East

Canada on Wednesday announced $5 million in funding for international efforts aimed at identifying and eliminating chemical weapons remaining in Syria, Anadolu reports.

“Today, the Honourable Anita Anand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, announced Canada’s contribution of $5 million to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) through Canada’s Weapons Threat Reduction Program,” the Global Affairs Canada said in a statement.

Noting that the OPCW will use the contribution to verify the scope of Syria’s former chemical weapons program, the readout added that the funding will also be used to investigate past uses of such weapons, and prepare for the safe destruction of remaining stockpiles, in line with the Chemical Weapons Convention.

The statement said the work is considered critical to “Syria’s long-term stability,” advancing accountability and reducing the risk to civilians of any future chemical weapons use.

“This contribution is part of Canada’s long-standing support to the OPCW to uphold the global ban on chemical weapons and strengthen international accountability,” it added.

Hezbollah MP, Hassan Fadlallah said that Hezbollah will eliminate the “yellow line” declared by Israel in southern Lebanon, stressing that “no one will be able to disarm the party.”

In an interview with Agence France-Presse, Fadlallah said: “We will topple this yellow line through resistance, through our insistence on our legitimate right to defend ourselves and our country.”

He added: “The Israeli army’s attempt to establish a buffer zone, under the guise of a front line, a yellow line, and a green line—we will break all these lines. We will not accept any of them, and we will reach our villages on the internationally recognized borders, no matter the sacrifices, no matter the cost.”

“There will be no disarmament of the resistance, and no one in Lebanon or abroad will be able to disarm it”, he added.

He said that “it is in the interest of the President of the Republic to withdraw from the path of direct negotiations with Israel,” adding that Hezbollah wants the ceasefire to continue.

“It is in the interest of Lebanon, the President of the Republic, and the government to withdraw from the path of direct negotiations and return to a national consensus on the best option for Lebanon,” he said, describing the move toward direct negotiations as “a unilateral decision on a fateful matter related to Lebanon’s future.”

He added: “We will reject and confront any attempt to impose political prices on Lebanon through concessions offered to this Israeli enemy.”

Fadlallah added he wants the ceasefire to continue, alongside efforts to ensure the withdrawal of the occupation army, the return of displaced persons to their villages, the release of prisoners, and the launch of a reconstruction program.

For the first time since at least the launch of Operation Epic Fury on Feb. 28, an Iranian-linked vessel was interdicted in the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) region, the Pentagon confirmed to The War Zone. The boarding of the Botswana-flagged oil tanker M/T Tifani came just days after Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine told reporters, including from The War Zone, that the U.S. would “actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran” anywhere in the world. The move also follows the U.S. firing on and seizing the Iranian cargo ship Touska on Sunday in the Arabian Sea.

Meanwhile, as the clock ticks down toward the end of a fragile ceasefire between the U.S and Iran, the future of peace negotiations remains very much uncertain, which we will discuss later in this story. 

“Overnight, U.S. forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding of the stateless sanctioned M/T Tifani without incident in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility,” the Pentagon stated Tuesday morning on X.

 “As we have made clear, we will pursue global maritime enforcement efforts to disrupt illicit networks and interdict sanctioned vessels providing material support to Iran—anywhere they operate. 

International waters are not a refuge for sanctioned vessels. The Department of War will continue to deny illicit actors and their vessels freedom of maneuver in the maritime domain.”

Video released by the Pentagon shows about two dozen armed troops boarding two MH-60S Seahawk helicopters on a U.S. Navy Expeditionary Sea Base (ESB) ship. The video then cuts to the troops repelling onto the deck of the Tifani and searching that vessel.

The Pentagon did not say where the incident took place, however, according to MarineTraffic.com, the Tifani was last located yesterday in the Indian Ocean, about halfway between Sri Lanka and Indonesia and some 2,000 miles southeast of Iran.

The Pentagon told us that “multiple agencies” played a role in seizing the ship. We have reached out for additional details.

Gregory Brew, Senior Analyst, Iran and Oil for Eurasia Group, stated on X that the Tifani departed from Iran’s Kharg Island on April 5 and that the ship appears to have continued sailing on after the boarding. We asked the Pentagon for more details about the ship’s disposition and they referred us to the White House, which sent us back to the Pentagon.

