Ankara — A Turkish military cargo plane carrying 20 personnel has crashed in eastern Georgia, killing everyone on board, Turkey’s Defence Minister Yasar Guler confirmed on Wednesday.
The C-130 Hercules aircraft was flying from Ganja, Azerbaijan, to Turkey when it went down in Georgia’s Sighnaghi municipality, near the Azerbaijani border, late Tuesday evening. The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
A Turkish military accident investigation team has arrived at the crash site and is working alongside Georgian authorities to determine what caused the tragedy. Georgian Interior Minister Gela Geladze said the wreckage was found scattered across farmland surrounded by hills, with debris covering multiple locations.
“Authorities have so far recovered the remains of 18 victims, and efforts continue to locate the remaining two,” Geladze told reporters, adding that information about the crash will be released “in stages” due to military sensitivities.
Defense Minister Guler expressed deep sorrow in a statement shared on X (formerly Twitter), saying:
“Our heroic comrades-in-arms were martyred on November 11, 2025, when our C-130 military cargo plane, which had taken off from Azerbaijan en route to our country, crashed near the Georgia-Azerbaijan border.”
Photographs of the 20 fallen personnel accompanied his message.
According to Turkey’s state-run Anadolu Agency, Georgian aviation officials reported that contact with the aircraft was lost minutes after it entered Georgian airspace. No distress signal was sent before the crash.
The C-130 Hercules, a 1968 model originally manufactured for Saudi Arabia, was later added to the Turkish Air Force’s inventory in 2010 and belonged to the 12th Air Base Command in Kayseri, central Turkey. It had reportedly departed from Kayseri on Monday, stopped in Azerbaijan to pick up personnel in Ganja, and was en route to Merzifon, northern Turkey, when the crash occurred.
Turkey and Azerbaijan, close military allies, had just celebrated Victory Day in Baku on Saturday to mark Azerbaijan’s 2020 military success over Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. It is unclear whether the personnel aboard the crashed plane had attended those commemorations.
Expressions of sympathy poured in from across the region and beyond.
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and Georgian Foreign Minister Maka Botchorishvili extended condolences to Ankara, while U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte offered their sympathies, honouring the fallen Turkish service members.
“We are deeply shocked,” Aliyev said in a message carried by Anadolu Agency.
There has been no immediate information about funeral arrangements or when the remains of the victims will be returned to Turkey.