| Headquarters: | Trabzon, Second Empire of Trabzon |
| Minister of Defence: | General Cengiz Akyüz |
| Branches: | Trabzon Army, Trabzon Air and Air Defense Corps |
| Active personnel: | 63,500 (Army), 500 (A/AD) |
| Reserve personnel: | 140,000 reserves, militia |
| Deployed: | 3,000 (New Erzurum) |
| Annual budget: | unknown |
| Founded in: | March 4, 1987 |
| Ages qualified for service: | 18-65 |
| Time of service: | 18 months |
| Domestic suppliers: | Scimitar International |
| Supplying countries: | Armenia, Federation of Georgia |
The Armed Forces of Trabzon are the military forces of the Second Empire of Trabzon. The armed forces were established in Trabzon by decree of its military leader and self-styled emperor, Altan Sahin, in 1987. The armed forces were reformed around remnants of Turkey's Third Army, namely its 11th Corps, which mutinied under a cabal of junior officers led by Sahin in 1983. The Armed Forces of Trabzon have taken possession of all Turkish military bases and equipment left in Trabzonian territory after Doomsday.
History[]
Early years[]
Prior to Doomsday, Turkey had a number of important military installations in Trabzon, including an airfield which frequently hosted NATO surveillance and combat aircraft, a former NATO radar station, and the headquarters of its Third Army's 11th Corps. The Third Army was largely rendered defunct as a result of Doomsday, as its senior command staff and entire 9th Corps had been eliminated during a retaliatory Soviet nuclear strike. The only formation of the Third Army to survive with most of its personnel and equipment intact was the 11th Corps, as Trabzon had been relatively unaffected by the nuclear exchange. Fearing a conventional Soviet ground invasion of eastern Turkey would follow, the Third Army headquarters in Erzincan mobilized the 11th Corps, bolstered it with every available Turkish army reservist in Trabzon province, and deployed it along the northeastern border. The 11th Corps fought a series of inconsequential border engagements with the Soviet 31st Army Corps but soon suffered serious logistical problems due to the disruption in communications and supply lines as a result of Doomsday. The chaos of Doomsday also resulted in poor morale and mass desertions as conscripts from other regions, encouraged by confusion at the command level and concerned for their families, returned home.
Sahin's troops round up suspected looters, November 1983.
In October 1983, a cabal of battalion and brigade commanders, led by Brigadier General Altan Sahin, mutinied and cut off contact with the Third Army headquarters, possibly as a result of revised orders redeploying the 11th Corps to an irradiated zone further south. An informal truce was brokered with the Soviets on the border, and the remnants of the 11th Corps abandoned their posts, returning to the city of Trabzon in early November. Trabzon had plunged into disorder as a result of Turkey's internal refugee crisis, forcing the returning soldiers to restore order. Dozens of civilians and deserters were rounded up and shot as suspected looters, a dusk to dawn curfew was imposed, and Sahin proclaimed the entire city (later the rest of the province) under martial law.
There were no major or rapid changes in the strength of the old 11th Corps between late 1983 and late 1986. It was assumed that the largest segment of the 11th Corps to survive the post-Doomsday border campaign had simply been reorganized, along with thousands of new conscripts, into the Trabzon Army when the latter was formed by decree in 1987, the same year Sahin formally declared Trabzonian independence. Upon its seizure of Trabzon, the 11th Corps had also taken charge of the Turkish Air Force facilities and aircraft at Trabzon Air Base. An uneventful backwater in peacetime, the airport's runway and adjacent base facilities had been appropriated for strike missions during Doomsday carried out against targets in Georgia, especially the Soviet Air Forces' strategic installation at Ponti. It was also made available as an emergency airstrip for crippled NATO tactical aircraft returning from raids into Soviet airspace. After the disintegration of the Turkish Air Force, Sahin's troops inherited vast quantities of fuel, refueling equipment, air search radars, air defense weaponry, and a motley collection of transport and combat aircraft. These became part of the Trabzon Air and Air Defense Corps. Together with the Trabzon Army, the Air and Air Defense Corps became part of the new Armed Forces of Trabzon.
Kemalist civilians and troops jostle in Atatürk Alanı (now Sahin Alanı) during the 1988 coup.
