Turkey just did what Iran tried to do for 20 years

The mechanics of EFES-2026 were impressive in themselves. More than 10,000 military personnel from 50 countries gathered along the Aegean coast near Izmir for one of the largest combined and joint exercises ever held in Turkey. Turkish unmanned systems took center stage, with the Bayraktar TB3 operating directly from the TCG Anadolu, the country’s light aircraft carrier, alongside the heavy Bayraktar Akinci supporting joint operations. Turkey also showcased its Steel Dome integrated air and missile defense architecture, a layered system linking multiple platforms designed to intercept threats ranging from cruise missiles to commercial drones. The exercise was a catalog of Turkish defense industrial ambitions translated into real firepower. But the hardware was almost irrelevant. The guests were the story.

Libya has deployed 502 soldiers, 331 from the country’s eastern forces and 171 from the west, training side by side under a single Libyan flag. It was the first time that the two rival factions deployed jointly abroad. Turkish defense officials presented this as a concrete step toward Ankara’s goal of “One Libya, One Army,” a phrase that sounds like peacebuilding but functions like something else entirely: the absorption of a strategically positioned North African state into a military orbit led by Turkey. Libyan personnel received training in amphibious warfare, electronic warfare systems, mine and improvised explosive device operations, and special forces tactics. These are not rebuilding skills. These are projection skills.

Syria’s participation was smaller in number but greater in involvement. Syrian army units participated in EFES-2026, the first reported participation of the reconstituted Syrian army in an overseas exercise since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in December 2024. Turkey and Syria had signed a memorandum of defense cooperation in Ankara in August 2025, covering military training, advice, weapons systems, military equipment and logistical support to the new Syrian authorities. Defense experts expected an increased role for Turkey after Assad’s collapse, from rebuilding the nation’s armed forces to providing Damascus with armored vehicles, drones and air defense systems. FEAS-2026 showed that this expectation has become a reality.

Consider what this means geographically. Turkey now maintains a military advisory relationship with the government in Tripoli, has established itself as the patron of Syria’s new armed forces and maintains a forward naval posture in the eastern Mediterranean through its 2019 maritime demarcation agreement with Libya. The deal, which Greece, Egypt and Israel view as illegal, creates an exclusive economic zone that runs through some of the world’s most contested hydrocarbon waters. Ankara is pushing for ratification of the deal, and Israel, like Greece and Egypt, views these moves as a direct threat to its energy sovereignty in the region. Military encirclement and economic challenge are two sides of the same strategy.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has done little to conceal where Ankara’s attention is focused. In April, Fidan warned that Israeli attacks in Syria represented a major crisis hotspot directly threatening Turkish national security, and accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of seeking to declare Turkey as its new enemy, stating that Israel could not live without enemies after Iran. These are not the words of a country that views its regional expansion as a defensive matter. These are the words of a country that sees an opportunity in Israel’s concerns over Gaza and Tehran and intends to exploit it.

Israel has had a presence here before, in the sense that it has seen regional powers attempt to use failed or transitional states as pressure platforms. Iran has spent two decades doing just that with Lebanon and Syria. The difference with Turkey is structural. Iran operated through proxies, militias and deniable channels. Turkey operates through defense ministries, signed memorandums, bilateral training programs and cover for its NATO membership. Even before the current conflict, Ankara had imposed a total trade embargo on Israel, closed its airspace to Israeli planes, and a Turkish court had filed criminal charges against Netanyahu and dozens of other Israeli officials for the interception of a flotilla in October 2025. This is state-on-state hostility wearing an institutional uniform.

The FEAS exercise also shed light on how Turkey uses the legitimacy of multilateral formats to whitewash its geopolitical project. FEAS-2026 participants included the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and dozens of other allies and partners. When Syrian soldiers train alongside their American and German counterparts under Turkish flags, Ankara gets something that Iranian proxy networks could never buy: the optics of normalcy. The new Syrian army is not presented as a client force of Turkey. It is presented as a reconstruction partner, alongside NATO members, absorbing the same professional military culture. The absorption is real; the framing is theater.

Israel cannot afford to view FEAS-2026 as a footnote. The question of what the Syrian armed forces will look like in three years, who will have trained them, what equipment they will carry, and what command culture they will have internalized is one of the most important questions facing Israeli defense planners. Syria’s participation in FEAS marked the moment when integration officially began, putting its army in the same framework of multinational exercises as countries with which it had never trained before. The clock on this process is now ticking.

Turkey’s ambitions are no secret. Erdogan declared them openly. The question is whether the rest of the region, and Israel in particular, will respond with equivalent strategic clarity, or whether the gradual consolidation of a Turkish-anchored military network, from Tripoli to Damascus, can continue until the architecture is too strong to reverse. The flags of Izmir were a message. The only real question is who was listening.

Amine Ayoub, a member of the Middle East Forum, is a political analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx