US magazine The National Interest published an article regarding Turkey and its mercenaries sent to different battlefields in the world. The article “Inside the Bloody Business of Turkey’s Syrian Mercenaries” tells stories of the mercenaries sent to Lybia, Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh) and other places.
The article reads:
“On September 27, 2020, Azerbaijan launched air and ground attacks across Nagorno-Karabakh, reigniting conflict between Azerbaijani, Armenian, and local Karabakh forces.
Saied was again recruiting for the war in the Caucasus, but he had to change tactics. As in Libya, Turkish intelligence outsourced recruitment to Syrian commanders. But those freewheeling days with no restrictions and little oversight were over. Now, according to Saied, the Turks “paid more attention, and they insisted we send experienced fighters.” The vetting process improved. As recruiters understood it, the Turks viewed the Azeris as “brothers,” and their support for Azerbaijan was ideological, unlike their support for the GNA in Libya, which was “contractual and based on geopolitical interests.”
Recruiters we spoke to maintain that their primary contact was with Turkish intelligence, while logistics were outsourced to “unknown companies.” It is likely that those companies are affiliated with SADAT, the Turkish private military company (PMC) founded by Adnan Tanrıverdi, a former brigadier general and close confidant of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In a 2020 report, the U.S. Department of Defense stated that SADAT “maintains supervision and payment of the estimated 5,000 pro-GNA Syrian fighters in Libya.” Yet compared to Turkish military and intelligence, SADAT’s importance in mercenary recruitment is difficult to ascertain. Still, the company likely coordinates, at least to some degree, with Turkish intelligence services.
Corruption was endemic to Turkey’s mercenary program in Azerbaijan as well. Hasan, a twenty-five-year-old from Aleppo, fought in Nagorno-Karabakh for fifty-five days. “I was told that my salary was going to be $2,500 per month and that I would be a border guard,” he told us. Paradoxically, despite Turkish intelligence’s demands for experience, the Syrians sent to Azerbaijan were simply cannon fodder. Hasan, who was only given an AK-47, understood right away he was under-equipped. “High precision targeting was a very scary thing for me. I never felt scared the same way in Syria.” After being shot by a sniper, Hasan returned home, where he received just $1,500. Again, only a fraction of what he was owed.
Syrians also found themselves under-equipped in Libya, but for different reasons. “We were given old machine guns from home,” one fighter recalled, “not due to lack of higher quality weapons, but because those weapons had been sold off on the black market.” As in Azerbaijan, the Syrians sent to Libya found themselves in a very different war. Haftar’s LNA—backed by the UAE, Egypt, and Russia—employed sophisticated surveillance drones to map out targets. Back in Syria, “neither the regime nor rebels had the ability to target precisely.”
The mercenaries Saied recruits are overwhelmingly young men with no income and few prospects for employment. Those interviewed saw the trips to Libya or Azerbaijan as a chance to save cash over a few months, build a little capital, and start a small business back home. Many Syrians who signed up to fight in Libya and Azerbaijan were promised, in the event of their death, that their family members would receive a path to Turkish citizenship.
It was not long before Syrian commanders profited off those citizenship schemes as well. According to fighters, commanders began offering Turkish citizenship to the highest bidder. Instead of providing a deceased fighter’s family with citizenship, anyone who could afford the bribe acquired forged documents. As the scam grew, Turkish intelligence had to shut down the program entirely.
Given the cynicism and naked profit-seeking that pervaded the program, few mercenaries were interested in why they were fighting. To motivate them, Turkish officials tried to paint the Syrian civil war as a global conflict, or appeal to religion or ethnicity.
Just hours after arriving in Azerbaijan, officials showed Hasan and others a video, purportedly of an Armenian soldier cutting open the belly of a pregnant Muslim Azeri woman. The Syrian fighters were upset. “They shouted they would be happy to fight for justice.” Others were told, falsely, that Yerevan had recruited Kurds from Syria to fight in Nagorno-Karabakh. Still, according to another Syrian fighter, most couldn’t care less.”
