Recognition For Rent From Unowned Property: Inside The Ethiopia-Somaliland Land Grab – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/10092026-recognition-for-rent-from-unowned-property-inside-the-ethiopia-somaliland-land-grab-oped/

The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and Somaliland:
Reaffirming their longstanding solidarity, fraternity and friendship,
Committed to foster a close partnership that would contribute to peace and security in the Horn of Africa and the broader region,
Desiring to encourage closer economic cooperation and to promote conditions of economic stability and well-being,
Considering their common concern in the maintenance of peace and security in the Horn of Africa,
Having resolved to conclude this Memorandum of Partnership and Cooperation,
Agree as follows:
ARTICLE I
The relationship between the parties shall be based on the principles of good faith cooperation and partnership for the advancement of mutual interests.
The purpose of this Memorandum of Understanding is to identify the major fields of cooperation and provide a framework to govern their overall engagement and partnership.
ARTICLE II
The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia shall extend recognition to Somaliland immediately after the designated area stipulated under Article X of this agreement. The parties shall coordinate their political efforts and outreach to stakeholders in the lead up to this determination.
The contracting parties shall hold regular consultations through the Joint Ministerial Platform established pursuant to this Memorandum of Understanding, and through other modalities as necessary, to harmonize and coordinate their views in international forums to advance common objectives and positions. They shall also cooperate in the areas of foreign service and diplomacy.
ARTICLE III
The contracting parties shall cooperate in trade and investment by developing physical infrastructure linkages to increase the flow of trade and investment.
The parties shall jointly invest in and develop the facilities and infrastructure necessary for the utilization of the Berbera Port, including a railway and a highway. The modalities and detailed arrangements for such joint investment shall be provided in subsequent agreements to be concluded by the parties.
The Berbera railway, as necessary to be linked with other railway networks in the area, shall be prioritized by the parties in their joint infrastructure development efforts.
The parties shall enter into a bilateral trade and investment agreement to foster greater economic integration.
ARTICLE IV
The Contracting Parties shall cooperate in infrastructure, water and energy sectors.
The FDRE undertakes to use the Berbera port facilities, on competitive market terms that cannot be greater than the prevailing market rate, for not less than 10% of its annual import and export.
The FDRE shall supply electricity to Somaliland on competitive market terms that cannot be greater than the prevailing market rate.
The detailed terms and conditions for the undertakings indicated in Article IV (2) and (3) shall be negotiated and agreed upon by the parties.
ARTICLE V
The Contracting Parties shall cooperate in the agricultural sector through training and capacity building in small scale irrigation, watershed development, food security and disaster management, control of trans-boundary animal and plant diseases, surveillance and control of livestock, fish and crop diseases and pests, exchange of experience in agricultural extension and rural development, environmental management and afforestation programs, and any other fields that may be mutually agreed upon.
ARTICLE VI
The contracting parties shall cooperate in the health sector and work in collaboration in building the capacity of health professionals and medical practitioners, malaria control, epidemiological surveillance, research, exchange of health professionals for the purpose of sharing new techniques and technologies, experience sharing in the provision of primary health care, nutrition and immunization, and any other fields that may be mutually agreed upon.
ARTICLE VII
The Contracting Parties shall cooperate in the education sector through capacity building and experience sharing at all levels of education and training, including technical and vocational education; the promotion of higher education; and promotion of alternative basic education, as well as any other fields that may be mutually agreed upon.
ARTICLE VIII
The Contracting Parties shall cooperate in the cultural sector through the exchange of cultural troupes, artifacts, experts and information sharing, as well as exchange of experiences on indigenous knowledge preservation and utilization; promotion of cooperation between national museums, libraries and archives, as well as exchange of delegations, publications and expert visits; preservation and restoration of cultural heritage, and any other fields that may be mutually agreed upon.
ARTICLE IX
The Contracting Parties shall cooperate in the defense and security sectors. This cooperation shall include but is not limited to: military training, education and technical assistance; exchange of information on defense, security and intelligence matters; countering terrorism and combating organized and transnational crimes; and any other fields and technical arrangements that may be mutually agreed upon.
ARTICLE X
Somaliland shall provide a 50-year lease of a coastal area with a 20 km width along the coast and a 20 km length inland (hereinafter referred to as the “leasehold area”) near eastern Lughaya to the FDRE for the establishment of a naval base and the development of commercial maritime facilities.
The leasehold area shall include the maritime zones adjacent to the coastline on which a coastal state might exercise jurisdiction in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, as well as a land corridor from the Ethiopian border to the coastline.
The land corridor shall include a highway and a railway going from the border to the naval base and maritime facilities. A map and GPS coordinates of the leasehold area shall be annexed to this Memorandum of Understanding.
The FDRE shall exercise full control and jurisdiction over the leasehold area. The FDRE shall not sublease, transfer control, assign territory or pledge to a third party.
The leasehold area shall be transferred over to Ethiopia within 30 days from the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding.
In lieu of rent for the lease indicated under sub-article 1 of this Article, the FDRE shall grant Somaliland shares in Ethiopian Airlines. The number of shares to be granted shall be agreed upon between the parties. These shares may not be sold, transferred, assigned, pledged, or encumbered to a third party.
Upon expiry of the period stipulated under sub-article 1 of this Article, the parties shall negotiate in good faith the terms for the extension of the leasehold, taking into account the investment of the FDRE in the leasehold area.
ARTICLE XI
The contracting parties hereby establish a Joint Ministerial Platform to oversee implementation of this agreement.
The Joint Ministerial Platform shall meet at least twice a year; it may hold extraordinary meetings as it may deem necessary.