In 1988, tension in the armed forces reached a head with an attempted coup d'état launched by republican veterans of the 11th Corps. Sahin's declaration of a monarchy, his rescinding of promises to lift martial law and encourage a return to civil government, and his attempts to formally abolish the old Turkish republic led to severe disillusionment among many of the original mutineers. A large number of the professional career soldiers in the pre-Doomsday Turkish Army were avowed disciples of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and his republican philosophies (known widely as Kemalism) were considered the cornerstone of the military. Among them was Bahri Yalçın, a former colonel in the 11th Corps who sat on Sahin's administrative council. Yalçın called for a coup that May aimed at deposing Sahin, denouncing the self-styled emperor for his betrayal of Kemalism, Atatürk's legacy, and the Turkish nation. He was joined by hundreds of sympathetic civilians and enlisted troops. However, the remaining senior military staff were driven more by self-preservation and individual loyalty to Sahin rather than ideology; many even considered Kemalist attitudes irrelevant since the Turkish republic had clearly ceased to exist. Trabzon's conservative population, never a bulwark of Atatürk's secularist ideology, ignored Yalçın's calls for a general uprising. Reflecting these attitudes, the local conscripts were largely indifferent. Within forty-eight hours, the Kemalist faction had been crushed by loyalist veterans. The fledgling army was mobilized in force, and pursued Yalçın to the neighboring city of Ordu, where he was executed. Undisciplined Trabzonian conscripts sacked the city, which Sahin permitted on the grounds that its residents had to be punished for granting refuge to his opponent.
Wars with New Erzurum and Greater Patnos[]
Following the 1988 attempted coup d'état, many of the original 11th Corps veterans were purged, demobilized, or assigned to a startling menagerie of newly formed battalions. The size of the armed forces had also increased from a manpower level of around 5,000 to almost 20,000, owing partly to increased conscription in the rural areas and a new influx of volunteers. To further consolidate his rule and in an attempt to expand his influence southwards, Sahin ordered the armed forces to invade New Erzurum in 1990, under the pretext of restoring order and some semblance of administrative governance to that region. After the collapse of the Turkish government, the region around Eruzurum had organized itself into a patchwork of autonomous communities, or vilayets. The arrival of Trabzonian troops forced the vilayets to unite in an attempt to retain their independence, resulting in a brutal, seven year guerrilla campaign. The last major engagements were fought in late 1997, resulting in Sahin abandoning his plans to control the southern part of that region and focus on exerting control over a small slice of territory contiguous to the old Trabzonian provincial boundaries, aside from the few outlying bases that could be resupplied easily by road. Low-level conflict continued in New Erzurum for years afterwards with border skirmishes and raids.
Trabzonian artillery prepares to fire on guerrilla positions in New Erzurum, early 1990s.
The war in New Erzurum served several auxiliary tasks. Firstly, it kept politically unreliable and problematic army units occupied; if Sahin doubted the loyalty of an individual or even an entire unit, he could simply redeploy them south with vague objectives of hunting guerrillas. Secondly, it served to unite the people of Trabzon (including the military establishment) against an external opponent, hopefully reducing discontent at home. The Trabzonian populace was fed a constant stream of propaganda from the country's sole radio broadcaster announcing that the army was constantly winning the war against "warlords" and "anarchy", or some combination of the two, restoring order to an area that was already associated internationally with lawlessness: the Eastern Turkish Wasteland. With the war effectively over in 1997, Sahin was faced with the unpalatable prospect of having no way to justify Trabzon's crippling defense budget, which consumed a majority of his proto-state's weak finances and was only stabilized by strict price and export controls. He also had to deal with problematic units returning home, and a surplus in military manpower which could not be demobilized for fears that idle ex-soldiers would contribute to crime or internal unrest. Consequently, Trabzon went to war again in 1999, this time against the neighboring Greater Patnos.
Unlike the campaign in New Erzurum, which was effectively a counter-insurgency effort against lightly armed guerrillas, the war with Greater Patnos was fought on a massive, conventional scale and involved all the paraphernalia of modern warfare, including the use of armor, heavy artillery, and aircraft. Like Trabzon, Greater Patnos was a post-Doomsday state created by remnants of the old Turkish Army, but there the similarities ended: it was still led by an avowedly Kemalist military leadership, which found Sahin's open disdain for pre-Doomsday Turkish republicanism abhorrent. Greater Patnos had also inherited one of the most powerful force groupings in the Eastern Turkish Wasteland. In the ensuing conflict, the Armed Forces of Trabzon suffered defeat and over 2,000 casualties, as well as the depletion of almost all its reserves of fuel and ammunition. Three-quarters of its vehicles, including tanks, had been lost and by the war ended, the remaining airworthy aircraft had been deadlined due to maintenance problems and lack of fuel, or shot down.
