24 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
aircraft large enough to carry munitions.
That year, Erdoğan, who was facing term
limits as Prime Minister, won the Pres-
idential election. A popular referendum
had given him control of the courts as
well, and he began using his powers to
prosecute political enemies. “They ar-
rested not only a quarter of active-duty
admirals and generals but also many of
Erdoğan’s civil-society op-
ponents,” Soner Cagaptay,
who has written four biog-
raphies of Erdoğan, told me.
Bayraktar dedicated his pro-
totype to the memory of Er-
doğan’s mentor, Erbakan.
“He gave all his life’s work
to changing the culture,”
Bayraktar said. (In his post-
humously published mem-
oirs, Erbakan asserted that,
for the past four hundred years, the world
has secretly been governed by a coalition
of Jews and Freemasons.)
In December, 2015, Bayraktar over-
saw the first tests of the TB2’s preci-
sion-strike capability. Using a laser to
guide dummy bombs, the drone was
able to strike a target the size of a pic-
nic blanket from five miles away. By
April, 2016, the TB2 was delivering live
munitions. The earliest targets were the
P.K.K.—drone strikes have killed at least
twenty of the organization’s leaders, along
with whoever was standing near them.
The strikes also taught Bayraktar to
fight for the airwaves. Drones are con-
trolled through radio signals, which op-
ponents can jam by broadcasting static.
Pilots can counter by hopping frequen-
cies, or by boosting the amplitude of
their broadcast signal. “There’s so many
jammers in Turkey, because the P.K.K.
had been using drones, too,” Bayraktar
said. “It’s one of the hottest places to
fly.” Turkey’s remote-controlled counter-
insurgency was thought to be the first
time a country had conducted a drone
campaign against citizens on its own
soil, but Bayraktar, citing the threat of
terrorism, remains an enthusiastic sup-
porter of the campaign.
That May, he married the Presi-
dent’s daughter. More than five thou-
sand people attended the wedding, in-
cluding much of the country’s political
élite. Sümeyye wore a head scarf and
an immaculate long-sleeved white dress
from the Paris designer Dice Kayek.
By then, the Turkish state had taken
on an overtly Islamic character. In the
nineteen-nineties, the hijab was banned
in universities and public buildings.
Now “having a hijab-wearing wife is
the surest way to get a job in the Er-
doğan administration,” Cagaptay wrote.
Bayraktar regularly tweets Islamic bless-
ings to his followers on social media,
and both Sümeyye and the
elder Canan wear the hijab.
Like Bayraktar, Sümeyye
is a second-generation mem-
ber of Turkey’s Islamist élite,
and she graduated from In-
diana University in 2005 with
a degree in sociology. “She
has great ethics,” Bayraktar
told me. “She’s a real chal-
lenger.” Other people de-
scribe her as a fashionable,
feminist upgrade on her father’s poli-
tics—a Turkish version of Ivanka Trump.
“Women have lost significantly under
Erdoğan in terms of access to political
power,” Cagaptay told me. “When there
are women appointed in the cabinet, they
have token jobs.”
In June, 2016, terrorists affiliated with
ISIS killed forty-five people at the Is-
tanbul airport, and soon a new front
was opened in Syria, where Turkey used
Bayraktar’s drones to attack the short-
lived ISIS caliphate. (The drones were
later turned on Syria’s Kurds.) In July,
a small group inside the Turkish mili-
tary staged a coup against Erdoğan. The
coup was chaotic and unpopular—the
main opposition parties condemned it,
a conspirator flying a fighter jet dropped
a bomb on the Turkish parliament, and
Erdoğan was reportedly targeted by an
assassination squad sent to his hotel.
Erdoğan blamed the followers of Fet-
ullah Gülen, an exiled cleric and polit-
ical leader who now lives in Pennsylva-
nia, and purged more than a hundred
thousand government employees.
(Gülen denies involvement in the coup.)
Bayraktar was now part of Erdoğan’s
inner circle, and his drones were mar-
keted for export.B
ayraktar is a Turkish celebrity, and
his social-media feeds are crowded
with patriotic reply guys. When he gives
talks to trainee pilots, which he does
often, he wears a leather jacket deco-
rated with flight patches; when he toursuniversities, which he also does often,
he wears a blazer over a turtleneck. In
our conversation, he referred to con-
cepts from critical gender theory, spoke
of Russia’s violations of international
law, and quoted Benjamin Franklin:
“Those who give up essential freedom
for temporary security deserve neither
security nor freedom.” But he is also an
outspoken defender of Erdoğan’s gov-
ernment. In 2017, Erdoğan held a con-
stitutional referendum that resulted in
the dissolution of the post of Prime
Minister, effectively enshrining his con-
trol of the state. Using politically mo-
tivated tax audits to seize independent
media outlets, his government sold them
in single-bidder “auctions” to support-
ers, and a number of journalists have
been jailed for the crime of “insulting
the President.” Erdoğan frequently sues
journalists, and Bayraktar has done so,
too. He recently celebrated a thirty-
thousand-lira fine levied against Çiğ-
dem Toker, who was investigating a
foundation that Bayraktar helps run.
Bayraktar tweeted, “Journalism: Lying,
fraud, shamelessness.”
Bayraktar’s older brother, Haluk, is
the C.E.O. of Baykar Technologies;
Selçuk is the C.T.O. and the chairman
of the board. (Their father died last year.)
In addition to being used in Ukraine
and Azerbaijan, TB2s have been de-
ployed by the governments of Nigeria,
Ethiopia, Qatar, Libya, Morocco, and
Poland. When I spoke with Bayraktar,
Baykar had just completed a sales call
in East Asia, marketing its forthcom-
ing TB3 drone, which can be launched
from a boat.
Several news sources have reported
that a single TB2 drone can be purchased
for a million dollars, but Bayraktar, while
not giving a precise figure, told me that
it costs more. In any event, single-unit
figures are misleading; TB2s are sold as
a “platform,” along with portable com-
mand stations and communications
equipment. In 2019, Ukraine bought a
fleet of at least six TB2s for a reported
sixty-nine million dollars; a similar fleet
of Reaper drones costs about six times
that. “Tactically, it’s right in the sweet
spot,” Bayraktar said of the TB2. “It’s not
too small, but it’s not too big. And it’s
not too cheap, but it’s not too expensive.”
Once a fleet is purchased, operators
travel to a facility in western Turkey for