THE NEWYORKER, MAY 16, 2022 25
several months of training. “You don’t
just buy it,” Mark Cancian, a military-
procurement specialist at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, told
me. “You have married the supplier, be-
cause you need a constant stream of spare
parts and repair expertise.” Turkey has
become adept at leveraging this relation-
ship. It struck a defense deal with Nige-
ria, which included training the coun-
try’s pilots on TB2s, in exchange for
access to minerals and liquefied natural
gas. In Ethiopia, TB2s were delivered
after the government seized a number
of Gülenist schools. Unlike dealing with
the U.S., obtaining weapons from Tur-
key doesn’t involve human-rights over-
sight. “There are really no restrictions
on use,” Cancian said.
Buyers are also supported by Baykar’s
programmers. The TB2, which Bayrak-
tar compares to his smartphone, has
more than forty onboard computers,
and the company sends out software
updates several times a month to adapt
to adversarial tactics. “You’ve seen the
articles, probably, asking how World
War One-performance aircraft can com-
pete against some of the most advanced
air defenses in the world,” Bayraktar
said. “The trick there is to continuously
upgrade them.”
Much of the drones’ battlefield ex-
perience has come against Russian
equipment. Russia and Turkey have a
complicated relationship: Russia is a
key trading partner for Turkey, Turkey
is a popular holiday destination for Rus-
sian tourists, and Russia is overseeing
the construction of Turkey’s first nu-
clear power plant, which, when com-
pleted, will supply a tenth of the coun-
try’s electricity. In 2017, Turkey angered
its allies in NATO when it bought a Rus-
sian missile system, triggering U.S. sanc-
tions. Still, both Turkey and Russia are
seeking to restore their standings as
world powers, and even before the war
in Ukraine they were often in conflict.
In the Libyan civil war, Turkey and
Russia backed opposing factions,
and the TB2 faced off against Russia’s
Pantsir-S1, an anti-aircraft system that
shoots missiles at planes and can be
mounted on a vehicle. At least nine Pan-
tsirs were destroyed; so were at least
twelve drones.
Another theatre opened in the
Caucasus in 2020, when Azerbaijan at-
tacked the ethnic-Armenian enclave
of Nagorno-Karabakh. Last month, I
met Robert Avetisyan, the Armenian
representative to the United States from
Nagorno-Karabakh, at a café in Glen-
dale, California. Avetisyan told me,
“During the first several days, Azerbai-
jan was not successful, in anything, until
the Turkish generals took the joysticks.”
Armenia has a security alliance with
Russia, which provides most of its mil-
itary equipment, some dating to the So-
viet era. For six weeks, TB2 drones bom-
barded that equipment relentlessly; one
independent analysis tallied more than
five hundred targets destroyed, includ-
ing tanks, artillery, and missile-defense
systems. “We lost the air war,” Aveti-
syan said. TB2s also targeted Armenian
troops, and footage of these strikes was
shared by the Azerbaijani Ministry of
Defense. A six-minute compilation of
the videos, posted to YouTube midway
through the war, shows dozens of vari-
ations on the same scene: Armenian
soldiers, cowering in trenches or hud-
dled around transport trucks, alerted totheir impending death by the hiss of an
incoming bomb before a blast sends
their bodies hurtling through the air.
Avetisyan sent me a translated state-
ment from Arthur Saryan, a twenty-
seven-year-old veteran of the war. Saryan
had been standing with a small deploy-
ment of soldiers when his unit was hit
by a bomb at around two in the morn-
ing. “We had no idea that we were the
target,” Saryan said. “We heard it only
two or three seconds before it hit us.”
The bomb created a fireball. “Everyone
was burnt. All the bodies were burnt
and the cars immediately caught fire.”
Six soldiers were killed, and seven were
wounded. “It was a horrible scene,”
Saryan said.
Bayraktar’s TB2 drones fly slowly,
and their propellers should be easy to
locate. But in Nagorno-Karabakh the
drones seemed to evade enemy recon-
naissance, either through radar jam-
ming or through technical incompe-
tence. “A striking feature of the video
clips was the utter helplessness of the
doomed systems,” the Israeli missileAROUND THE TABLE:
STORIES OF THE FOODS WE LOVE
June 4–September 11