Türkiye, Egypt to Hold Sea of Friendship-2026 Naval Drill as Ada-Class Corvette Returns to Alexandria
Türkiye and Egypt will run a joint naval exercise, Sea of Friendship-2026, in Alexandria from November 4 to 9, the Turkish Ministry of National Defence announced this week. The drill is the latest step in a naval relationship both countries have rebuilt from almost nothing in just over a year, and it puts a Turkish-built warship back in an Egyptian port for the first time since the exercise series resumed last September.
Rear Admiral Zeki Aktürk, the ministry’s press and public relations adviser, announced the dates at its weekly briefing in Ankara. He said the exercise will cover surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare, air defence and underwater offensive training, the last led by Turkish naval special forces (SAT) teams working alongside their Egyptian counterparts. Personnel and vessels from both navies will take part; neither side has published a full order of battle.
A Fast Restart After a 13-Year Pause
The exercise series is not new, but its recent history is short. Türkiye and Egypt froze most military contact after the 2013 removal of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government, and the two navies did not train together again until September 2025, when the first “Sea of Friendship” (Bahr El Sadaka) drill ran in the Eastern Mediterranean. This year’s edition is the second since that restart, and it follows a July 2026 letter of intent between the two defence ministries that both sides have described as a step toward deeper cooperation rather than a finished agreement.
For Ankara, the drill fits a pattern it has used elsewhere: naval exercises and ship visits as the entry point for a defence relationship that can later extend to equipment sales or joint production, as it has with Qatar, Pakistan and, more recently, Syria, where a Turkish Navy-ASFAT delegation agreed a naval roadmap with Damascus last month. Egypt is a tougher sell. Its navy already operates a mixed fleet of French, German, Chinese, Russian and locally built Gowind-class vessels, and it has shown no public interest in Turkish shipbuilding exports. The immediate value of Sea of Friendship-2026 is closer coordination and confidence-building than a path to a contract.
An Ada-Class Corvette, Built at Home
Local reporting on the announcement names TCG Burgazada, the Turkish Navy’s third Ada-class corvette, as the ship making the port call to Alexandria ahead of the exercise; Türkiye’s defence ministry has not confirmed the vessel by name. Burgazada (F-513) was built at Istanbul Naval Shipyard under the MİLGEM programme, the effort that gave Türkiye its first domestically designed and built surface combatants. It carries Harpoon anti-ship missiles, an OTO Melara 76mm gun, a TÜBİTAK-developed hull-mounted sonar and an ASELSAN-made Hızır torpedo countermeasure suite, and it is among the Ada-class ships slated to receive HAVELSAN’s ADVENT combat management system in a later upgrade.
The Ada-class design is the one genuine surface-combatant export success Türkiye has to show so far: modified versions serve in the Pakistan Navy as the Babur class and in the Ukrainian Navy, with a stretched İstif-class frigate derivative now also selling abroad. A Turkish warship sailing into an Egyptian harbour is a lower-key appearance than a defence-fair booth, but for a shipbuilding industry trying to normalise its presence in new markets, routine exercises like this one do some of the same work.
The Backdrop: A Maritime Dispute Still Unresolved
The exercise is being announced against an unrelated but awkward backdrop. Libya’s eastern-based parliament ratified, on October 20, the 2019 maritime boundary memorandum that Türkiye signed with the then Tripoli-based Government of National Accord — an agreement Greece, Cyprus, the EU and Israel have long rejected as ignoring Greek islands’ maritime rights. Türkiye’s defence ministry has separately said it is open to signing a similar boundary agreement with Egypt, one it argues would give Cairo a larger maritime area than a Greek-Egyptian deal would. Egypt has not responded publicly to that specific proposal, and nothing ties it formally to Sea of Friendship-2026. The exercise and the boundary question are being discussed in the same week, not the same negotiation — a distinction worth keeping in mind given the contested history on all sides of this file.
Despite the wider regional friction, military-to-military contacts between Ankara and its neighbours are continuing on a separate track: the head of the Hellenic Tactical Air Force is due to visit Turkish Air Force Command from November 3 to 5 under existing confidence-building arrangements, running in parallel with the Egypt exercise rather than in response to it.
Sources
Reporting is based on the Turkish Ministry of National Defence’s weekly briefing as relayed by AzerNews and ProtoThema English; background on the Ada-class programme and its export history draws on Turkish Naval Forces and shipyard disclosures reported previously by this outlet.
