Turkey clinches deal to sell 4 warships to Pakistan

Turkey recently logged a critical achievement by winning a bid to supply the Pakistani navy with four warships. The deal will be Turkey's first for corvettes and the "largest single export [deal] in the history of the Turkish defense industry,” Defense Minister Nurettin Canikli announced July 5.

Canikli said Turkey and Pakistan decided two of the corvettes will be built in the Istanbul Shipyard and the other two in Pakistan’s Karachi. Negotiations had been underway for six months.

The four ships will be Ada-class corvettes, which are 99.5 meters (some 326 feet) in length and were designed by the Turkish navy under the MILGEM (National Ship) project to carry out missions such as surface warfare, anti-submarine warfare, air defense, surveillance and reconnaissance, command-control and asymmetric defense warfare missions.

Turkey's defense industry has been selling smaller naval vessels for several years. Patrol boats produced by Yonca-Onuk Shipyards have been in use for years in Georgia, Egypt, Malaysia, Indonesia and Qatar. Dearsan Shipyard also sold 10 Tuzla-class patrol boats to Turkmenistan. But Turkey had not succeeded in selling the more substantive MILGEM-class boats until now. Middle East countries typically have preferred French, Italian and US shipyards.