Turkey

Turkey's trajectory as a state enabler of Islamist movements is inseparable from the political project of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, which came to power in November 2002 following Turkey's worst economic crisis in decades. Erdoğan presented the AKP to Western audiences as a moderate, democratising, pro-EU Islamic party that had made peace with secular democracy — a narrative that received a largely uncritical welcome in Washington and Brussels for nearly a decade. Beneath the reformist surface, however, the AKP was systematically dismantling the Kemalist institutional architecture — the military, judiciary, and civil service — that had enforced Turkey's secular orientation, and replacing it with an Islamist-nationalist network loyal to Erdoğan personally.

The pivot toward overt Islamist regional enablement became unmistakable after 2011. The Arab Spring presented Erdoğan with what he perceived as a historic opportunity: the emergence of Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated governments across the Arab world — in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and potentially Syria — that would constitute a Sunni Islamist regional order in which Turkey, under AKP leadership, would be the natural hegemon. Erdoğan threw Turkey's diplomatic, financial, and military weight behind Brotherhood-aligned movements, most visibly in Egypt (where he was the most vocal international defender of Mohamed Morsi's Brotherhood government), Libya (where he deployed Syrian proxy militias and signed a maritime delimitation deal to extend Turkish naval reach across the Mediterranean), and Syria (where Turkish intelligence — MIT — ran the primary logistics corridor for foreign jihadist fighters entering the country, including those who later joined ISIS and al-Qaeda-affiliated groups).

Turkey's relationship with Hamas represents the most internationally scrutinised dimension of its enabling role. Erdoğan has cultivated Hamas's political and military leadership for over fifteen years, hosting Hamas leaders in Ankara, providing Turkish passports and travel documents to Hamas operatives, and allowing Istanbul to serve as a base for Hamas fundraising and financial operations — activities documented by Israeli, US, and European intelligence services. Following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, Erdoğan refused to condemn Hamas, instead hosting Hamas Political Bureau Chief Ismail Haniyeh in Ankara and publicly describing Hamas fighters as "mujahideen" defending Palestinian land. Turkey's stance placed it in direct open conflict with its NATO allies and with EU positions, though the alliance's structural dependencies prevented any formal accountability.

The Kurdish dimension of Turkey's enabling role is equally significant and far more lethal in its immediate consequences. Since 2016, Turkey has conducted four major military operations against Kurdish forces in northern Syria — targeting the YPG/SDF, which served as the primary US partner force in the campaign against ISIS — and has conducted ongoing cross-border strikes in northern Iraq targeting PKK positions. These operations have displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians, destroyed Kurdish-administered communities, and deployed Syrian Islamist proxy forces documented by human rights organisations as perpetrating looting, abductions, and summary executions of Kurdish and other minority populations.

Erdoğan's ideological framework — a synthesis of Sunni Islamism, Turkish nationalism, and neo-Ottoman civilisational ambition — provides the doctrinal foundation for Turkey's enabling activities. His intellectual mentor, Ahmet Davutoğlu, articulated a "Strategic Depth" doctrine arguing that Turkey's Ottoman history gave it a natural sphere of influence across the Middle East, the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia — and that cultivating Muslim Brotherhood-aligned movements was the instrument through which Turkey could reclaim this role. This is not cynical realpolitik in the manner of Qatar's strategic clientelism; it is a genuine ideological commitment that Erdoğan has expressed consistently in public speech, diplomatic posture, and military action for over two decades.

The AKP's domestic consolidation has provided the institutional infrastructure for this external enabling. Diyanet — Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs, with an annual budget exceeding $2 billion and a network of over 80,000 mosques — has become a vehicle for projecting Turkish state Islam globally, funding mosque construction and imam training across Europe, the Balkans, Africa, and Central Asia in ways that advance AKP-aligned religious and political narratives. The Turkish intelligence service MIT has been restructured under Erdoğan as a directly presidential instrument, conducting operations across Syria, Iraq, Libya, and beyond with minimal institutional oversight.

Turkey's enablement of Kurdish targeting operates through a different but equally deliberate doctrinal framework. The AKP government designates the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party), the YPG (People's Protection Units), and the broader Kurdish political movement in Turkey — the HDP/DEM Party — as a unified terrorist threat, a designation that it uses to justify the arrest of elected Kurdish politicians, the removal of Kurdish mayors, military operations against Kurdish populations in Syria and Iraq, and the obstruction of any international recognition of Kurdish political rights. This framework has allowed Turkey to frame the systematic targeting of Kurdish communities as counter-terrorism while prosecuting what Kurdish advocates and human rights organisations document as a campaign of collective punishment and demographic engineering.

Turkey's NATO membership is the structural enabler of its own enabling: it provides Erdoğan with military protection, intelligence-sharing relationships, and a seat at the table of Western decision-making that insulates Turkey from the sanctions, designations, and diplomatic consequences that a non-NATO state conducting the same activities would face. The alliance's consensus decision-making rules mean that Turkey can veto measures directed against it, demand concessions in exchange for supporting alliance positions, and leverage its geographic control of the Bosphorus Strait — through which Russian naval forces must pass — as a permanent geopolitical bargaining chip.

Turkey deploys its enabling strategy through a combination of direct military force, proxy militia deployment, intelligence operations, religious soft power, and diplomatic protection — making it structurally the most capable and militarily consequential state enabler profiled in the IFC library.

Turkey's enabling activities span direct military operations, proxy deployments, intelligence facilitation, and political protection — a combination that makes it the most operationally active state enabler documented by the IFC.

Turkey's enabling activities under Erdoğan have produced documented harm across an exceptionally wide range of populations — from Kurdish communities in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey itself, to Libyan civilians caught in proxy warfare, to European Muslim communities subjected to Turkish state surveillance and Brotherhood-adjacent radicalisation infrastructure.