As a result of their catastrophic combat losses, Trabzon's armored and mechanized forces declined in importance. Whereas the large tank force had previously been grouped in armored battalions essentially inherited intact from the pre-Doomsday Turkish armored corps, the surviving tanks were integrated with all other light armored vehicles and truck-mounted motorized infantry to form the army's first-line brigades. Before losing much of its transport to capture, destruction, and poor maintenance during the war, most infantry battalions possessed an adequate fleet of trucks and armored personnel carriers. They also had integral heavy weapons. After the war, the surviving infantry battalions were equipped with little more than rifles. Shortages of pilots and inoperative aircraft also severely affected the ability of the air corps to continue operations, and by 2001 it existed only on paper.
Trabzonian T-55 tanks either supplied by Georgia or Armenia, or battlefield salvage restored with assistance from Trabzon's ex-Soviet allies.
Adjusting to these difficult new realities, Sahin ordered the army reorganized around light infantry rather than mechanized forces while seeking increased foreign military assistance to replace its stocks of depleted pre-Doomsday equipment. In order to rebuild the armed forces, the regime sought arms from Georgia and Armenia, as well as black market dealers in the Caucasus and allegedly as far afield as Kurdistan and Iraq. Sahin's long-term goal was to diversify the state's industrial base to provide much of the lighter military equipment and ancillary supplies needed by the armed forces, while re-standardizing on Soviet heavy armaments which were readily available from his two post-Soviet allies, and on the regional black market.
The wars with New Erzurum and Greater Patnos had a serious impact on Trabzonian society. The official casualty figures for the first war, based on the regime's own despatches, were around 1,000 soldiers dead, with around 1,200 for the second, although these tallies have been questioned, since they omit those dying of their wounds later in the hospital. Beyond these figures lie an unknown number of those permanently maimed or crippled, or left traumatized by two of eastern Turkey's most vicious modern military conflicts. The wars also forced the armed forces to acknowledge issues of indiscipline and the poor treatment of conscripts. Both wars were a disaster for morale and discipline in almost every respect: looting, murder, and rampant crime committed by conscripts as well as ostensibly elite units were a constant factor. The army's leadership capabilities also collapsed: hundreds of NCOs and officers were killed, captured, or deserted rather than serve in the second war.
Postwar decline[]
Until around 2000, the Trabzonian armed forces was to a large extent the pre-Doomsday Turkish armed forces in organization, culture and role – just smaller, and poorer. After 2000 it resembled less a conventional military and more a ramshackle assemblage of forces, with varying standards of discipline and coordination. The army, for example, fielded "brigades" and "battalions" that were actually little more than companies. At best, they were structures ready to accept new recruits in case of a nationwide mobilization, but at worst they were simply "paper formations" manned by skeleton crews of conscripts to give them something to do. The cohesion of these units within the army was terrible; by the mid 2000s there was no professional NCO corps to speak of. Most of the experienced NCOs were lying dead in shallow graves throughout Greater Patnos and New Erzurum. The new NCOs were conscripts with a few months' extra training, or junior officers forced to perform many of the roles traditionally carried out by NCOs in the pre-Doomsday army.
Crime and corruption had also taken root. While much of this was petty and opportunistic, such as theft from military stores, senior officers had created criminal business empires beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, along a spectrum from illegally using soldiers as laborers or enforcers in their private enterprises to using military convoys to smuggle drugs, weapons, and commercial goods.
In 2004, Sahin, who had hitherto managed the armed forces himself, created the portfolio of Minister of National Defense and appointed General Ali Ulutaş in that role. Ulutaş, also a veteran of the 11th Corps, was tasked with reforming and modernizing the military structure. It was a rare admission of personal failure on the part of the monarch in keeping the army relevant after the trauma of his disastrous campaigns in the 1990s and years of mismanagement and neglect.
The regime's preoccupation with rebuilding its defense capabilities was linked to fresh concerns over the expansionist goals of the Sultanate of Turkey, which claimed to be the only legal successor to the defunct Turkish republic. These fears were exacerbated by the Sultanate's unprovoked invasion of Elazig in 2004. In the event of a concerted attack by the Sultanate's well-equipped 300,000-man army, it appeared unlikely that Trabzon's severely outnumbered and under-equipped armed forces could halt the advance. Ideally, an invasion would be opposed by a hostile civilian population. To this end, the military regime has done its best to inculcate the Trabzonian populace with anti-Sultanate propaganda and has encouraged various strains of local nationalism to counter the brand of resurgent Turkish nationalism in the Sultanate. Conscription laws were also sufficiently pervasive to assure that almost every able-bodied male citizen would receive some form of military training during his lifetime unless exempted due to age, physical or mental disability, or official ties to a foreign power. An emergency mobilization decree by the country's administrative council was sufficient to authorize the provision of arms by military officers to loyal civilians at the district and local level.
Weapons training for civilians in Trabzon, 2023.