———-

Editor’s Note
The document above is presented as the full text of the Memorandum of Understanding for Partnership and Co-operation signed by the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and Somaliland in Jan. 1, 2024. Neither government has released an official text of the agreement. Ethiopian and Somaliland officials have offered differing and at times conflicting accounts of its contents since the signing, and independent researchers tracking the accord have noted more than a year that no authoritative version has been made public.
WDM obtained this document through sources it regards as reliable. Its provenance could not be independently corroborated through public or official channels at time of posting. It is published for reference and analysis on that basis, and readers should treat its specific terms — including the leasehold dimensions, compensation mechanism and recognition clause — as unconfirmed pending an official release by either party.

Somalia’s Crisis Is Systemic, Not Personal: The Case For Collective Accountability – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/08092026-somalias-crisis-is-systemic-not-personal-the-case-for-collective-accountability-oped/

Puntland Is Not A Platform – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/07092026-puntland-is-not-a-platform-oped/

Garowe, Puntland, Somalia — Said Abdullahi Deni did not come to Puntland’s presidency to make Puntland stronger. He came to make himself bigger.

For too long, that was the operating logic of his administration. Mogadishu shaped his political imagination, and Mogadishu remained the measure of his ambition. Puntland gave him the office, the security structure, the public budget, the political platform, and the parliamentary influence needed to pursue national power. Yet he often governed as if Garowe were merely a temporary headquarters for a future campaign in Villa Somalia.

Puntland was not treated as the mission. It was treated as the machinery.

That is why the first half of Deni’s presidency often felt politically busy but institutionally thin. The cabinet functioned less like a forum for serious collective government and more like an extension of the presidency. Ministers were expected to execute rather than deliberate. Independent judgment became risky. Policy coordination depended too heavily on the president’s immediate circle, while capable officials and experienced political figures were left outside the room.

That is not a cabinet. It is a chain of command.

Puntland’s parliament, meanwhile, has too often been treated as an obstacle to manage rather than an institution to respect. A legislature exists to scrutinize budgets, question ministers, investigate failures, and force the executive to explain itself. But a government that sees scrutiny as hostility will always prefer compliant legislators to independent ones. It will seek acquiescence rather than accountability.

That is not stability. It is institutional suffocation.

The same pattern has affected Puntland’s regional administrations. Mudug, Bari, Nugaal, Karkaar, Sanaag, Haylaan, and the other regions cannot be governed permanently by instructions issued from Garowe. Local authorities need predictable mandates, administrative capacity, transparent funding, and enough political space to respond to their communities. Yet the presidency has repeatedly favored central control over durable local empowerment.

A state cannot be built from the capital alone.