The ship was sanctioned under a 2018 executive order issued by President Donald Trump during his first term designed to counter Iranian malign activities and prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

UPDATES

The status of peace talks in Pakistan remains murky. While Vice President JD Vance and other top officials are expected to leave for the negotiations today, Iranian officials have yet to officially commit. The main sticking points remain the future of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, the Strait of Hormuz, the status of its ballistic missile inventory and support for proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis of Yemen.

“A diplomatic source in Pakistan says no diplomatic delegation from Iran has been dispatched to Islamabad ‘so far,’” the official Iranian IRNA news agency stated on Tuesday. “In response to speculations about possible negotiations in Pakistan, a diplomatic source told IRNA on Tuesday that no delegation from Iran has arrived in the Pakistani capital.”

The source clarified that “neither official nor unofficial information has been received regarding any Iranian involvement in the negotiations in Islamabad.”

In a brief phone call, Trump told CNBC host Joe Kernan he thinks the U.S. is “going to end up with a great deal” with Iran to end the war, even as he said he does not expect to extend a ceasefire due to expire on Wednesday.

“I think they have no choice,” Trump said during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” when asked what he expected to come out of a second round of peace negotiations with Iran. “We’ve taken out their navy, we’ve taken out their air force, we’ve taken out their leaders.”

The president added that he is ready to resume the conflict if a deal with Iran does not appear in the offing.

“Well, I expect to be bombing because I think that’s a better attitude to go in with – but we’re ready to go,” Trump answered when asked if he needs at least the prospect for a signed deal either today or tomorrow.

Trump also said “I don’t want to do that,” when asked if he would extend the ceasefire beyond tomorrow if talks with Iran appear promising.

April 19 (UPI) — South Korea’s Defense Ministry said North Korea test launched multiple, short-range ballistic missiles into the East Sea, also known as the Sea of Japan, Sunday morning.

“Detailed specifications are currently under close analysis by South Korean and U.S. intelligence authorities,” officials in Seoul said in a statement, according to ABC News.

“Our military is closely monitoring North Korea’s military activities under a firm combined defense posture and maintains an overwhelming capability and readiness to respond to any provocation.”

The Japan Times said the Defense Ministry of Japan also confirmed the activity.

“North Korea’s series of actions, including the repeated launches of ballistic missiles and other weapons, threaten the peace and security of Japan, the region and the international community,” the ministry said in a statement.

Newsweek said Pyongyang has increased its ballistic missile testing and nuclear weapons development since the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran began nearly two months ago.

Sunday’s missile launches appear to have come from Sinpho, a coastal city in North Korea where submarines capable of launching such weapons are built.

Multiple ballistic missiles fired from eastern Sinpo area in seventh such test this year.

North Korea has launched multiple ballistic missiles towards the sea off its eastern coast, according to South Korea and Japan.

The incident on Sunday marked North Korea’s seventh ⁠ballistic missile launch this year and its fourth in April.

The missiles were fired near the city of Sinpo on North Korea’s east coast at about 6:10am on Sunday (21:10 GMT, Saturday), South Korea’s military said in a statement. It added that South Korea had bolstered its surveillance posture and was closely exchanging information with the United States and Japan.

Japan’s ⁠government posted on social media that the ballistic missiles were believed to have fallen near the east coast of the Korean Peninsula. No incursion into Japan’s exclusive economic zone was confirmed.

South Korea’s presidential office said it has held an emergency security meeting, according to media reports.

Such tests violate United Nations Security Council resolutions against North Korea’s missile programme. The diplomatically isolated country rejects the UN ban and says it infringes on its sovereign right to self-defence.

The launches come as China and the US prepare for a summit in mid-May, ⁠in which Chinese President ⁠Xi Jinping and his US counterpart, Donald Trump, are expected to discuss North Korea.

North Korea has made “very serious” advances in its ability to turn out nuclear weapons, with the probable addition of a new uranium enrichment facility, ‌International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said on Wednesday.

Late last month, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country’s status as a nuclear-armed ‌state ‌was irreversible and that expanding a “self-defensive nuclear deterrent” was essential to national security.