Sahin delegated more and more authority to the administrative council and the general staff, giving Ulutaş virtually unlimited powers to manage both the state and the armed forces as he saw fit. Although Ulutaş was granted larger budgets to implement reforms, most of the money was embezzled or wasted due to incomplete or unclear blueprints for change. In early 2023, with Sahin virtually absent from public affairs and said to be suffering from ill health, Ulutaş dismissed the other members of the council and declared a coup d'état. Although Ulutaş had counted on the support of the armed forces, it soon became clear that there was little enthusiasm for his efforts to topple the imperial government. Following the pattern of the 1988 coup, most of the conscripts remained confined to their barracks and ignored orders from Ulutaş and the regime loyalists, opting to simply wait out the crisis and see who emerged victorious. After several failed attempts to mobilize units near the capital, the ousted council members under General Cengiz Akyüz finally summoned contractors from a private military group, Scimitar, to crush the coup. This move effectively bypassed the armed forces' chain of command and allowed the loyalists to route the coup plotters without worrying about mixed loyalties among the rank and file. Ulutaş and his entourage were eventually killed at the Trabzon state radio station by Scimitar operators and the Imperial Guard.
In the aftermath of the coup, Akyüz assumed the portfolio of Minister of National Defense and the position of the secretary of the administrative council, effectively making him the most powerful figure in the country. Akyüz promised to reverse the decline of the armed forces and reiterated the regime's commitment to future reforms. The first of his actions was to order the reactivation of the air and air defense corps, which had been essentially dormant since the early 2000s due to a lack of fuel, airworthy aircraft, and equipment. Perhaps in gratitude for its role in Akyüz's counter-coup, Scimitar was awarded a contract to oversee the process. In September 2023, Scimitar transferred a number of anti-aircraft guns to the armed forces and began training their crews. Akyüz was then said to be in talks with both state actors as well as black market arms dealers for light aircraft, using Scimitar as an intermediary; presumably, these would be flown by Scimitar personnel on contract until Trabzonian pilots could be trained to replace them.
By December, the first squadron of the reactivated air corps was operational at Trabzon Air Base with at least three Antonov AN-2 biplanes. The airframes were said to have been overhauled in an unidentified ex-Soviet republic (which domestic sources alternatively named as Armenia or Dagestan), then shipped to a Scimitar facility in Giresun, where they were converted for ground attack/counter-insurgency missions with machine guns, pylons for hanging various types of ordnance, and pods for launching unguided 57mm rockets.
Akyüz announced plans to eventually increase the number of aircraft up to seventeen.
Political status[]
Prior to Doomsday, the armed forces had represented Turkey's single most powerful interest group by virtue of the political influence it had enjoyed since the Young Turk Revolution. Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic, and his chief supporters were all military men. Atatürk himself considered the military to be the intelligentsia of the Turkish republic and the guardians of its ideals. Long after Atatürk's death, the military continued to enjoy high prestige and had assumed the status of a national elite responsible for protecting Kemalist principles. Since the 1960 Turkish coup d'état, it had also participated in the national government and become a leading force for social change in Turkey. In the context of Turkish history, Sahin's decision to take power and set up a military regime was reflective of a common attitude among the pre-Doomsday officer corps at the time: if the civilian government had failed the people, then it was acceptable for soldiers to intervene directly in the political process, depose the incompetent politicians if necessary, and set up a government of national salvation. The Turkish armed forces did this three times: in 1960, in 1971, and 1980, ousting civilian governments on average once per decade.
Public attitudes towards the interference of the military in political discourse were mixed, especially in Trabzon's case. Given the chaos which had enveloped Turkey in 1983, it was not considered unusual that Sahin and his fellow soldiers would impose martial law and assume formal responsibility for drawing up general policies. Although the country's administrative council always claimed to speak unanimously, Sahin appears to have failed in instilling a spirit of unity and discipline among the military which supported him. Internal dissent always existed, and differences came into the open in 1988 because of his deviation from the principles of Turkish republicanism and Kemalism which were so pervasive to the traditional Turkish military philosophy. The coup d'état attempt allegedly led by Colonel Yalçın was more faithful to the pattern of previous coups in Turkey, which held as their primary objective the need to return the nation to the fundamental "six arrows" of Kemalism: secularism, republicanism, populism, reformism, nationalism, and etatism. Its failure sounded the death knell for Kemalism in Trabzon's military institutions: the enlisted men refrained from taking to the streets as they had during previous coups, and most remained in their barracks. The public looked to soldiers for guidance; since they did nothing the civilians did nothing to support the coup either. Sahin initially promised a return to civilian rule was his objective, and the populace had no reason to doubt him, since civilian rule had always returned to Turkey after short terms held by military governments before. However, it had become clear by 1988 that Sahin's seizure of power was resulting in a much longer transition period to civilian rule and the imposition of greater restrictions on political rights than had the earlier regimes.
