An-Nahdha and Sita Alliance: Turkish plan to support al-Sarraj with Tunisian experts

Amira al-Sherif

In implementation of the realization of what it calls the new Ottoman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan allied with the leader of the Brotherhood Renaissance, Rashid Ghannouchi, to secure the Brotherhood in Libya by sending Tunisian experts to Tripoli to protect the Brotherhood’s presence, especially in light of the current crisis in Libya.

Sita cover

Media reports revealed a Turkish-Tunisian-Libyan plot to implement cooperation between the Renaissance Brotherhood in Tunisia and the Sita Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Ankara, to send dozens of experts from Tunisian engineers and technologists to Libya to support the reconciliation forces in the Libyan western cities.

The reports quoted a high-ranking Turkish security official as saying that the former military doctor Murad Aslan  revealed during a special session held on the first of March 2020, for the experts of the (SITA) Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Ankara of the Presidency of the Republic of Turkey, the first of the technical experts from Tunisian engineers was hired to support the Al-Wefaq government in Tripoli.

Aslan, who holds the task of the head of the Researcher Training Section in Security and Military Affairs at the (SITA) Center, revealed that he supervised the training of 76 Tunisian engineers in the chemical, biological, mechanical, electrical, communications and information technology fields, and the training period lasted two months in the city of Eskişehir in Turkey.

He also confirmed that the first batch of technical experts from Tunisian engineers began its work in the city of Tripoli since the beginning of February 2020.

The second installment

In the beginning of March 2020, the training of the second group of 48 Tunisian engineers was scheduled to start in Turkey, and they were subsequently transferred to Misurata and other Libyan cities, but the appearance of coronavirus and the resulting precautionary and preventive measures prevented the start of the training process.

Aslan added that the implementation of the training and transfer plan for experts and their deployment to the operating rooms in the Libyan cities is carried out in close cooperation between the Ankara government, the Government of Accord, and the Tunisian Renaissance movement, where the Turkish state, through the SITA center, is financing the training and dispatch of technical experts from Tunisian engineers to Libya.

Meanwhile, official institutions in the Tripoli government formally contracted with them, while the field follow-up is carried out by the Center for Strategic and Diplomatic Studies in Tunisia (affiliated with Ennahda), which is headed by former Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdel Salam, son-in-law of the head of the Ennahda movement, Ghannouchi.

Sita Center

The center supervised the selection of the Tunisian engineers who were trained and sent to Libya and the Tunisian engineers were chosen specifically because of their proximity to the Libyans in terms of culture and language, in addition to the relatively low cost and the Libyans’ refusal to have Turkish experts in Libya.

The Sita Center, which is based in Turkey, is one of the largest support centers for the Brotherhood, as it carries out several activities in several Arab countries, and the National Security personnel in the Egyptian Ministry of Interior had previously raided the website of one of the electronic committees run by elements of the Brotherhood in the Bab el-Louk area, in the center of the Egyptian capital Cairo.

After the investigation it was found out that the committee is working under the cover of the SITA Center, and prepares negative reports that include false and fabricated information about the political, economic, security and legal conditions and send them to the center in Turkey with the aim of distorting the image of Egypt at the internal and external levels.