The EU’s special representative for the Gulf said Saturday that any lasting solution for the Middle East must be led by countries in the region rather than imposed from outside, Anadolu reports.

Speaking at a panel during the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in southern Turkiye, Luigi Di Maio said the current crisis in the Gulf is another sign of the “further erosion of international law.”

“If we want to try to find a solution for avoiding again another crisis, like the ongoing crisis or a wider crisis, a farther spillover, we need to work all together,” he said.

Di Maio said the EU remains committed to multilateralism and international law, while stressing that Europe does not want to be “part of this war.”

At the same time, he said European countries are supporting Gulf partners in self-defense, including intercepting drones and missiles from Iran under bilateral agreements.

READ: US, Iran likely on Monday to hold 2nd round for technical talks in Islamabad: Sources

He also warned that instability in the Gulf affects the wider world, not only because of oil and gas, but also due to trade in fertilizer, helium for semiconductors and other goods moving through the Strait of Hormuz.

Di Maio said the collapse of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal showed the importance of involving regional countries in negotiations.

“Every solution for the Middle East has to be a region-led process,” he said.

He said stronger connectivity and defense cooperation can make the region more resilient to future crises, adding that “autonomy does not mean isolation.”

He praised mediation efforts by Turkiye, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, saying they had helped secure a ceasefire and could contribute to a broader agreement.

READ: French soldier killed in attack on UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon: Macron

There is another way to read the ongoing Middle East crisis, one that makes legible what standard analysis consistently struggles to explain. It begins not with capability but with the geometry of the system through which capability must travel to produce effects. The United States and its partners possess overwhelming military superiority over Iran, and that superiority is not in question, yet the conflict has produced a pattern that defies its logic. A superpower coalition has been unable to impose coherent strategic outcomes against an adversary operating through proxies, low-cost disruption, and the systematic exploitation of global commercial vulnerabilities.

Over the past two years, we have seen multiple instances of this kind of disruption with consequential effects on the global system. Houthi drones force the rerouting of global shipping, with Red Sea cargo volumes falling by roughly 50% through early 2024 as major carriers diverted around the Cape of Good Hope, adding up to two weeks to transit times, driving freight costs sharply higher across European markets, and costing Egypt nearly $800 million per month at peak in lost Suez Canal revenue. A non-state network spanning Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Gaza has absorbed sustained air campaigns, targeted eliminations of senior commanders, and repeated ground operations without losing its capacity to generate coordinated pressure across multiple theaters simultaneously. The asymmetry seems to follow a deliberate strategic logic that raw power analysis struggles to read, precisely because the conflict operates on a surface that capability assessments were never designed to map. What this suggests is that the decisive variable is not what actors possess but whether the relationships connecting them can transmit coordinated action when the system is under strain.

When that system cannot coordinate, something important breaks down. An alliance that formally exists but faces operational friction at every decision point ceases to be an alliance in any meaningful strategic sense. A security guarantee that cannot be transmitted rapidly to the partner it is meant to protect has, in effect, already failed its primary function. It follows that the gap between what a system formally is and what it can actually do under pressure is not a secondary consideration but the surface on which this conflict is being decided. Conventional analysis, calibrated to count warheads and assess intentions, consistently leaves this gap unmapped.

Analysts know that Saudi Arabia’s OPEC production decisions have repeatedly positioned Riyadh against Washington’s economic preferences, they know that European energy dependency complicates transatlantic alignment, and they know that Iran’s proxy network extends across five countries and absorbs military pressure without fracturing. Yet what the available frameworks cannot do is convert that knowledge into a structural reading of the system. They show that these conditions exist. What they cannot show is how those conditions interact, where they compound, and what the aggregate geometry of their interaction means for whether coordinated action is possible at all.

Power analysis was built to read capability differentials between states, and it does that well. Alliance theory was built to read the conditions under which formal commitments hold or fail, and it does that too. Neither, however, was built to read the operational weight of the ties through which capability and commitment must travel to produce effects.

The instruments available are calibrated to answer questions different from those the current situation poses. Deploying them on a problem they were not designed to read produces the consistent failure to explain what is actually happening that has marked analysis of this conflict from the start.