Military dominance of political affairs in Trabzon continues to this day, which the administrative council has justified on the grounds that by virtue of their discipline and order military officers were more competent than civilian officials. In 2017, high-ranking military officers occupied all the seats on the ruling administrative council and the four highest offices in government. Critics of the regime have argued that the military in Trabzon was not so much a source of political power as an instrument of elites who use it to exert their own personal control over political affairs.
Economic role[]
The armed forces have occupied a central place in the Trabzonian economy since the mid-1980s, when Sahin and his returning soldiers seized control of all state-owned enterprises, ostensibly to prevent looting and black market activity. In the 1990s, senior military officers were the only people granted state licenses to import commodities, and were granted preferential access to profitable real estate development programs. The military's continued capture of the economy during the 1990s and 2000s eventually resulted in its effective control over food distribution, crop and livestock production, commercial fishing, hospitality, timber production, textiles, consumer goods, and pharmaceuticals. All foreign companies are required to set up joint ventures with the military to manage their local operations.
Military enterprises are a major source of off-budget revenue for the armed forces and the chief employer of former military personnel. Although the armed forces consume as much as 40% of the national budget, off-budget profits by the military's parastatals and smaller scale businesses run on the individual unit level are considered essential tools to financing national defense. These "slush funds" finance the purchase of modern arms and technology transfers.
The most profitable industries, such as the hazelnut and tobacco trade, are under the full control of structures set up under the military's aegis. Scores of commercial tobacco farms and tea plantations were seized by the armed forces after Doomsday and repurposed to provide work for unemployed youth. In reality, they operated as a forced labor program for political dissidents as well as Trabzonian youths under military age, who could also be conscripted as needed. The armed forces has justified this program as part of an initiative to instill a sense of "national consciousness and work ethic" in the country's youth. The goal was for the military farms to become self-sufficient, but productivity has remained low and they operate on subsidies from the defense budget.
The largest and most well-known military enterprise involved in the labor program is the old Tekel factory in the capital. The factory produces cigarettes under the Tekel brand, as well as counterfeits of foreign brands for export, and is a vital source of foreign exchange for the regime. The factory's products are distributed to general public through a network of retail locations owned by the military but managed by individual franchisees.
By 2024 it was clear that the rigid controls on planning by the military leadership, the weight of the military bureaucracy, and the restrictions placed on free inquiry in the educational system, including scientific and technical research on economic theory, had also burdened all sectors. Military oversight hindered the economy's efficiency and productivity, as well as the capacity of parastatals and private enterprises to adapt themselves to technological advances made since 1983.
Prominent Trabzonian business leaders have clamored for the diffusion of decision-making power to the lower levels of the economic structure, and for the diversification of foreign trade. However, the military regime remains intent on keeping the region's socially conservative and pious business elite under its thumb, and shows little interest in relinquishing control of economic affairs. In early 2024, the government reaffirmed the military's monopoly on foreign trade, purchasing monopoly on agricultural products, and its role in setting prices for industrial and agricultural goods. The Armed Forces of Trabzon directly control an estimated 30% of the country's gross national product.
Organization[]
Local conscripts on checkpoint duty pose in Arsin, 2020.
The secretary of the Administrative Council exercises operational control and supervision over the army and the air and air defense corps. The total personnel strength of the three services was estimated at no more than 60,000 regulars and reservists in 2010, rising to about 64,000 in 2017. The Administrative Council holds the responsibility for setting defense policies. Ultimate security-related decisions rested solely with Sahin. The army's strength of just over 62,000 was far, far greater than the air and air defense corps, and even several times the size of the gendarmerie. The principal combat units were eight infantry brigades and one commando brigade, the so-called Imperial Guard. The Guard is the only combined arms brigade with its own integral armor and artillery, the others are light infantry brigades with individual armor or artillery attached only as needed. Each brigade consists of four light infantry battalions, equipped with small arms but few heavy weapons. These are almost wholly manned by conscripts. All but three of the infantry brigades are grossly understrength, aggravated by lax oversight which permits consistent absenteeism and by the shortage of experienced technicians and noncommissioned officers in contrast to the overstaffed officer corps. Competition with a gendarmerie that recruits heavily in rural regions has also limited the pool of potential army manpower.
