Turkey, Egypt Wrap Up ‘Dostluk Denizi-2026’ Naval Drill

Turkish and Egyptian naval forces concluded a six-day joint exercise, “Dostluk Denizi-2026” (“Sea of Friendship-2026”), off Alexandria on November 9, following drills that began November 4. Turkey’s Ministry of National Defence (MSB) announced the exercise at its October 28 weekly press briefing.

The program covered surface warfare, anti-submarine defence, air-defence operations and underwater offensive training, according to the ministry. MSB did not disclose the number or names of participating vessels, describing only that naval elements and personnel from both countries took part.

This is the second edition of the bilateral exercise series, which resumed in 2025 after a 13-year gap in joint Turkish-Egyptian naval drills. The first “Dostluk Denizi” exercise ran September 22-26, 2025, in the Eastern Mediterranean; this year’s edition moved to Egyptian waters off Alexandria.

At the same briefing, MSB linked the drill to the broader Eastern Mediterranean maritime boundary file. The ministry said it welcomed the Libyan House of Representatives’ October 20 ratification of its maritime jurisdiction agreement with Turkey, and reiterated Ankara’s readiness to sign a similar delimitation deal with Egypt — a signal that defence cooperation and boundary diplomacy are advancing in parallel.

The exercise caps a year of accelerating bilateral military contact. In late October, the Turkish frigates TCG Gökçeada and TCG Yıldırım sailed for an international deployment off Somalia; in September 2024 Turkey’s state-owned MKE signed a defence-industry memorandum of understanding with Egypt, and in September 2026 Egypt took delivery of its first US-supplied CH-47F Chinook heavy-lift helicopters. Successive summits between President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi have provided the political cover for the rapprochement.

Analysts read the recurring drills as confidence-building and interoperability exercises between two navies that, since a 2013 political rupture, had had no direct military contact until 2021 restored diplomatic ties, followed by a 2023 upgrade to ambassador level and Erdoğan’s 2024 visit to Cairo. The naval track is now the most visible layer of that normalization.

Egypt’s navy fields French-built Gowind-class corvettes and Mistral-class amphibious assault ships, while Turkey operates its domestically built MİLGEM-family frigates and the carrier-like TCG Anadolu — giving the exercise a genuine interoperability test between platforms of different origin, alongside what the drill described as underwater offensive (combat-diver) training.

The deepening Turkey-Egypt naval track also sits against the backdrop of the Israel-Greece-Cyprus-Egypt axis that has shaped Eastern Mediterranean alignments in recent years; Ankara has pursued a bilateral channel with Cairo partly to avoid being boxed out of regional maritime diplomacy. The Eastern Mediterranean has also seen rising competition over gas exploration rights since the 2019 Turkey-Libya maritime deal reshaped regional claims, a backdrop that gives even routine bilateral drills added diplomatic weight.

MSB had not issued an assessment of the exercise’s outcome at the time of writing, and no date has been announced for a third edition of Dostluk Denizi.

Sources

• Turkish Ministry of National Defence (MSB) — October 28, 2026 weekly press briefing, announcing the “Dostluk Denizi-2026” exercise and the Egypt maritime-boundary file.