The federal presidential campaign exposed the weakness of this political model. When Deni sought the presidency of Somalia, he expected the federal parliamentarians associated with Puntland to stand behind him. He expected political allies elsewhere to repay support with loyalty. But at the critical hour, they did not.

The result was not merely defeat. It was exposure.

Deni had invested in politicians. He had not built political conviction. He had cultivated a network of transactions. He had not created a constituency prepared to defend a shared national project. When the calculations changed, the alliances changed with them.

This is the truth he had to learn: political loyalty purchased through patronage is temporary by design.

Since then, Deni has changed—at least in appearance, and perhaps in part by conviction. He has traveled more widely. He has met traditional elders in Mudug and Bari. He has spoken more cautiously and reacted less explosively in public. His administration has put greater emphasis on the Puntland Defence Forces, an institution that deserves sustained investment, professional command, clear civilian oversight, and reliable support for its personnel.

These are positive signs. But they are not enough.

The Puntland Defence Forces cannot become another instrument of presidential politics. A serious security sector requires professional recruitment, accountable command structures, regular pay, logistical planning, parliamentary oversight, and a clear separation between state security and factional loyalty. If security institutions serve a president rather than the law, they may protect power for a while—but they will not protect the state.

Puntland’s public finances require the same seriousness. Citizens have a right to know how revenue is raised, how contracts are awarded, how budgets are spent, and whether public resources are advancing public priorities. The administration cannot demand public trust while treating budget transparency as a privilege granted at its convenience. A state that collects revenue must also account for it.

Puntland also needs more than road tours, speeches, and carefully managed gatherings. It needs functioning schools, dependable health services, viable local councils, water infrastructure, job opportunities for young people, and an economic strategy that turns its coastline, livestock, fisheries, trade routes, and potential natural resources into public prosperity rather than elite advantage.

The president’s regional visits matter only if they produce institutions that remain after the motorcade leaves.

Deni’s deeper problem is that he appears to trust loyalty more than competence. Experienced civil servants, respected elders, capable politicians, and independent policy professionals complicate presidential power because they ask questions. They challenge assumptions. They insist on procedures. They remember past failures. They do not always clap on command.

That is why they are indispensable.

Instead, the administration has too often elevated inexperienced aides and political messengers whose strongest qualification is personal loyalty. Energy is useful; youth is valuable. But neither is a substitute for judgment, expertise, or institutional memory. Puntland cannot be governed through an echo chamber of people whose careers depend on never telling the president “no.”

This is not strength. It is fear disguised as control.

Deni’s political roots may partly explain the instinct. His links to the Islah current and his previous service in Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s first administration placed him in political environments where hierarchy, discipline, and internal loyalty carried great weight. But no political tradition excuses the weakening of public institutions. No movement culture justifies treating criticism as sabotage.

Puntland has outgrown politics of personal command.

Its future depends on a stronger parliament, a credible cabinet, empowered regional administrations, a professional security sector, transparent public finances, and a civil service that serves the public rather than the president’s inner circle. These are not abstract reform slogans. They are the difference between a functioning state and a personal administration.

Deni now has an opportunity that many leaders never receive: failure has forced him to reconsider his purpose. He can turn that failure into maturity. He can appoint serious people, tolerate criticism, open government, strengthen institutions, and leave Puntland more capable than he found it.

Or he can continue to rule through personal networks, political suspicion, centralized control, and a circle of loyal dependents.

The first choice would establish a legacy.

The second would confirm the worst judgment of his presidency: that Puntland was never a homeland to govern, only a platform to use.

Puntland is not a route to Mogadishu. It is not a consolation prize after Mogadishu. And it is not a private kingdom for any president.

— WDM Editorial Board

Turkey In Somalia: From Lifeline To Power Broker – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/06092026-turkey-in-somalia-from-lifeline-to-power-broker-oped/

“Ismaaciil adiga mooyee, Adoogeen Haaji mooyee, Ayeydeen Dhoofa mooyee, Uduufaa meesha joogtee.

“Ismaaciil ogadada, udgoonaa ogadaadu, ma sixin baa lagu agloolay.”