The cost of maintaining the military establishment and the army in particular consumes 40% of the national budget. Official defense expenditure was last confirmed at 62 million İperpiron in 2023, which exceeded the combined amounts budgeted for public health and education. Of that amount, personnel costs account for the largest segment of the total defense budget. High wages and the privileges afforded by corruption have succeeded in keeping discontent among the officer corps to a minimum, but have taken their own toll on military spending.
There is compulsory military service for all male residents of Trabzon aged 18 to 65. According to Trabzonian conscription laws, men must undertaken national service for eighteen months (which includes six months of basic military training and one year of national service). There are no provisions for conscientious objectors. The country inherited a deeply rooted tradition of military service from pre-Doomsday Turkey, and conscription was not only regarded as normal but as a sacred duty by Trabzon's relatively conservative population. While the military regime lacks the resources to enforce conscription to any real degree outside of the coastal urban centers, social pressures in Trabzon's interior contribute greatly to voluntary compliance by most of the male population. Evading service is punishable by up to 20 years' imprisonment and a 1,700 Lira fine, a huge sum in a region where wages average under 200 Lira a month.
The few seeking to avoid conscription, often for political reasons, are either ethnic minorities who obtain documents from non-Turkic nations to avoid being recruited, or exiles who take refuge in the Sultanate of Turkey. For example, ethnic Kurds holding Kurdistan identity documents cannot be conscripted in Trabzon, nor can individuals holding identity documents from any of the ex-Soviet republics in the Caucasus.
Abkhaz militia in eastern Trabzon.
Conscription has more than quadrupled the size of the armed forces since 1987. While the army has absorbed many unemployed urban dwellers as well as farmers incapable of supporting themselves due to the changing economic circumstances, it is also dependent on a disproportionate number of Trabzon's comparatively rare educated and technically trained professionals, whose continued service is of detriment to the civilian sector's ability to train and retain a skilled workforce. The government has sought to rectify this problem by using the army to contribute to the national economy through various development projects. The army is responsible for road maintenance, for example, as well as most of the new infrastructural programs undertaken in rural Trabzon since 1983.
The Second Empire of Trabzon is divided into five military districts similar in organization to pre-Doomsday Turkish military sectors. Each district operates independently and has been organized on the basis of terrain, logistics, communications, and potential threats. All of the military's armor, aircraft, and heavier weaponry is concentrated in the capital district, encompassing the city of Trabzon and the surrounding suburbs.
Any male resident of rural Trabzon who was not an actively serving member of the armed forces or its reserve formations is considered to be part of a vague national manpower pool known as the Trabzon Milisleri (militia). Village militias are provided with obsolete arms from the nearest military district and could be mobilized on short notice, without an imperial proclamation or ministerial order, although such action required the approval and direction of a local authority figure, such as a village head. The purpose of the militia is to combat the element of surprise, upon which guerrillas, saboteurs, terrorists, or foreign commando raids depended. In small towns far removed from the nearest military or gendarmerie outpost, augmentation of the national defense structure by local militias was considered essential - particularly in those under-policed rural areas populated by minority communities that were more or less autonomous.
In 2024, militias existed primarily in villages near the borders of northern and eastern Trabzon.
Equipment[]
Trabzonian wheeled APC in New Erzurum, 2014.
After 2000 the Armed Forces of Trabzon had to adjust to changing realities as a result of their catastrophic defeat by Greater Patnos; organizational structures had to be altered due to heavy losses of equipment and the necessity to adapt to the corresponding ratio of troops and hardware. Shortages of equipment, inadequate maintenance, and unavailability of spare parts for what remained of pre-Doomsday Turkish tanks, artillery pieces, and aircraft considerably limited their effectiveness.
The armed forces entered the twenty-first century with a bulk of well-worn, pre-Doomsday era weapons and a certain share of (mostly American and Turkish) hardware refurbished since Doomsday. Had it not lost much of this equipment in the conflicts with New Erzurum and Greater Patnos, sooner or later the question of the need to purchase new hardware or cooperate with foreign nations to produce it would have arisen regardless, since it would have been impossible to simply continue with refurbishing the old materiel for much longer. The Patnosi-Trabzon War greatly accelerated this process, and thanks to the help of its Georgian and Armenian allies, as well as the thriving regional arms trade which appeared in the Caucasus after Doomsday, Trabzon has now amassed a huge arsenal of Soviet bloc equipment alongside its remaining pre-Doomsday weaponry and vehicles inherited from the Turkish Armed Forces.
It is understood that in the long term, Trabzon will have to abandon its pre-Doomsday Turkish hardware, at least due to the fact that there is a limited amount of ammunition and spare parts available. Meanwhile, the number of military personnel trained by private contractors and Trabzon's allies to operate Soviet type equipment is constantly increasing.
