THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022 23
political Islamist movement that, the
analyst Svante Cornell has written,
wishes “to build a powerful, industrial-
ized Turkey that serves as the natural
leader of the Muslim world.” Turkey’s
arms industry has grown tenfold in the
past twenty years, and most of the coun-
try’s military equipment is now manu-
factured locally. “The Bayraktars, and
particularly the TB2s, have turned into
the flagship of the Turkish defense in-
dustry,” Alper Coşkun, a former Turk-
ish diplomat, told me.
Turkey borders Iran, Iraq, Syria, Ar-
menia, Georgia, and the European
Union, and it faces Russia across the
Black Sea. Donelli told me that the
shifting allegiances and complex poli-
tics of the region reminded him of Eu-
rope in the days before the First World
War. “In Bayraktar, they have a kind of
genius who can change the historical
path of Turkey,” Donelli said.
Erdoğan has held power since 2003.
During that time, he has seized control
of the courts and the press, amended the
Turkish constitution, and advocated for
a return to traditional roles for women.
Journalists critical of the Erdoğan re-
gime have been beaten with baseball bats
and iron rods, and opposition activists
have been sentenced to decades in prison.
But Turkey’s economy is stagnating, and
its inflation rate rose to seventy per cent
during the past twelve months. In 2019,
Erdoğan’s party lost the mayoralty of Is-
tanbul, which it had held since the nine-
teen-nineties. The TB2 is a spectacular
propaganda machine, and Erdoğan has
used its success to promote his vision for
Turkish society. As Bayraktar told me,
“In this day and age, the biggest change
in our lives is driven by technology—
and who drives the changes? The ones
who create technology.”
B
ayraktar and his family live on
Baykar’s grounds, which he com-
pared to a university campus, with sports
facilities and a park that he called “big-
ger than Google’s.” While we spoke, his
mother, Canan; Sümeyye; and the cou-
ple’s four-year-old daughter, also named
Canan, were eating dinner in an adja-
cent room. Bayraktar told me that he
was one of the oldest engineers at Baykar,
and that many of the firm’s program-
mers are women. “My software side
comes from my mother,” he said.
Bayraktar was born in Istanbul in
1979, the middle of three brothers. His
father, Özdemir, the son of a fisherman,
graduated from Istanbul Technical Uni-
versity and founded an auto-parts com-
pany; Canan, his mother, was an econ-
omist and a computer programmer in
the punch-card era. The brothers were
introduced to machine tools at an early
age. “We were working, all throughout
our childhood, in the factory,” Bayrak-
tar told me. By the time he was a teen-
ager, he was a competent tool-and-die-
maker. Özdemir was also an amateur
pilot, and as a boy Selçuk would survey
Turkey’s splendid geography from the
window of his father’s plane. “A small
aircraft, it’s like sailing in there,” he told
me. “You feel like a bird.” Bayraktar was
soon building radio-controlled airplanes
from kits, sometimes modifying them
with his own designs. “I was hiding my
model aircraft under my bed, and work-
ing on it secretly,” he said. “I should have
been studying for my exams.”
Bayraktar’s radio-controlled aircraft
prototypes impressed academic research-
ers. In 2002, after graduating from Istan-
bul Technical, he was recruited to the
University of Pennsylvania. For his mas-
ter’s degree, he flew two drones in for-
mation at the Fort Benning Army base,
in Georgia. Bayraktar then began a sec-
ond master’s, at M.I.T., where he pur-
sued the difficult and off beat goal of try-
ing to land a radio-controlled helicopter
on a wall. His adviser, Eric Feron, remem-
bered Bayraktar as a dedicated craftsman
and an observant Muslim, with a pas-
sion for youth education. He recalled
Bayraktar’s enthusiasm when he tutored
Feron’s daughter in her mathematics
homework, and the time he demonstrated
his helicopter to a troop of Girl Scouts.
“He was a good pilot,” Feron said. “But
I did not understand all that he was after
until I got invited to his wedding.”
While Bayraktar was a student, the
United States was using Predator drones
to strike targets in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bayraktar disapproved of U.S. foreign
policy—“I was obsessed with Noam
Chomsky,” he told me—and engaged
in social activism with other graduate
students, most of them foreigners. But
he was drawn to the autonomous vehi-
cles. While still enrolled at M.I.T., he
began building small prototype drones
at the family’s factory in Istanbul.
Özdemir set out to secure govern-
ment support for Selçuk’s drones. Öz-
demir was friendly with Necmettin Er-
bakan, an Islamic nationalist and a
vitriolic critic of Western culture. Tur-
key had been a secular republic since
the nineteen-twenties, but Erbakan, a
professor of mechanical engineering,
believed that by investing in industry
and grooming technological talent the
country could become a prosperous Is-
lamic nation. In 1996, Erbakan had been
elected Turkey’s Prime Minister, but he
resigned from the post under pressure
from the armed forces, and was banned
from politics for threatening to violate
Turkey’s constitutional separation of re-
ligion and the state. (Erbakan, who had
developed connections with the Mus-
lim Brotherhood and Hamas, blamed
his ouster on “Zionists.”)
Bayraktar briefed Erbakan on his
work, and by the mid-two-thousands
Bayraktar was spending his school breaks
embedded with the Turkish military.
The Bayraktar family also had ties to
Erbakan’s protégé, Erdoğan, who was
elected Prime Minister in 2002. Bayrak-
tar’s father had been an adviser to Er-
doğan when he was a local politician in
Istanbul, and Bayraktar recalled Erdoğan
visiting the family house.
Bayraktar’s first drone, the hand-
launched Mini U.A.V., weighed about
twenty pounds. In early tests, it flew about
ten feet, but Bayraktar refined the de-
sign, and soon the Mini could stay aloft
for more than an hour. Bayraktar tested
it in the snowy mountains of southeast-
ern Anatolia, surveilling the armed reb-
els of the P.K.K., a Kurdish separatist
movement. Feron recalled his astonish-
ment when he contacted Bayraktar in
the mountains. “He has no hesitation to
go to the front lines, to really the worst
conditions that the Turkish military can
go into, and basically be with them, and
live with them, and learn directly from
the user,” he said. Bayraktar told me he
prefers to field-test a drone in an active
combat theatre. “It needs to be battle-
hardened and robust,” he said. “If this
doesn’t work at ten-thousand-feet ele-
vation, at minus-thirty-degrees tempera-
ture, then this is just another item that
you have to carry in your backpack.”
Bayraktar began developing a larger
drone. In 2014, he débuted a prototype
of the TB2, a propeller-driven fixed-wing
