Turkey’s Libya Deal Puts Oil Majors in a Bind
Turkey has finally gotten both sides of a divided Libya to sign the maritime map it has pushed for seven years. Ankara signed the boundary deal with Libya’s Tripoli government in 2019, and the rival parliament in the east rejected it in 2020. On October 20, that same parliament, the Haftar-aligned House of Representatives in Benghazi, ratified the deal unanimously. Both of Libya’s governments now recognize a boundary that runs between Crete and Cyprus, leaving Greek islands in the area with no sea beyond their territorial waters. Ankara is pursuing the same kind of deal with Damascus.
The vote passed after the camp of Saddam Haftar, son of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, pushed out the speaker who had blocked it for years. Aguila Saleh, close to Cairo and speaker of the eastern parliament for 12 years, had refused to bring the memorandum to ratification. On October 6, lawmakers voted him out and elected Al-Salhin Abdelnabi al-Obeidi, who chaired the parliament’s Libyan-Turkish friendship committee.
Ankara had laid the groundwork in July, when it signed an agreement with Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) covering military facilities, surveillance systems and training for eastern officers. Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin was in Tripoli the day the vote passed, and he thanked Dbeibah, the new speaker, and Saddam Haftar for securing it.
Saddam Haftar wants to be president of a united Libya, east and west. Washington’s plan to merge Libya’s two governments would reportedly keep Abdulhamid Dbeibah as prime minister in Tripoli and put Saddam at the head of the Presidential Council. According to Jalel Harchaoui, Abu Dhabi backs the plan, but Ankara hasn’t committed, and its troops in western Libya give it the means to kill the deal. Harchaoui says Turkish officials told Saddam this directly, and that Saddam had the deal ratified to win Turkish support for the plan.
Turkey holds the veto here, and Ankara made Saddam pay up front. Any unified Libyan government will inherit the maritime deal, and Turkey has publicly committed to nothing in return.
Tarek Megerisi of the European Council on Foreign Relations reads the vote the same way as Harchaoui: Saddam “is using Parliament to try to curry favor with the Turks.” Claudia Gazzini of Crisis Group says Turkish backing for a Saddam presidency is not certain. Oussama Assed, who runs the Libya Center for Strategic and Future Studies in Tripoli, says Ankara could put its full weight behind the U.S. plan.
By ratifying the memorandum, both of Libya’s rival authorities have endorsed Turkey’s long-standing claim that Greek islands in the area generate no continental shelf or exclusive economic zone beyond their territorial waters. SETA, a think tank close to the Turkish government, says that endorsement strengthens Turkey’s position in any future delimitation of the Aegean with Greece. Turkish analyst Ahmet Erdi Öztürk writes that Ankara is “making it increasingly difficult and costly to construct an Eastern Mediterranean order that excludes Türkiye.”
Ankara wants the same maritime deal with Damascus that it now has with both of Libya’s rival governments. Cyprus has signed maritime boundaries with Egypt in 2003, Israel in 2010 and Lebanon in November 2025, but not with Syria. Turkey rejected all three agreements because they ignored Turkish Cypriot claims. Since Ahmed al-Sharaa took power in Damascus, Greek Cypriot officials have feared that Ankara will draw a boundary with Syria that cuts Nicosia out, the Cyprus Mail reports. In August, Turkey announced it is ready to survey and drill off the Syrian coast.
On October 26, Greek Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis read a joint statement in New York on behalf of Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, the UAE, Bahrain and the EU, and said the Benghazi vote “raises serious concerns for regional security and stability.” The same day in Cairo, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said maritime arrangements incompatible with the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea should not be recognised. Turkey is not a party to the convention. Erdogan said the objections have “no legitimate basis.”
Egypt has now lost its grip on eastern Libya. Cairo backed Khalifa Haftar’s 2019 war on Tripoli, and Aguila Saleh was its man in the speaker’s chair in Benghazi. Saddam’s camp removed Saleh, and the parliament ratified a deal that Egypt’s Foreign Ministry calls “a clear infringement upon Egypt’s sovereign rights within its exclusive economic zone and continental shelf.”
Harchaoui says the vote shows Saddam “feels free to completely ignore Cairo.” Relations had already cooled over Haftar’s alleged role in supplying Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary fighting the Egyptian-backed Sudanese army.
Cairo is fighting back through lawyers and Athens. Foreign Ministry spokesman Nader Zaki says Egypt is assembling a “comprehensive legal dossier.” On October 26, the Egyptian and Greek foreign ministers agreed to advance talks on extending their 2020 maritime boundary eastward toward Cyprus. Ankara has also offered to discuss the issue.
A Turkish military presence in eastern Libya would worry Cairo more than the maritime map, says Wolfgang Pusztai, a former Austrian defence attaché in Athens.
Turkey was an outsider, and now it’s a gatekeeper in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it got there by winning over the Libyan faction its rivals once armed against it. For Turkish offshore oil exploration, the deal doesn’t mean much yet. Oil companies are not going to flock to waters that Greece, Egypt and the EU say belong to someone else. “I don’t expect any international oil companies to actively explore or invest in contested waters,” Claudia Gazzini of Crisis Group told Agenzia Nova.
SETA says the Turkish-Libyan exploration areas do not yet cover waters disputed with Greece. TPAO holds 40% of Block O7, a deepwater block about 140 kilometres northwest of Benghazi, with Repsol as operator. Chevron holds exploration leases for four Greek blocks south of Crete that Turkey’s Defense Ministry concedes do “not directly affect our continental shelf.”
What Ankara has gained is a legal basis to contest any project that crosses the line. SETA marks Greek exploration east of 26° longitude as the point that could draw Turkish naval deployments, and the risk of a naval incident is high.
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