Army[]
During the 1980s, one of the more notable features of the armed forces was its large armored force, which was equipped with at least 100 M47/M48A1/M48A5 American-built medium tanks, another 30 M60 main battle tanks, and up to 200 M113 and M59 armored personnel carriers. This equipment gave Trabzon one of the largest post-Doomsday armored and mechanized forces of any Turkish successor state, second only to Greater Patnos and the Sultanate of Turkey itself. By 2000, virtually none of this remained. The remaining tanks were integrated with lighter armored vehicles under the umbrella of a reorganized, much-reduced armored corps and its role limited to complementing the army's first-line infantry battalions.
Major Yacin Göktaş, former tank commander and a defector to Konya who was interviewed by the Turkish press in 2010, stated that as little as 10% of the supposed armored corps was capable of operating at any given time. There were still an unknown number of M60s and M48s in storage, although the army was gradually having them scrapped and selling the steel for much-need foreign exchange. Working turrets stripped from these older American tanks have often been repurposed for use with bunkers and fixed fortifications along the country's western borders. The only operational tanks were 10 T-62 and T-54/55 main battle tanks of Soviet origin, presumably received as military aid from Georgia and Armenia. Shortly after his defection, however, Göktaş claimed the T-62s were actually salvaged from battlefields in the border region or captured Soviet examples brought back as "spoils of war" to Trabzon by the 11th Corps in 1983. For example, at least two were on public display and plinthed at the entrance to Trebizond Castle from 1987 until some time in the 2000s. Göktaş reported that they were restored to running condition with parts and technical assistance from one or both of Trabzon's ex-Soviet allies. There are occasional rumors that the Trabzonian tank crews and mechanics were being trained in Georgia; however, the armed forces has denied this.
Of the pre-Doomsday Turkish armored personnel carriers, almost nothing was believed to remain. The army appears to have replaced the ageing, tracked M113 and M59 with wheeled Soviet models delivered by Georgia and Armenia. During the 2016 centennial parade to mark the Russian withdrawal from Trabzon after World War I, the army paraded 20 newly refurbished Panhard AML-90 armored cars. Major Göktaş claimed these were acquired surreptitiously through Kurdish arms dealers and had arrived with Arabic markings on their hulls, implying they were purchased from the vast stockpiles of Iraqi military hardware awash in the region after the Iraqi civil war.
The logistics vehicles used by the armed forces were a hodgepodge of GAZ, ZIL, and Ural trucks of Soviet origin, and had been delivered during the mid-2000s by an unknown supplier. These trucks have proven especially popular as Trabzon found it easy to source their associated parts from dealers in the ex-Soviet republics.
An armored car is loaded onto a transporter for repairs at the army workshops near Trabzon. Photo courtesy Yacin Göktaş.
Serviceability of all types of heavy artillery was poor, largely due to inadequate technical expertise. American artillery pieces inherited from the pre-Doomsday era continued to serve as the basic equipment of Trabzonian artillery units from 1987 to the early 2000s. At this point, most of Trabzon's ammunition stocks had been depleted during the war with Greater Patnos, and what remained of the pre-Doomsday stockpile had deteriorated due to improper storage. Furthermore, the army possessed no means to train new artillery crews. After a series of catastrophic accidents caused by inexperienced crews in 2002, all the American howitzers were scrapped or mothballed. The army had no active field artillery until the 2010s, when Armenia and Georgia began to supply it with Soviet M-30 and M-46 howitzers and D-44 field guns. These old systems were inferior to the previously operated American guns and already obsolete by Doomsday, but came with a significant logistical advantage: ammunition, parts, and crew training were freely available from Trabzon's ex-Soviet allies. In addition, those weapon types had proliferated all over the Middle East and Central Asia, meaning additional ammunition stocks and parts from further abroad would remain obtainable for the foreseeable future. The D-44 is deployed as an infantry support gun and often attached to infantry units, while the M-46s and a somewhat larger number of M-30s form the nucleus of the army's only artillery regiment. In 2022, Trabzon revealed it had also formed a single battery of 9K55 multiple rocket launchers. These were believed to have been retrieved from old Soviet conventional stockpiles in Georgia and Armenia and restored to service under the supervision of ex-Soviet technicians on Trabzonian payroll.
In 1982, Turkey created the Coast Guard Command to maintain coastal security and apprehend refugees and smugglers. In Trabzon, the Coast Guard was disbanded in 1987, and its assets and personnel incorporated into an army marine patrol squadron, which essentially fulfilled the same purpose but with the added mission of supporting the army forces in maritime operations. In 2019 the unit was equipped with one SAR-33 class patrol boat. Another five vessels inherited from the Coast Guard had deteriorated beyond repair and were scuttled that year.
