Turkey’s cooperation with Gulf countries has perceptibly grown since the March 2015 meeting between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud in Riyadh. It hasn’t escaped notice that this cooperation is beginning to slowly encompass security matters.

Reports of military cooperation between Turkey and Qatar are not really new. It wasn’t a secret that Qatari Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, in his December visit to Turkey, sought to find ways and means of boosting security and defense cooperation between Qatar and Turkey. Thani continued these discussions in his March visit to Turkey. 

As a result of these high-level contacts, the Turkey-Qatar Military Cooperation Agreement was passed with unusual speed, first in the Turkish parliament on March 22 and then by Erdogan on March 27. The agreement went into force after its March 28 publication in the official gazette.

The agreement outlines intelligence sharing between Qatar and Turkey as well as military cooperation and the deployment of forces in each other’s territory. There is no longer any legal impediment to the return of the Turkish military to Qatar, which it evacuated Aug. 19, 1915.