“Ismaaciil, were it not for you, were it not for your father, Haji, were it not for your grandmother, Dhoofa — no fragrance would linger in this place. Ismaaciil, the sweetness of your scent — is it not the fragrance of your own body wrapped in good-smelling ghee?”

A WDM Editorial

There is a particular kind of sleep that overtakes a region when its capital grows fat while its periphery grows quiet. Nugaal is drifting into that sleep. Someone needs to ring the alarm before whole towns become little more than names on an old administrative map.
Look at the map, if anyone in the planning offices still bothers to.
Nugaal is not Garowe. Nugaal is Garowe, Eyl, Dangorayo, Sinujiif, Buurtiinle and the rangelands and coastline that give the region its economic, historical and strategic meaning. Yet ask many young Puntlanders today to name the towns of Nugaal, and the answer quickly collapses into one word: Garowe. Full stop. The rest increasingly resemble administrative footnotes.
Eyl: History Without Investment
Eyl deserves better, if only because history refuses to let it disappear quietly. This ancient port, once known as Illig, served as capital of the Dervish movement under Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan from 1905 until Taleh took over that role in 1909. It later became known internationally, less happily, as a hub of Somali piracy in the 2000s. Its location, fishing grounds, maritime heritage and surrounding livestock economy should make it one of Puntland’s more interesting coastal development centers.
Instead, Eyl is too often treated as a postcard. It is remembered when politicians need a photograph of Puntland’s heritage, mentioned when speeches require a little historical seasoning, and forgotten when budgets and investment priorities are drawn up.
A coastal town cannot live on nostalgia. Eyl needs roads, fisheries infrastructure, reliable electricity, communications, water systems, health services, schools and an economy capable of keeping its young people there. Otherwise, every speech praising Eyl’s history becomes an obituary delivered in installments.
Dangorayo and Sinujiif: From Towns to Coordinates
Dangorayo and Sinujiif are in an even more precarious position, because they do not carry Eyl’s historical name recognition. These settlements once anchored local economies and communities in Nugaal’s interior. Increasingly, they risk becoming waypoints: places people drive through on their way to somewhere with better services, electricity and jobs.
That is how towns disappear without physically disappearing. First the professionals leave. Then businesses follow. Young families relocate. Government offices thin out. Schools struggle. Investment stops. Eventually the settlement remains on the map while its economic purpose migrates elsewhere. A town reduced mainly to a road sign has become a coordinate. That should worry Nugaal.
And Then There Is Buurtiinle
Whenever questions arise about Nugaal’s development outside Garowe, Buurtiinle is often produced as evidence that the region still has another growing urban center. But Buurtiinle complicates the argument rather than rescuing it.
Administratively, Buurtiinle belongs to Nugaal. Economically and socially, however, its trade and family ties have long run at least as strongly toward Mudugh and Galkayo as toward Garowe — a pattern residents and traders in the area describe, though it deserves fuller documentation than a single editorial can offer. Trade, livestock movement and commercial activity do not necessarily obey administrative boundaries drawn on government maps.
The map says Nugaal. The marketplace often looks south. That distinction matters. Using Buurtiinle’s growth to demonstrate balanced development across Nugaal risks flattering the regional ledger without confronting the condition of the towns whose economic orientation is unmistakably tied to Nugaal itself. Set Buurtiinle aside for a moment and ask the harder question: what is happening to Eyl, Dangorayo and Sinujiif? The answer is considerably less comfortable.
A Region Becoming a City-State
Here is the arithmetic nobody should be afraid to run. A region consisting of one rapidly expanding capital surrounded by stagnating settlements is gradually ceasing to function as a region. It is becoming a city-state with rural appendages.
That should be especially uncomfortable in Puntland, of all places. Puntland has spent nearly three decades arguing, often correctly, that Somalia cannot be governed by concentrating political authority, public spending and economic opportunity in Mogadishu. It has defended federalism precisely because excessive centralization impoverishes the periphery while feeding the center.
