Mercenaries and fake aid: Erdogan prepares to interfere in Yemen

Mahmoud al-Batakoushi

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to be driven by his delusion of reviving the Ottoman Empire, as he declared that the Turks are in Libya and Syria for the sake of their rights and the rights of those in the future and out of respect for their ancestral legacy, attempting to justify his devious plans to sabotage the Arab world. Now Erdogan is seeking to repeat the Libyan scenario in Yemen.

Erdogan seeks to control Yemen in order to get his hands on the resources and wealth of Shabwah governorate, which is rich in oil and gas. The Turkish interference in Yemen is also an attempt to save the Brotherhood there, as well as to secure a foothold on the eastern bank of the Red Sea and in the Gulf of Aden.

The Islah Party, the political arm of the Brotherhood in Yemen, is Erdogan’s Trojan horse to penetrate Yemeni society and control the country’s capabilities.

As usual, the Turkish regime is first trying to penetrate the country through the gateway of aid, just as it did before it began to tamper in Libyan, Syrian and Iraqi affairs. In Yemen, the Turkish Red Crescent Society distributed food baskets during Ramadan to the displaced, disabled and poor families in the Yemeni governorates of Shabwah, Hadramawt, Ma’rib, Aden, and Taiz.

At the same time, Turkey sent dozens of intelligence officers under the cover of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Organization (IHH), and some of them arrived in Ma’rib and Shabwah through the border freight port in Al-Mahrah after they obtained facilities from Yemeni Interior Minister Ahmed Al-Misri and former Al-Mahrah Governor Rajeh Bakreet.

In recent years, the Turkish Red Crescent and the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) have carried out suspicious activities in the governorates of Aden, Dhale and Taiz through imaginary local partners so as not to draw attention. The Turkish organizations rented their headquarters in the temporary capital of Aden and a number of other governorates in order to manage their dubious activities and penetrate Yemeni society.

Erdogan tasked the Turkish intelligence services and the Turkish defense consulting company SADAT with preparing mercenaries to be sent to Yemen to fight with extremist groups there in exchange for huge sums of money and other temptations.

Indeed, mercenary brokers in Syria’s northwestern Afrin region began promoting the news to pro-Turkish Syrian factions that Erdogan is ready to recruit anyone who wants to fight in Yemen. It is noteworthy that the Turkish president has introduced more than 10,500 Turkish soldiers to take full and direct control of the area from Jisr Al-Shughour to Jarabulus in Syria to compensate for the potential “disappearance” of Syrian fighters there.

The camps established by the Brotherhood in Yemen, such as the Taiz camps, are an extension of Turkey’s growing influence in the country through its local Brotherhood agents who seek to control the Yemeni coast and the Bab al-Mandab Strait.