Kenya Will Soon Become The Newest African Operator Of Bayraktar TB2 Drones
On 23 August, Turkish drone manufacturer Baykar Technology company announced in a post on its X account that trainees from Kenya completed their Bayraktar TB2 UAV training at the Baykar Flight Training Centre in Keşan and graduated. With this post, it was revealed for the first time that Kenya is the tenth known operator of the famous Bayraktar TB2s in Africa after Libya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Togo, Niger and Nigeria.
During the 16th International Defence Industry Fair (IDEF) last year, Turkey and Kenya signed a defense industry cooperation agreement that covers the direct procurement, development, production, sale to third parties, maintenance, sustainment, and modernization of systems and platforms in the inventory, technology transfer, training, information, and document exchange of all kinds of defense industry products and services required by the security institutions of the parties. Kenya is also thought to have ordered the TB2 within the scope of this cooperation agreement.
The details of the agreement between Baykar Teknoloji and Kenya are currently unknown. However, the visuals shared by the company on its x account provide us with some clues about the terms of this agreement. The photographs show that the number of trainees from Kenya is 40. Since four to five operators are usually needed for the successful operation of each TB2, Kenya is likely to have received 8 to 10 of these unmanned systems. This means that the deal cost at least 40 million US dollars.
It is now known for sure that Kenya will use the Bayraktar TB2 drones in its operations against the Al-Shabaab terrorist organization, just like its northeastern neighbor Somalia. The East African country has also procured Boeing Insitu MQ-27 ScanEagle, Unmanned Aeronautics GhostRay, and AeroVironment RQ-11 Raven drones from the US. Military Africa’s UAV Procurement Dataset claims Kenya procured three Anka-S MALE drones from Turkish Aerospace in 2015. However, no official statement or visuals have been shared on social networks to confirm this claim.