Turkey’s drone exports are giving the country greater geopolitical sway but Ankara is coming under pressure over their use in Ethiopia’s war.
Newly obtained photographs of missile fragments provide the first material evidence that Ethiopia used a Turkish drone this month in an attack that killed 58 civilians sheltering in a school.
Turkey’s growing prowess as a drone exporter is styled as a point of national pride by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but any indication that a Turkish aircraft targeted civilians in Ethiopia’s 15-month-long war will intensify international pressure on the NATO country to stop arming Addis Ababa.
Drones are rapidly turning into the decisive weapon of the conflict and have helped Ethiopian government forces turn the tide against rebels from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governed the country for nearly three decades before 2018. Military experts say Ethiopia is buying unmanned aerial vehicles not only from Turkey, but also from Iran, the United Arab Emirates and China.
Studying those photographs, military experts from the Dutch nongovernmental organization PAX and Amnesty Internationalidentified the weapon used as a MAM-L bomb that is fitted to a Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone. The photographs were taken on January 13 after the aid workers extracted the missile fragments from the debris. The Bayraktar drones are made by a company in which Erdoğan’s son-in-law is a senior executive.
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