How, then, can Puntland condemn Mogadishu for centralization while tolerating the same pattern inside its own regions? A government cannot spend Monday accusing Villa Somalia of swallowing the country and Tuesday congratulate itself while Garowe swallows Nugaal. Centralization does not become federalism merely because it happens in Garowe rather than Mogadishu. The contradiction is obvious.
The Garowe Magnet
Garowe’s growth is not the problem; its success should be welcomed. The problem begins when the capital grows instead of the region, rather than with it.
The mechanism is straightforward. Government institutions attract civil servants. Civil servants attract housing. Housing attracts shops, schools, restaurants, clinics and construction. International organizations and aid groups follow the government. Private capital follows purchasing power. Universities, hotels and service industries then reinforce the cycle. The capital becomes a magnet, and without deliberate regional policy, everything else becomes iron filings.
That is why development cannot simply be left to gravity. Every new government institution built in Garowe strengthens Garowe, while every neglected road to Eyl weakens Eyl. Every major service concentrated in the capital becomes another reason for families elsewhere to relocate there. Eventually officials point to Garowe’s expansion as evidence that Nugaal is developing. It is not. Garowe is developing. Those are not the same thing.
The Satire Is Becoming Too Easy
One can already imagine the tourism brochure: “Welcome to Nugaal region. Population centers: Garowe, and several historically reported settlements believed to exist beyond the city limits.” Or perhaps the next regional development conference can simplify matters by hanging one large map of Garowe on the wall and labeling it “Nugaal.”
Eyl’s representative gives a speech about fisheries. Dangorayo asks for another road. Sinujiif requests basic services. Everyone applauds. Then another government building goes up in Garowe. Conference adjourned. That joke stops being funny when it starts resembling policy.
Development Must Fan Out
There is nothing mysterious about what needs to happen. Investment must deliberately fan outward from Garowe.
The road to Eyl should be treated as an economic corridor connecting Puntland’s political center with the Indian Ocean, not as a charity project for an isolated district. Fisheries development belongs on the coast. Livestock infrastructure belongs near producing communities. Health and education spending should follow population, geography and need, not proximity to government offices.
Dangorayo and Sinujiif need economic purposes beyond serving passing traffic. Eyl needs serious maritime and fisheries development. District governments need real budgets and authority rather than functioning as administrative messengers waiting for instructions and money from Garowe. Private investors should be drawn beyond the capital through land policy, infrastructure, incentives and reliable public services. And regional planning must start measuring success by what happens outside Garowe, not by counting buildings inside it.
Puntland Cannot Preach What It Does Not Practice
This is larger than Nugaal. Puntland’s political argument within Somalia rests heavily on decentralization, federalism and the right of communities to govern themselves rather than wait for everything to descend from a distant capital. That argument loses moral force when Puntland reproduces centralization internally.
A government cannot demand fiscal decentralization from Mogadishu while starving its own districts. It cannot complain that Somalia has become a Mogadishu city-state while allowing Nugaal to become a Garowe city-state. It cannot preach federalism nationally and practice centralism locally. The principle either travels all the way down, or it is merely political vocabulary.
Wake Up, Nugaal
The warning is straightforward: fan out from Garowe, or watch Nugaal contract around it. Eyl is not a museum. Dangorayo is not a rest stop. Sinujiif is not a road sign. And Nugaal is not another name for Garowe.
These communities do not need another conference promising that their turn is coming. They need roads, investment, functioning local governments, economic opportunity and a deliberate policy that treats regional balance as an obligation rather than a slogan.
Garowe should keep growing — bigger, richer, better. But its success must radiate outward instead of pulling everything inward. Otherwise, officials may someday discover they built a capital spectacularly well while quietly losing the region around it. And by then, there may be nobody left in the forgotten towns to attend the conference explaining what went wrong.
Wake up, Nugaal. A region cannot survive forever as one booming city surrounded by memories.