Adjacency mapping is an instrument designed to read that gap by mapping connectivity, by which I mean their operational weight, specifically their capacity to carry coordinated action under strain. What distinguishes it from standard approaches is its unit of analysis. Rather than the actors themselves, it treats the weight of the relationships as primary. The question it asks is not who holds power but whether the ties connecting power-holders can transmit that power when the system needs them to. Two states can be formally allied, operationally integrated in name, and structurally disconnected at the same time, and nothing in standard analysis will tell you which of those conditions is actually operative until the moment of crisis reveals it.

The instrument assigns each significant relationship in the system a weight between 0 and 1, reflecting how frequently the two actors interact operationally, how reliably information moves between them, how the tie has behaved under recent stress, and how quickly it transmits pressure when the system is under strain. At the higher end of the scale, a weight at or above 0.6 indicates that coordination approaches automaticity, and the tie carries load without constant investment to maintain it. Around 0.3, friction accumulates. In this setting, decisions require deliberate effort at every juncture, slowing the system and making it susceptible to gradual degradation that never triggers a visible rupture. At or below 0.2, the tie has effectively ceased to function as a transmission pathway, leaving the actors operationally disconnected regardless of what their formal relationship nominally says.

These weights are analytical judgements calibrated against observable evidence. In other words, their value lies in making visible what experienced analysts already carry as intuition and in giving that intuition a structure precise enough to argue about. The numbers are therefore analytical judgements, not measurements. A more rigorous application would derive them from quantifiable indicators across each dimension, including military interoperability, intelligence exchange depth, crisis responsiveness, economic interdependence, and signaling consistency, averaged and weighted systematically. That work lies beyond the scope of this piece, but the architecture is designed to accommodate it.

There is a risk management dimension to this reading that is worth making explicit. Standard geopolitical risk assessment focuses on actor-level variables such as regime stability, military capability, and leadership intentions. What adjacency mapping adds is a structural layer that those assessments typically miss. A coalition whose load-bearing relationships operate in the friction zone is exposed to a category of risk that capability assessments do not capture and that becomes visible only when the system is read structurally.

What the matrix adds is the ability to see how compound weakness across multiple relationships produces cascading effects that bilateral assessment alone would struggle to predict. A system whose dominant actor holds several weak partnerships faces more than friction. As a consequence, the geometry of those weaknesses determines whether any concerted response is structurally possible at all. Aggregate capability becomes, in that light, secondary to that question.

If we apply this to the Middle East security complex, the instrument produces one possible reading. This reading differs considerably from the picture conventional analysis generates. Its value is not in the precision of the numbers but in making the system’s geometry visible enough to argue about.

The matrix below maps operational connectivity across the system’s key actors. The numbers are analytical judgements, not measurements.

The geometry they make visible is what matters here.

The matrix is intentionally non-symmetric. Where operational influence flows asymmetrically between two actors, the weights reflect that directionality.

The matrix reveals, in this light, a system whose dominant actors are connected at fundamentally different weights. And more significantly, its most important bilateral relationship is operating in the friction zone. It’s formally excluded adversary has constructed the only alternative connectivity architecture in the system. What this implies is that the geometry of the conflict runs considerably deeper than standard alliance analysis tends to suggest.

On the coalition side, the US has high adjacency with Qatar, Bahrain, Israel, and Kuwait, ties that enable rapid coordination and require little maintenance, constituting the operational backbone of what Washington can actually activate quickly.

Its relationship with Saudi Arabia, however, sits at 0.4. That number is analytically more significant than almost anything else in the matrix. Saudi Arabia remains, on most readings, the relationship on which Gulf order coherence formally depends, the anchor of the security architecture since the 1970s, and it is operating in the friction zone where every significant decision requires renegotiation from scratch rather than flowing through an established channel. Saudi Arabia’s invitation to join BRICS in August 2023, yuan-denominated oil transactions with China, and its participation in the Chinese-brokered rapprochement with Iran in March 2023 all point in the same direction. Riyadh is hedging structurally toward China and the broader non-Western order, a posture that sits uneasily alongside its formal security alignment with Washington. Taken together, these are not isolated political episodes but evidence of a tie that has been operating below the coordination threshold for years and whose weakness is, on this reading, the system’s most consequential structural vulnerability.

