SADAT: Turkey’s Wagner Group

Excerpt

Turkey’s use of private military actors has become an increasingly important—if opaque —feature of its foreign policy toolkit. Among these, SADAT International Defense Consultancy stands out as a quasi-official instrument that blurs the line between state policy and deniable coercion.

SADAT is a Turkish private military company (PMC) founded in 2012 by former Turkish Brigadier General Adnan Tanriverdi, a close ally of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The firm describes its mission as providing military training, defense consulting, and security assistance primarily to Muslim-majority countries. In reality, it is a paramilitary instrument advancing Ankara’s regional and ideological agenda to spread Islamist extremism, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caucasus.

SADAT’s mission emanates from a grievance narrative against the West. Its corporate manifesto is explicit in its Islamist inclinations. It intends to prevent Muslim countries “from dependence on Western crusader imperialist countries and to help establishment of a defensive collaboration and defensive industrial cooperation among Islamic countries with the intent of serving Islamic union.” SADAT intends to “to respond to all of 60 Islamic countries’…needs at defense sector [sic].” The company “will contribute to the emergence of the World of Islam as a Super power and to promote an environment of cooperation in [the] field of defense and defense industry among Islamic countries [sic].”

Tanriverdi was dismissed from the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) in 1997 for his Islamist leanings. Following the purge, Tanriverdi founded Turkey’s first PMC, SADAT. Tanriverdi was a personal confidant of Erdogan. Since its inception, SADAT has provided military security and training to organizations aligned with Islamist ideologies in Libya, Azerbaijan, West Africa, Syria, and Iraq. 

Sinan Ciddi is a senior fellow on Turkey at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, DC.