Turkey Risks Being Drawn Into Saudi Arabia’s War in Yemen

The Ottoman presence in Yemen long predated the nineteenth century. But after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 transformed the strategic importance of the Red Sea, Istanbul made a renewed effort to consolidate imperial control over the region, as a coalition of local tribes revolted in the 1870s.

Among the officers sent south was Ahmed Muhtar Pasha.

He would later become one of the Ottoman Empire’s most celebrated generals, particularly for his campaigns against the Russian army in 1877. But before earning fame on the Caucasian front, Muhtar Pasha served in Yemen, where Ottoman forces sought to extend Constantinople’s authority over territory that existed much more convincingly on imperial maps than it did on the ground.

His memoirs describe the difficulties of campaigning through Yemen’s mountains and dealing with a political landscape structured by tribal loyalties, religious authority, local rivalries, and an unforgiving geography. Yes, the Ottoman army could capture towns. That did not mean the Ottoman state controlled the countryside around them.

Military victories repeatedly failed to settle political questions. Rebellion was suppressed only to soon flare up again. More troops were dispatched. More money was spent. More men died. And the soldiers who bore this burden were generally not the men who had decided that Yemen was indispensable to the security of the empire. They were conscripts.

That distinction, between those who define the strategic necessity of a war and those who actually pay for it, survived the Ottoman Empire itself. The generals and ministers disappeared. The popular memory remained, hence the songs.

A century later, a vastly wealthier and technologically superior power encountered a variation of the same problem.

When Saudi Arabia launched its military intervention in Yemen in 2015, there was little apparent symmetry between the two sides. Riyadh and its allies possessed modern aircraft, precision weapons, enormous financial resources, and crucial backing from the United States and other Western powers.

Yet years of bombing failed to eliminate Ansar Allah, better known as the Houthis.

The consequences for Yemen were catastrophic. Saudi Arabia’s US-backed campaign devastated civilian infrastructure and contributed to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. American and European arms manufacturers, meanwhile, profited from the weapons flowing toward the coalition. The Houthis have not only survived a decade of war but developed greater military capabilities than they began with.

None of this makes Ansar Allah a progressive force. It remains, however, among the very few forces willing to confront American and Israeli military power directly — not merely rhetorically — and, in doing so, to challenge the US-led regional order.

But there is equally little reason to accept the fantasy that military superiority allows an outside power to rearrange Yemen according to its wishes. The Ottomans learned this the hard way, and so did the Saudis after 2015. Turkey now risks stepping into the same political geography.

On August 7, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, announcing that an armed attack against one member would be considered an attack against all three.

Hakan Fidan compared the pledge to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Article 5. But in his account, assistance would follow a request from the threatened member and decisions by the relevant institutions; it would not automatically mean sending troops. He listed intelligence, logistics, ammunition, and potentially military units. Even Article 5 leaves NATO members discretion over how to assist an attacked ally. Ankara has made a commitment, but it still has choices.

The pact also envisages cooperation before a crisis. On August 8, Fidan described plans for joint training and exercises, intelligence sharing, coordinated threat assessments, and cooperation in arms production. The aim is to make the three armed forces capable of operating together, with arrangements in place before a member calls for help.

Some machinery is already taking shape. A committee of the three countries’ foreign and defense ministers and military chiefs met on August 31; a secretariat is planned in Riyadh. On September 19, Fidan said preparations for it and an associated military headquarters were nearly complete, but decisions on staffing and operations still lay in the future.

NATO is the model, but this alliance is still being built. On September 18, the that Turkish parliamentary ratification was still pending. Events have since moved considerably faster. On October 5, the three governments agreed to activate collective deterrence measures and prepare for the rapid deployment of military forces and capabilities in support of Saudi Arabia. Two days later, Turkish officials confirmed that Ankara had begun providing mainly defensive and technical assistance. Fidan has ruled out Turkish participation in offensive operations inside Yemen, but Ankara is considering air defense, electronic warfare, and other forms of military support. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has meanwhile that the agreement will be submitted to parliament for ratification.Financial Timesreportedsaid

Ankara insists the pact is defensive. But whose regional order might it defend? Iran’s setbacks in Syria and Lebanon have opened space for rival powers. Donald Trump has publicly welcomed the agreement. One possible outcome is, in effect, a division of labor: Israel attacks Iran and its allies, while US-aligned regional powers expand their influence at Tehran’s expense. Their rivalry with Israel could coexist with policies that reinforce an order favorable to Washington. The NATO analogy would then extend to the consolidation of a US-led order beyond the promise of mutual defense.

The pact’s immediate test, however, is in Yemen. Renewed Houthi attacks on Saudi territory and Riyadh’s military response are now testing what its promises mean in practice. The pressure is, however, no longer coming from Riyadh alone. On October 13, Trump publicly suggested that he might ask Erdoğan to help Saudi Arabia against the Houthis.