Through the normalization architecture, the UAE has arguably become the system’s most structurally reliable node at 0.6 with both the US and Israel, its operational integration exceeding Saudi Arabia’s despite Saudi Arabia’s formal primacy. The Abraham Accords of September 2020 established the formal foundation for that integration. The operational depth it has since generated, across intelligence sharing, defence cooperation, and coordinated positioning on Iran, has made the UAE the coalition’s most functionally connected Gulf partner. Oman holds what is perhaps the system’s most anomalous position, meaningful adjacency with both the US coalition and Iran simultaneously, a profile no other state actor in the matrix replicates. That structural position gave Oman the back-channel role it played through the early phases of the conflict, with documented precedent in the secret US-Iran nuclear negotiations that began in Muscat in 2012 and ran through 2013. As the conflict has intensified, Pakistan has assumed the primary mediation function, but Oman’s position as a quiet facilitator has not disappeared; it has simply been supplemented by a node with more direct access to both capitals at this particular moment.

Pakistan has emerged as the conflict’s primary mediation node, hosting the highest-level direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran since 1979 and brokering the April 2026 ceasefire. That role reflects a structural position the matrix makes legible: high Saudi adjacency, a functioning Iran tie, and a rehabilitated relationship with Washington that no other regional actor currently combines. China’s influence over both Pakistani and Iranian decision-making operates as an exogenous pressure that the matrix only partially captures, and Pakistan’s own domestic constraints, including its difficulty developing direct channels with the IRGC, limit how far that mediation role can ultimately reach.

Iran’s position is where the matrix becomes most analytically revealing. Across the state actors in the system, Iran’s adjacency sits at or near fragmentation, built up through sanctions, absent operational channels, and decades of adversarial signalling that have left Tehran formally isolated from the coordination architecture the United States and its partners have constructed.

And yet the only high-weight tie Iran holds is with its proxy network at 0.7. That single number may go further toward explaining the architecture of the entire campaign than any other figure in the matrix.

It is an asymmetric relationship in which Tehran’s capacity to activate and direct exceeds the reverse influence those actors exert over Iranian strategic decisions. What that single structural condition implies goes further toward explaining the architecture of Iranian pressure operations than most analyses of Iranian intentions or capabilities tend to reach. Iran is geographically central and formally excluded. It is precisely that combination, positioned to apply pressure across every theatre while bearing none of the coordination costs that formal inclusion imposes. That, from this vantage point, is what makes legible a strategy that standard analysis, focused on actors and their capabilities, cannot see.

Seen through this lens, what Iran is doing across the region is something more structurally ambitious than a military campaign. It is attempting to restructure the matrix itself. The goal appears to be less about battlefield victory than about the gradual degradation of the ties connecting the United States to its regional partners, below the threshold at which coordinated response becomes automatic, eroding the will to keep paying the price of alignment while simultaneously building alternative adjacency in the nodes where US-aligned connectivity is weakest.

The Houthi campaign against Red Sea shipping is calibrated to stay below the threshold that would compel a unified military response. It introduces friction into the economic relationships connecting European states to the Gulf system, raising the cost of alignment with Washington’s regional posture without forcing the kind of direct confrontation that would unite the coalition. Strikes on Gulf infrastructure follow the same calibration, persistent enough to signal that the US security guarantee cannot insulate its partners from costs, yet restrained enough to avoid crossing the point at which coalition fragmentation becomes irrelevant because a unified response becomes compulsory. Across Iraq and Syria, simultaneous pressure from affiliated militias prevents the concentration of attention that sustained coalition coordination requires. In each case, the instrument targets a relationship rather than a capability, specifically the weight of the ties whose degradation would restructure the system’s geometry without requiring Iran to displace the existing order directly.

The US-Saudi tie at 0.4 is the primary focus of that degradation effort. Should that threshold be breached, Saudi Arabia hedges. As hedging reduces operational interactivity the tie weakens further. The process risks becoming self-reinforcing. Iranian military superiority over any individual partner is not required to sustain it.

