The relationship has expanded considerably since, with Israel’s BlueBird Aero Systems announcing in 2024 that it had established a production plant in Morocco. Israel’s second largest defense firm by revenue, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) holds a 50% share in BlueBird, which supplies a variety of UAV systems to Morocco including the SpyX loitering munition and the vertical take-off and landing WonderB and ThunderB systems. In 2022, Morocco bought IAI’s MX air defense system for about half a billion dollars.
Israel’s three defense firms in the SIPRI rankings each placed in the top 50, far above their Turkish counterparts. Israel’s Elbit achieving the 27th spot while IAI and Rafael ranked 32nd and 44th respectively. Morocco has turned to Israel as an alternative to France, reportedly ordering 36 of Elbit’s Atmos 2000 self-propelled artillery systems in February 2025 to replace the French-made Caesar artillery systems after the French systems experienced technical failures. Similarly in 2024, Morocco purchased two Ofek 13 surveillances satellites to replace the two satellites developed for Morocco by Airbus Defense and Space France and Thales Alenia Space France. In terms of drones, the Moroccan military already uses Elbit’s Hermes UAVs as well as IAI’s Heron UAVs and Harop loitering munitions.
Israel is not the only weapons exporter that is keeping the Turkish defense industry looking over its shoulder. Israel’s strategic partner India has also started production of weapons systems in Morocco. Tata Advanced System, the weapons manufacturing subsidiary of Indian conglomerate the Tata Group, entered into a 2024 agreement with Morocco to produce its Kestral armored combat vehicle in an industrial zone in the Casablanca area. Tata’s Advanced Systems’ premier product, the Kestral is a WhAP 8X8 (Wheeled Armored Platform) developed in partnership with India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation for optimal for survivability, mobility, and firepower. Tata’s Moroccan factory will have an initial production capacity of 100 combat vehicles per year. With the Moroccan Armed Forces slated to receive a total of 150 Kestrals over time, while the remainder of the infantry fighting vehicles are slated for export in Africa potentially undercutting Turkey’s armored vehicle sales on the continent. A rising weapons exporter, India also has three defense firms that have placed in the SIPRI rankings, at 43rd, 67th, and 94th place respectively. If these companies follow Tata Advanced Systems example and position Morocco as India’s gateway to the African arms market, Turkey could lose significant African market share to India.
Morocco is a bellwether of an expanding trend among the Arab monarchies of the MENA region. Following the 2020 Abraham Accords that normalized relations between the UAE and Israel, the Emirates’s largest defense firm EDGE came to two agreements in 2021 to jointly develop advanced drone defense systems and unmanned naval vessels for anti-submarine warfare. Elbit similarly established a subsidiary in the UAE in 2021, entering into a 2022 contract to supply the Emirati Air Force with anti-missile and electronic warfare systems. Rafael opened its Abu Dhabi office in 2023, but the company had already established a joint venture with the UAE in 2021 for the co-development of Artificial Intelligence and big data technologies for the civilian market. Although Emirati-Israeli cooperation in weapons co-development slowed since the October 2023 outbreak of the Gaza War, cooperation continues to expand and points to the durability of the relationship. In January 2025, EDGE bought a 30% stake in the Israeli defense firm Third Eye, which develops drone detection technology used by the Israel Defense Forces and certain NATO members. At the same time, EDGE invested $12 million in a new, majority EDGE-owned joint venture with Thirdeye Systems to help Thirdeye Systems expand into new markets. The UAE and India are eyeing the development of a similar relationship.
CONCLUSIONS: The Turkish defense industry’s 2024 record-breaking exports are a testament to the success of Ankara’s 25-year effort to make Turkey into a global player in 21st century arms manufacturing. Turkey’s emergence as a significant weapons supplier has also been assisted by the decisive battlefield successes of the Turkish systems deployed in the Syrian and Libyan Civil Wars as well as the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War. As an analysis published by Turkey’s SETA Foundation observed, “The program to build up the manufacturing capacities of Turkey’s defense industry developed as a correlate of Turkey’s strategic imperative to function geopolitically as an independent actor.” With enhanced strategic autonomy, Turkey has expanded its geopolitical footprint in the Middle East and North Africa, becoming a primary actor in Syria and Libya.
At the same time, the expansion of Israeli and Indian weapons sales to the Arab monarchies of the MENA region and especially the advent of co-development and local production in Morocco and the UAE reveals an apprehension about rising Turkish power in the region and a desire among the Arab monarchies to preserve their own autonomy. With Saudi Arabia yet to establish formal diplomatic ties with Israel, the manner and extent to which Ankara becomes a weapons supplier for Riyadh will shape the future strategic contours of Turkey’s role as a security provider in the MENA region.
AUTHOR BIO: Prof. Michaël Tanchum teaches international relations of the Middle East and North Africa at the University of Navarra, Spain and an associate fellow in the Economics and Energy at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. He is also a Senior Associate Fellow at the Austrian Institute for European and Security Studies (AIES) and an affiliated scholar of the Centre for Strategic Policy Implementation at Başkent Universty in Ankara, Turkey (Başkent-SAM) and the NTU-SBF Centre for African Studies in Singapore. @michaeltanchum