By 2022, the status of the single SAR-33 class vessel had been in question for a number of years. It did not leave Trabzon's harbor facilities between 2019 and 2022, and gradually deteriorated during that time. Rumors abounded that the maritime patrol unit was being disbanded and most of the vessel's electronic systems had long ceased functioning. In December 2022, the Trabzonian government confirmed that the SAR-33 had been stripped of all its essential systems and was being permanently moored until a decision had been reached on whether to retrofit it in the capital's shipyards, keep it moored as a public attraction, or have it scuttled.
Air and Air Defense Corps[]
The Trabzonian Air and Air Defense Corps operated all of its aircraft from Trabzon Airport, which had the only intact runway in the country capable of handling large military transports. Its primary mission was to carry out ground attack and strike missions in support of the army, a task thwarted during the conflict against Greater Patnos by fuel shortages and the correspondingly limited operating range. By the early 2000s all its combat aircraft were deadlined due to lack of spares or possessed only limited operational capabilities. Several sources have reported that as of 2005 the air corps was in possession of approximately six grounded F-100D Super Sabres, two F-86D Sabres, a Northrop F-5A Freedom Fighter, and a Republic F-84F Thunderstreak. It also had a transport squadron composed of three C-160 Transalls, all of which were in deep storage.
In December 2023, the Air Corps was reactivated with at least three Antonov AN-2 biplanes. These were civilian airframes purchased in the Caucasus and modified for the ground attack role with rocket pods for firing unguided 57mm rockets, and wing pylons for various other types of ordnance. The Air Corps was said to have modified mortar shells with aerial bomb fuses, creating simple but effective air-dropped weapons that could substitute for conventional unguided bombs. These, along with improvised barrel bombs, could be easily dropped on ground targets through a hinged trapdoor added to the bottom of the aircraft's fuselage. Similarly, Trabzonian engineers have developed rocket pods for the AN-2 capable of launching rocket-propelled grenades, which are much cheaper and more readily available than conventional rocket munitions.
For several decades, the air defense troops were equipped with 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns, but it was assumed that these were largely inoperative. Beginning in September 2023, the ruling administrative council announced it would make modernizing the country's air defense one of its chief priorities, likely to compensate for Trabzon's lack of combat aircraft and fears that the Sultanate of Turkey's warplanes could operate with impunity over its airspace. On September 7, General Akyüz announced that the private firm Scimitar International had been awarded a contract to re-equip and retrain the air defense corps around Soviet legacy ZU-23-2, ZPU-2, and ZPU-4 anti-aircraft guns, further underscoring the latter's close ties with the Trabzonian state and its own murky relationship with Akyüz. The company was believed to have a handful of these systems captured from the Muslim Liberation Army (MLA) during its operations in Dagestan, and was apparently instructed by Akyüz to transfer these to the armed forces. The guns were all slated to be sited in fixed emplacements around the Trabzon airport, although some may have also been mounted on trucks for added mobility.
List[]
Infantry weapons[]
Artillery[]
Ground vehicles[]
| Model | Type | Origin | Photo | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T-62 | Main battle tank | Soviet Union |   |
>10 in service. |
| T-54/55 | Main battle tank | Soviet Union |   |
>10 in service. |
| M60 | Main battle tank | United States |   |
In storage. |
| M48 | Medium tank | United States |   |
In storage. |
| M113 | Armored personnel carrier | United States |   |
In storage. |
| BTR-60 | Armored personnel carrier | Soviet Union |   |
Supplied by Georgia; Armenia. |
| BTR-70 | Armored personnel carrier | Soviet Union |   |
Supplied by Georgia; Armenia. |
| AML-90 | Armored car | France |   |
20 in service. |
| UAZ-469 | Utility vehicle | Soviet Union |   |
|
| Kalesi | Utility vehicle | Trabzon |   |
Copy of various prewar jeeps. |
| Unimog 404 | Utility vehicle | West Germany |   |
Most in storage. |
| ZIL-157 | Utility vehicle | Soviet Union |   |
|
| ZIL-130 | Utility vehicle | Soviet Union |   |
|
| ZIL-131 | Utility vehicle | Soviet Union |   |
|
| Ural-4320 | Utility vehicle | Soviet Union |   |
|
| GAZ-66 | Utility vehicle | Soviet Union |   |
Aircraft[]
Air defense[]
Patrol boats[]
| Model | Type | Origin | Photo | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAR-33 | Coastal patrol | West Germany/Turkey |   |
1 in service; operational status unknown. |
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