Turkey is thus confronted not with an abstract treaty provision but with the possibility that its new ally might request assistance during an actual war. On September 19, Fidan addressed precisely that possibility. He condemned attacks against Saudi sovereignty and territorial integrity and said that Riyadh might have military requirements, particularly of a technical nature. Under the new agreement, he indicated, Turkey would have no problem meeting such needs.

“Technical” no longer describes merely a hypothetical form of assistance. Turkey has already begun providing mainly defensive and technical support to Saudi Arabia. Intelligence and logistical support can help sustain a military campaign without a single Turkish battalion entering Yemen. Deeper involvement would still require further decisions. But each commitment can give Ankara another reason to make the next one.

There is a deeper contradiction in Ankara’s position. Fidan has simultaneously argued that Saudi Arabia should not be dragged into the confrontation between the United States and Iran. Turkey has called for diplomacy and attempted to present itself as an actor capable of communicating with the different sides.

But if Saudi Arabia should not be dragged into someone else’s war, the same question must surely be asked of Turkey. The present regional conflagration was not initiated by an attack on Turkey. Turkish territory is not under Houthi occupation. The Turkish people have no dispute with the people of Yemen.

The current regional escalation has grown out of the US-Israeli confrontation with Iran and the network of alliances surrounding it. Ansar Allah has positioned itself firmly on Tehran’s side of that struggle. Saudi Arabia, willingly or not, has become another arena in it.

Now the pact gives Riyadh a basis for seeking Turkish help and Ankara a reason to treat Saudi security as its own. That does not make intervention inevitable. It makes refusing further involvement a political choice that the language of alliance solidarity can make harder to defend.

The Turkish government may believe that its increasingly close military relationship with Riyadh increases Ankara’s regional influence. Turkey’s defense industry may also find new opportunities in Saudi demand for drones, missiles, electronic warfare systems, and other military technology. But what appears from Ankara as strategic influence looks rather different from below.

There is no single “regional interest” at stake here. The Saudi monarchy and the Turkish state are pursuing their own interests, as are Washington and Israel in their confrontation with Iran, and Ansar Allah and Tehran on the other side. Defense contractors have interests of a more profitable kind. The people who die in these struggles rarely have much say in defining any of them.

This is where the Ottoman experience matters. Not because Erdoğan is some latter-day sultan, as he is still too often caricatured in the Western press. Nor because modern Turkey is the Ottoman Empire, or because every Turkish move in the region can be explained away as “neo-Ottomanism.” And not because twenty-first-century Yemen is identical to the Yemen encountered by Ahmed Muhtar Pasha. Such analogies explain very little. The continuity lies elsewhere.

States have always been extraordinarily good at converting the interests of rulers, strategic establishments, and economic elites into something called the “national interest.” Once that transformation has been accomplished, ordinary people can be asked to sacrifice themselves for objectives they had no role in determining.

Ottoman officials had perfectly sophisticated strategic arguments for holding Yemen. Control of the Red Sea mattered. Rival European empires mattered. The security of the holy cities mattered. Imperial prestige mattered. None of these arguments made the dead conscript less dead.

Today, the vocabulary has changed. Politicians and pundits say that regional security and alliance credibility and defense cooperation matter, or that Turkey’s influence in the Persian Gulf matters. Maritime trade matters. But before accepting these abstractions as reasons to go to war, there is a more elementary question: Who benefits, and who pays?

Turkey’s rapidly expanding arms industry would certainly benefit from deeper military cooperation with the Gulf monarchies. Political elites may benefit from the prestige of projecting Turkish power beyond the country’s borders. The young soldier ordered to defend that projection will experience it differently. So will the Yemeni family living underneath the drones.

The Ottoman Empire eventually disappeared from Yemen. The official case for holding Yemen has largely faded from popular memory. The officials who sent troops south are remembered mostly by specialists. Many of the battles mean almost nothing to modern Turks.

Yet the songs survived. That should tell us something about how war enters popular memory. The state remembers campaigns, commanders, and victories. Ordinary people remember the son who did not return.

Ruhi Su understood the difference. When he sang the old Yemen songs, he was not celebrating imperial strategy. His voice belonged to another tradition, one that preserved the suffering concealed beneath the language of glory.

That is why an Ottoman general’s memoir and a communist folk singer unexpectedly belong in the same story. Ahmed Muhtar Pasha shows us the view from the campaign, while Ruhi Su gives us the view from home. Between them lies the history that Ankara should remember before “technical assistance” becomes something larger.

Turkey has no need to return to Yemen. Its people have already paid for that lesson once before.

Yemen, Yemen, glorious Yemen,

Yemen, Yemen, your soil soaked in blood.