The Sultan’s Drones: Ankara’s Descent From Somali Patron To Villa Somalia’s Hired Gun – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/04092026-the-sultans-drones-ankaras-descent-from-somali-patron-to-villa-somalias-hired-gun-oped/

By Ismail H. Warsame

Garowe, Puntland, Somalia -Somewhere in Ankara, someone should be asking a plain question: what is Turkey trying to win in Baidoa?
The reported facts are sobering without embellishment. Southwest State officials and residents around Baidoa have for months accused Turkish drones, and at times helicopters and F-16 fighter jets, of providing air cover for federal operations against forces loyal to ousted Southwest President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, known as Laftagareen. On the night of Sept. 3-4, a drone struck the Doolow, Gedo region, home of Gen. Mahad Abdirahman Aden, known as “Shub,” a former federal police commander now politically opposed to Villa Somalia. His family says he survived. Local reporting citing residents at the scene describes deaths and injuries among those present, with one Somali-language outlet citing preliminary information that three people died. None of this is independently confirmed, and neither Villa Somalia nor Ankara has said who ordered or carried out the strike — a silence that has become Turkey’s signature posture in Somalia, the wordless shrug of an ally content to let the smoke answer the questions.
This satire needs no invention. Reality already wrote the punchline: a country that markets itself as patron saint of Somali reconstruction — the airport, the hospital, the scholarships — has become, in the eyes of a growing number of Somalis, subcontractor in a family feud among Somali elites over who sits in which regional palace.
The Loyalty Card Trick
The mechanism is simple. Ankara arrives with a training academy, a port concession, an energy deal, and a line of political credit extended personally to whoever occupies Villa Somalia. The relationship is framed as partnership with the Somali state. In practice it functions as a retainer with the man signing the paperwork. When that man’s rivals happen to be state governors he has fallen out with, Turkish drones stop distinguishing between al-Shabab, the enemy Ankara was invited to fight, and a Southwest State president whose offense was winning his own region’s vote.
One imagines the internal memo: “Mission: counterterrorism partnership.” One reads the results: a deposed president’s forces pushed to Baidoa’s edge; a former police commander’s family home hit in Doolow, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest al-Shabab stronghold worth the fuel. If this is counterterrorism, al-Shabab has disguised itself remarkably well as Somali federalism.
A Villa Somalia Discount Air Force
The pattern speaks for itself. Southwest State’s president was removed in March with reported Turkish air support. His forces were pushed back from Baidoa’s outskirts months later under further reported strikes. By September, drones attributed to the same posture hit the private residence of a general whose apparent crime is opposing Villa Somalia politically. Southwest State residents did not need this desk to notice; they burned the Turkish flag in the streets weeks ago. Ankara’s response has been more silence.
That leaves an uncomfortable proposition this newspaper has circled for months, through the M/V LUTUF affair, the Garmaal and Jiifle strikes, and the SOMTURK dispute under Article 54: Turkey has drifted from partner against al-Shabab to Villa Somalia’s discount air force against other Somalis. A partner defends a state’s sovereignty against external threat. A discount air force defends whoever pays the retainer against whoever does not. Ankara has spent a decade of goodwill blurring that line.
The Doolow Precedent
The Doolow strike deserves gravity, not satire alone. A strike on a private residence that reportedly killed a family member and narrowly spared its intended target, where the target’s apparent offense is political opposition rather than insurgency, is precisely the kind of episode international humanitarian law exists to scrutinize. Whether it meets the threshold of a war crime is for investigators with access to targeting data Ankara has, predictably, declined to share. What is already clear: a foreign air force striking a political rival’s home inside a sovereign state’s internal dispute is not a footnote. It is a precedent — one that could travel to Garowe or Bosaso the next time an official falls out of favor with whichever capital is lending the drones.
A Modest Proposal
If Ankara insists on remaining Somalia’s aerial guarantor, this newspaper offers, in the spirit of Swift rather than sincerity, a modest proposal: publish a price list. If a Turkish airstrike is now available to whoever controls Villa Somalia, Somalis deserve to know the rate and the terms, and whether regional states may place competing orders. Puntland has already found a less ambiguous path in its Aug. 2 basing arrangement with the United States at Bosaso, built on a defined counter-piracy mandate rather than an open tab against domestic rivals. The contrast should embarrass Ankara more than it appears to.
Somalia’s federal member states did not sign up for a foreign power adjudicating their succession disputes from 15,000 feet. Turkey did not build a decade of Somali gratitude to spend it bombing a retired general’s home in Gedo. Somalis are entitled to ask, again: who authorized this, under what law, and to what end?
The smoke over Doolow will clear. The question will not.
  