The same logic extends across European actors, though not uniformly. Germany’s industrial exposure to energy price volatility, France’s residual strategic autonomy instinct, and the EU’s institutional preference for de-escalation all produce different thresholds for continued alignment with Washington. Their shared energy dependency gives them asymmetric stakes in the Gulf system’s stability, but their appetite for risk diverges from Washington’s in ways that are not identical across capitals, and each time Iran forces a decision about the cost of continued alignment, that divergence fragments the coalition’s coordination surface further.

By sustaining operational ties with non-state actors across the region, Iran is constructing alternative adjacency in precisely the nodes where US-aligned connectivity is weakest. These are populations and factions that the existing regional order has excluded from the dominant coalition’s coordination architecture. Deliberately so — Iran is building in the structural gaps the system leaves open. Displacing the existing order appears unnecessary. Becoming the more reliable pole of alignment for the actors that order has failed to integrate may be sufficient. All that is required is that the order fragment sufficiently at its margins for that offer to appear credible, and the current trajectory of US-Saudi friction and European hedging is steadily moving in that direction.

The coalition’s instruments are calibrated to military threats. The system, however, is failing along a different surface entirely, or so this reading suggests. The formal architecture remains largely intact, security guarantees have not been withdrawn, Gulf states remain formally aligned, and normalisation agreements hold. And yet the operational adjacency that gives that architecture its functional weight is under sustained pressure from an actor that has correctly identified the gap between formal commitment and operational tie as the system’s primary vulnerability. That identification is outpacing the coalition’s capacity to respond.

On this reading, the surface on which the conflict appears to be decided is not the one the coalition is defending.

What adjacency mapping reveals is a story about geometry. The system’s dominant actor holds formal commitments at weights the system cannot sustain under the pressure being applied to it. Its adversary, in turn, has built the only alternative coordination architecture in the space that those weakening ties leave open. The conflict is likely to be determined by which ties the system can no longer afford to lose under sustained and calibrated pressure. The question is whether the actors currently holding those ties in the friction zone can rebuild them to the coordination threshold before the process of degradation becomes irreversible. That is a question that capability assessments are not well-positioned to answer, and one that a structural reading of the system’s connectivity at least helps to make visible.

Modern warfare has dramatically changed as we have seen from the Russia-Ukraine war, conflicts involving Gaza, India and Pakistan, and the recent US-Israeli strikes on Iran. At the centre of this shift is a surging global reliance on drone and missile technology as well as advanced air defence systems.

Turkiye, one of the largest military powers in the Middle East, is increasingly positioning itself as a major supplier in the global defence sector. Central to this effort is Roketsan, a company founded in 1988 to supply the Turkish Armed Forces, which has since evolved into the country’s primary manufacturer of missile and rocket systems.

Currently exporting to approximately 50 countries, the firm is one of the fastest-growing defence companies globally.

So how did Roketsan secure a large share of the global arms trade?

Bypassing Western embargoes

Turkiye’s defence expansion was largely accelerated by restrictions placed upon it. Western embargoes aimed at halting its military advancement meant Ankara could not acquire the necessary technical systems or components.

In 2020, the United States imposed Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) restrictions on Turkiye – a key member of the transatlantic military alliance NATO. These sanctions targeted Turkiye’s military procurement agency, its chief Ismail Demir, and three other senior officials. Washington also ejected Ankara from the F-35 stealth jet programme in July 2019.

The measures came after Ankara purchased Russia’s S-400 missile defence system, which was seen as a potential threat to NATO security. The European Union also prepared limited sanctions and discussed restricting arms exports following energy exploration disputes in the Eastern Mediterranean.

To circumvent this, the country built an integrated, domestic defence ecosystem. Today, Turkiye relies on a vast supply chain of nearly 4,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) scattered across the country. As a result, the Turkish defence industry now operates with a local production rate exceeding 90 percent.

This shift has yielded significant financial returns for Ankara. In 2025, Turkiye’s defence industry reported $10bn in exports. Roketsan’s General Manager Murat Ikinci told Al Jazeera that the company currently ranks 71st among global defence firms, with ambitions to break into the top 50, then the top 20, and ultimately the top 10.

