In the early 2000s when I started studying Yemen, no one in Turkey seemed to care about the country. Yet by 2010-11, Yemen was a hot topic. Neo-Ottomans loved Yemen, they sang songs about Yemen, they discovered the honey from Yemen, they established schools in Yemen.

One of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s senior advisers, Yasin Aktay, even found Kurdish Yemenis — who have oddly gone missing since his discovery — who were pro-Justice and Development Party (AKP). Hurriyet daily columnist Ertugrul Ozkok, along with others, joined in the cultural tours of Yemen guided by the Turkish ambassador at the time, investigated markets for the qat shrub and even wondered what kind of lingerie Yemeni women were wearing.

In 2012, then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu opened offices for the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency in Sanaa, Yemen. Turkish universities hosted conferences about the Yemeni uprising with several Yemeni activists as speakers, and they celebrated the centurieslong "special" friendship between Yemen and Turkey. Indeed, Turks loved Yemen so much, they allegedly even sent weapons hidden in biscuit boxes. That is what the current Turkish government — the AKP, in power since 2002 — is known for in Yemen: the weapons.

But today, Erdogan repeats Islamic State rhetoric about refusing Sykes-Picot borders and questions the legitimacy of the Lausanne Treaty of 1923, which at the time was seen as the successful ending of the Turkish War of Independence. Neo-Ottoman maps are in circulation showing several cities in northern Syria and Iraq as being within Turkey’s National Pact borders. The Turkish president and the Turkish press are silent on Yemen.