On Türkiye’s Victory Day, Somalia’s envoy stands beside Ankara — and a century of lessons
ANKARA — Under a late-summer sky, the red-and-white flag that is never far from Turkish life seemed to stretch just a bit wider this weekend. Victory Day, marked every August 30, is an annual rite here — a day when schoolchildren learn again the name Dumlupinar and adults take an extra glance toward the statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. This year, amid the ceremonies and speeches, a guest from the Horn of Africa stepped forward to salute a history that has shaped modern Türkiye, and to signal a partnership increasingly shaped by the future.
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Somalia’s ambassador to Türkiye, Fathudin Ali Mohamed Ospite, joined President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and dignitaries in Ankara to mark the 103rd anniversary of Victory Day, commemorating the 1922 triumph that sealed the Turkish War of Independence. He brought greetings from Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and, just as notably, a reminder of a friendship forged in hardship and renewed in strategic alignment.
“Turkey and Somalia share many strong ties,” Ambassador Ospite said on the sidelines, echoing a sentiment that has been years in the making. Erdoğan, in his own remarks, called August 30 “one of the golden milestones in our history,” and described the Great Victory not only as a memory, but “a guide acting as a source of light” for the nation’s future.
A century-old victory that still speaks
Victory Day is not simply about past battles. It marks a decisive moment — the battle of Dumlupinar, fought August 26–30, 1922 — that paved the way for the expulsion of occupying forces and the founding of the Republic in 1923. The anniversaries are a reminder that the making of modern Türkiye began with a coalition of villages, veterans, and visionaries, and that confidence in self-rule was hard-won.
Each year, commemorations mix solemnity with civic pride. The images are by now part of the national tapestry: wreaths laid at memorials, veterans pinned with medals, choruses of schoolchildren reciting Atatürk’s words. The texture of the day is unmistakably Turkish — public, emotive, disciplined — and intentionally inclusive, a way of threading history into everyday life.
But this year’s ceremony also carried a note that resonates beyond Türkiye’s borders. Ambassador Ospite’s presence underscores how Ankara’s victories are watched, and sometimes celebrated, by partners who see in Türkiye’s modern story a template for resolve.
From Mogadishu to Ankara: a bridge built in crisis
If the balcony flags in Ankara feel a world away from Mogadishu’s port cranes and crowded markets, the ties between the two capitals have grown steadily over the past decade. Türkiye’s deepening role in Somalia is well known in the region: the first G20 leader to visit Mogadishu after decades of isolation was Erdoğan in 2011, at the height of a famine that drew a global relief effort. Turkish humanitarian groups pitched tents, doctors arrived, and engineers started drawing up plans.
Since then, the relationship has widened and professionalized. Turkish Airlines restored a major international link to Mogadishu in 2012. The Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Training and Research Hospital opened its doors in 2015. A sprawling military training mission — TURKSOM — began in 2017, preparing Somali soldiers who are now a backbone of the government’s fight against extremist groups. Thousands have rotated through that campus, and Turkish-built infrastructure has followed: roads, schools, municipal projects. The arc of the relationship has moved from relief to resilience.
In February 2024, Ankara and Mogadishu signed a long-term defense and economic cooperation agreement that includes support for protecting Somali waters. At a time when the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden have become a maritime chessboard, that deal signaled that Türkiye’s footprint in the Horn is strategic as well as humanitarian. For Somalia, the promise is twofold: enhanced security and a partner willing to invest in state-building over years, not months.
Rituals of nationhood, resonating abroad
For a global audience, ceremonies like Victory Day may seem routine — the set-piece statements, the anthem, the flyovers. But in a world where sovereignty is tested by everything from drone strikes to debt crises, such rituals are also a quiet referendum on national confidence. What does it mean when a smaller nation’s ambassador shows up, not just to applaud, but to tie his country’s fate, in part, to that story?
In Somalia’s case, the answer lies in trust accumulated over time. Turkish engineers worked alongside Somali crews. Scholarships sent Somali students to Ankara and Istanbul. Aid convoys came not only with food, but with project managers and long-term contracts. The work was not always smooth — nothing in statecraft is — but it was visible. And visibility matters in places where institutions are often abstract and promises fragile.
There’s also a cultural affinity that officials from both sides sometimes describe as intangible but real. In markets from Hargeisa to Baidoa, it is easy now to find Turkish brands. On Somali social media, Turkish TV dramas have quietly expanded their audience, sharing, for better or worse, a narrative vocabulary of resilience and family loyalty that resonates. Soft power, for all the spreadsheets and defense briefings, still tends to move on such currents.
Why this matters now
Türkiye is recalibrating its diplomacy, looking south and east as energetically as it does west. Somalia, meanwhile, is trying to convert fragile gains into a durable state. Each has reasons to invest in the other. Türkiye’s defense industry — from drones to naval platforms — has grown into an export engine, and African partners are increasingly part of that map. Somalia, rich in coastline and young talent, needs allies who understand that institutions are built as much in classrooms and clinics as in barracks.
Victory Day’s message about a “guide acting as a source of light,” as Erdoğan put it, can sound lofty. But the practical test is in moments like these: an ambassador standing in Ankara, acknowledging the past, and nudging a long-term alliance forward. The symbolism is not trivial. It says that memory, when paired with investment and mutual respect, can be a tool of statecraft.
For readers far from the Bosporus or the Horn, there’s a universal question tucked into the ceremony’s pageantry: which alliances are built to weather the next storm? The past few years have taught smaller states, especially, that great-power attention can be fickle. Partnerships that survive tend to be those that show up when the cameras don’t — that deliver a scholarship in September as reliably as a military exercise in March.
Ankara’s streets will return to their ordinary rhythms now. The flags will fold, the speeches filed away. But the work of translating commemoration into cooperation continues — in classrooms where Somali cadets learn Turkish commands, in clinics where visiting surgeons train local residents, and in coastal waters where patrol boats will soon test new protocols. On Victory Day, Turkey looks back. With Somalia at its side, it also looks out — toward a horizon where history and strategy meet.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