To support this expansion, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan inaugurated several large-scale facilities last week, including:

• Europe’s largest warhead facility.
• new research and development (R&D) centre housing 1,000 engineers.
• the “Kirikkale” facility dedicated to rocket fuel technology.
• new infrastructure for the mass production of ballistic and cruise missiles.

These projects represent a $1bn investment, with the company planning to inject an additional $2bn to expand mass production capabilities.

The ‘Tayfun’ and modern warfare

Roketsan’s R&D strategy – which employs 3,200 engineers and makes the company the third-largest R&D institution in Turkiye – is heavily influenced by data gathered from ongoing global conflicts.

According to Ikinci, the war in Ukraine highlighted the impact of cheap, first-person view (FPV) and kamikaze drones supported by artificial intelligence. In response, Roketsan developed air defence systems like “ALKA” and “BURC,” alongside the “CIRIT” laser-guided missile.

The regional landscape was further complicated during the US-Israel war on Iran, as cheap Iranian-designed Shahed drones – recently upgraded by Russia with “Kometa-B” anti-jamming modules – overwhelmed defences and even struck a British base in Cyprus in March 2026. During the same month, NATO air defences were forced to intercept three Iranian ballistic missiles that entered Turkish airspace.

Meanwhile, the recent conflict between Israel and Iran showcased the use of complex attacks combining ballistic missiles with “swarms” of kamikaze drones designed to overwhelm air defences. This environment makes hypersonic technology a critical asset.

This brings the Tayfun (Typhoon) project into focus. Tayfun is a developing family of long-range ballistic missiles. Its most advanced iteration, the Tayfun Block 4, is a hypersonic missile engineered to penetrate advanced air defence systems by travelling at extreme speeds.

When Al Jazeera asked for specific details regarding the Tayfun’s exact operational range, Ikinci was elusive. “We avoid mentioning its range; we just say its range is sufficient,” he noted.

Similarly, historical Western sanctions have pushed Turkiye to form new cooperation initiatives, effectively accelerating an “Eastern shift” away from Western defence dependence. Turkish drones are now being used by a growing number of countries, including by Pakistan during its war against India last May.

Based on these threat assessments, Roketsan has prioritised five key areas of production:

1. long-range ballistic and cruise missiles.
2. air defence systems, including the “Steel Dome”, Hisar-A, Hisar-O, and Siper.
3. submarine-launched cruise missiles, utilising the AKYA system to leverage Turkiye’s large submarine fleet.
4. smart micro-munitions designed specifically for armed drones.
5. long-range air-to-air missiles, a need highlighted by the brief India-Pakistan skirmish.

A strategic export model

Unlike traditional arms procurement, Turkiye is marketing its defence industry to international buyers as a strategic partnership.

“Our offer to our partners… is as follows: Let’s produce together, let’s develop technology together,” Ikinci stated.

By establishing joint facilities and R&D centres in allied nations across the Middle East, the Far East, and Europe, Turkiye is attempting to secure long-term geopolitical alliances rather than purely transactional sales. Ikinci highlighted Qatar as a prime example of this model, describing it as a benchmark for technological, military, and security cooperation in the region.

Filling the global stockpile gap

This rapid expansion comes at a critical time for the global arms trade. Ongoing wars have severely depleted the stockpiles of advanced weapon systems worldwide.

During the recent US-Israel war on Iran, Washington relied heavily on multimillion-dollar Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems to intercept cheap Iranian drones targeting US assets across Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. With growing concerns that US interceptor supplies could run low, Gulf states – which have collectively detected over 1,000 drones in their airspace – are actively seeking alternative defence technologies, creating a highly lucrative opening for Turkiye’s missile industry.

Defence analyses indicate that even military superpowers like the US will require significant time to replenish their current air defence inventories due to the complexity and massive infrastructure required to build them.

Turkish defence officials view this shortage as a strategic opening. Having localised its supply chain, Turkiye claims it can manufacture and export these highly sought-after complex systems independently.

As global demand for air defence and ballistic technologies rises, Roketsan is aggressively reinvesting its revenues into production infrastructure to expand its footprint in the international arms market.