While speaking to Israel’s 103 FM Radio on June 17, Israeli Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli warned that the formation of a Turkey-Qatar-Pakistan partnership is a growing strategic concern for Israel.
“What we are witnessing before our eyes is the rise of a new axis,” Chikli said. He described this alliance as “a radical Sunni axis of evil, more dangerous than anything we have seen before.”
Qatar and Turkey are the main state financial sponsors of the Muslim Brotherhood, which operates globally. Pakistan is one of the world’s leading centers of Islamic terrorism. Together, this axis is a strategic concern for Israel, wider regional stability and even world peace.
The Muslim Brotherhood was established in Egypt and has been militant from its very beginning in 1928. Its founder, Hassan al-Banna, said “jihad is an obligation from Allah on every Muslim and cannot be ignored nor [sic] evaded.”
In a book titled The Way of Jihad, he wrote:
Al-Banna also taught that “it is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated.” Thus, the mission of Islam, according to the Muslim Brotherhood, is “to impose its law on nations and extend its power across the entire planet.”
The decades that followed witnessed Muslim Brotherhood members committing numerous acts of terrorism, such as the 1948 assassination of Egypt’s Prime Minister, Mahmoud Fahmy al-Nuqrashy.
When the Brotherhood took control of Egypt from 2012 to 2013, then-President Mohamed Morsi granted himself near absolute power. His administration used state institutions to promote Islamic radicalism. The Brotherhood has incited and committed widespread violence against Coptic Christians in Egypt. For instance, following the April 2013 removal of Morsi, Muslim Brotherhood supporters torched and looted at least 42 churches, as well as dozens of other Christian religious institutions across the country, leaving at least four people dead.
Its Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badie, said that the organization’s goal is to establish a new Islamic caliphate that will impose sharia law, which is the totalitarian Islamic legal code.
The Morsi Muslim Brotherhood government is no more, yet the Brotherhood and its affiliates continue advancing their agenda across the world. It now comprises national movements in more than 70 Muslim and non-Muslim countries.
Qatar functions as both a major political hub and financial patron for the Muslim Brotherhood. Postdoctoral researcher Claudia De Martino notes that,
Qatar also hosts the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), which was headed for years by al-Qaradawi. According to its website, the IUMS is active in some 90 countries around the world. The Union was founded in 2004 in Dublin, Ireland (and later relocated and headquartered in Doha, Qatar).
Meanwhile, under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey is both a major supporter of the Brotherhood and a safe haven for Hamas.
Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch and is a U.S.-designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs issued a detailed report in 2021 documenting how Turkey contributes to Hamas’s military empowerment.
According to the report, Hamas’s Istanbul headquarters has directed hundreds of terror attacks against Israelis and laundered millions of dollars. Senior officials (most former inmates in Israel for terrorism who were released in a prisoner exchange) are operating from Turkey against Israel. Some have even been granted Turkish citizenship. Besides hosting Hamas offices and senior officials who planned terror attacks, Turkey has also become a safe haven for Hamas’s financial affairs, including funding terror organizations in the West Bank.
It doesn’t stop there. Turkey reached an agreement with Sudan under President Omar al-Bashir in December 2017 to reconstruct and manage the Ottoman-era port city of Suakin. The Bashir regime’s close ties with the Brotherhood were instrumental in Erdoğan’s plans to advance its affiliates in the Horn of Africa.
Bashir’s authoritarian rule of Sudan began in 1989. Brutal conflict and the targeting of minority ethnic groups have characterized his 30-year rule. The crimes committed during his regime were so serious that the International Criminal Court indicted him for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. He was the first-ever sitting head-of-state to receive an arrest warrant from the ICC. He continues to evade the court.
Erdoğan has cultivated close ties with Bashir and consistently defended the Sudanese president’s track record, despite Bashir’s widespread human-rights violations. Erdogan hosted Bashir in Turkey on several occasions despite international criticism for Bashir’s mass killings and crimes against humanity.
The Turkish intelligence agency (MIT) also secretly transported an undisclosed amount of cash on privately leased planes to Sudan to provide financial support to then-President Bashir.
The same goes for Somalia. Turkey set up its biggest overseas military base, Camp TURKSOM, in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in 2017. Ankara also delivers a large quantity of weapons to the country and has secured lucrative business deals, including control over fisheries, ports and airports, infrastructure projects and maritime defense pacts, gradually establishing itself as Mogadishu’s dominant external partner in the Horn of Africa.
Meanwhile, Turkey keeps pushing the expansionist “Blue Homeland” doctrine in the Mediterranean Sea and claims Greece’s territorial waters. Through it, Turkey refuses to recognize Greece’s right to the continental shelf of the Greek islands in the Mediterranean and Greece’s right to territorial waters beyond six nautical miles. Erdoğan has repeatedly threatened Greece with an invasion, by saying Turkey “can come suddenly one night,” and that its neighbor should “mind its place” and “remember the history.”
In Libya, Turkey’s 2020 military intervention supported the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA) against Khalifa Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) to enforce the November 2019 maritime demarcation deal. This agreement seeks to expand Turkey’s continental shelf claims in the Eastern Mediterranean, assigning exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and offshore gas fields to Turkey at the expense of other Mediterranean states such as Greece, Cyprus and Egypt.
More recently, Turkey helped Al-Qaeda-affiliated forces conquer Syria. Turkey assisted the U.N.-designated terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in capturing Damascus in December 2024 through its long-term territorial occupation of northern Syria, tactical intelligence, advanced equipment, and complementary military maneuvers by Turkish-backed proxy forces such as the Syrian National Army (SNA).
Meanwhile, Pakistan remains one of the world’s leading centers of terrorism. Osama bin Laden lived in a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, before U.S. Navy SEALs killed him on May 2, 2011. The city is a major military garrison area housing thousands of Pakistani troops and multiple army units.
For decades, Pakistan has remained a safe haven for terrorists, given that its military establishment uses some terror groups for its own political purposes.
Pakistan historically leverages U.N.-designated terrorist outfits, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and its active splinter groups like the Resistance Front (TRF), to execute terrorist operations. Attacks engineered from across the border, such as the Pahalgam massacre in Jammu and Kashmir, deliberately target civilians based on religion.
In a 2017 report titled “Pakistan Army and Terrorism: An Unholy Alliance,” the European Foundation for South Asian Studies (EFSAS) noted:
This complicity produces horrific results for the country to the point that Pakistan ranks first on the 2026 Global Terrorism Index. According to the Index, Pakistan is the country most impacted by terrorism this year, the first time it has been ranked at No. 1 on the Index. It has been ranked among the 10 countries most impacted by terrorism every year since the inception of the Index.
Meanwhile, some former Pakistani diplomats and military strategists openly advocate for using nuclear capabilities to target India during geopolitical standoffs. Pakistan’s former high commissioner to India, Abdul Basit, for instance, said that striking Indian cities like New Delhi and Mumbai should be Islamabad’s “default move” if the country comes under attack from the United States. Basit had served as Pakistan’s top diplomat in New Delhi from 2014 to 2017.
The governments of Qatar, Turkey and Pakistan—through the ideologies they amplify and their actions that enable Islamic terrorism on a global scale—threaten the safety of all freedom-loving nations and individuals. By promoting sharia and strengthening the Muslim Brotherhood, they target human dignity, liberties, modern democracies and national sovereignties. This axis is a major threat to international security given that they are the main state sponsors of Islamic jihad.