The Haud Betrayal: A 1956 File And The Template For Ethiopian Encroachment – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/02092026-the-haud-betrayal-a-1956-file-and-the-template-for-ethiopian-encroachment-oped/

Garowe, Puntland, Somalia

By Ismail H. Warsame

Mohamed Affey has spent recent weeks recounting his years as a Kenyan diplomat and mediator of the Mbagathi Somali National Reconciliation Conference, 2002-2004, in a series of interviews with Juxa Video. The episodes cast Kenya as a steady, even-handed host guiding Somali actors to consensus. What Affey omits is how his own government’s conduct, and his own hand in it, nearly collapsed the conference before it produced anything at all.
This writer was present in Mbagathi during the period Affey now narrates from a distance. The record deserves correction.
The State House Maneuver
The signing ceremony Affey treats as a milestone did not take place in the Mbagathi conference hall, where negotiations had run for more than two years. It was moved to Kenya’s State House, and that relocation was not incidental.
There, Abdiqasim Salad Hassan and Mohamed Abdi Yusuf signed the Kenyan-drafted document in their official capacities as president and prime minister of the Transitional National Government. Abdullahi Yusuf was told to sign as an individual, not as president of Puntland State. It was a diplomatic maneuver engineered inside Kenya’s Foreign Ministry, designed to diminish Puntland’s standing at the moment Somalia’s transitional order was being finalized on paper.
This was not oversight. It bore the marks of then-Kenyan Foreign Minister Kalonzo Musyoka and Affey himself, the two officials most responsible for managing Kenya’s role as host. A mediator who omits the one episode that nearly ended the process he claims to have safeguarded is not offering an incomplete memory. He is offering a curated one.
The Walkout That Almost Was
Abdullahi Yusuf recognized the insult and moved to leave the conference outright, a step that would have removed Puntland’s leadership and thrown more than two years of negotiation into crisis.
Reversing that took considerable effort, much of it this writer’s own. Working through two trusted Kenyan contacts, Gen. Mohamud and Kenyan intelligence chief Shukri, this writer argued that Abdullahi Yusuf’s grievance was legitimate and that Kenya’s credibility as host was at stake. The two officers persuaded Abdullahi Yusuf to stay.
More significant than that immediate save was what followed. Mohamud and Shukri, once aware of Musyoka’s and Affey’s bias, committed to backing Abdullahi Yusuf for the remainder of the conference. Their influence reached Kenyan Presidents Daniel arap Moi and, later, Mwai Kibaki, and it became one factor in Musyoka’s eventual removal from Kenya’s Cabinet.
Why It Matters
Signing Abdullahi Yusuf in as a private citizen, stripped of his Puntland title, was an attempt to redraw the balance among Somalia’s transitional actors at the exact moment that balance was being formalized. Had it succeeded, and had Abdullahi Yusuf actually walked, the Mbagathi process and the Transitional Federal Government built on it might not have survived intact.
Affey’s version, delivered more than two decades on with no one present to contest it, recasts Kenya as an even-handed midwife to Somali unity. The fuller record shows a Foreign Ministry that tried, at a decisive moment, to diminish one of the conference’s principal actors, checked only by Kenyan officials who saw the maneuver and corrected course.
Silence on that episode, sustained across a multi-part interview series devoted to the conference, is not forgetfulness. It is a choice. This writer’s account is offered here as a firsthand participant’s record, with an invitation to other participants, Somali and Kenyan, to add what they witnessed.

Ismail H. Warsame is founder of Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) and Warsame Digital Media (WDM). He served as founding chief of staff and director general at the Puntland State Presidency, 1998-2004, and was a participant in the Mbagathi Somali National Reconciliation Conference.

Somalia’s federal system is being tested on five fronts at once: the reach of federal authority, the legitimacy of constitutional amendments, security relations between Mogadishu and the states, fiscal federalism, and an increasingly disputed presidential mandate. None of these is a manufactured grievance. They are, as a matter of plain constitutional analysis, genuine problems of national statehood — and Puntland is now the state most directly forced to answer them.
Where Federal Authority Ends
The federal government in Mogadishu holds real constitutional powers, but those powers have limits. Foreign affairs cannot be used to bypass the Article 53 consultation requirement. National defense cannot become a blanket justification for military intervention in regional political disputes. Fiscal oversight cannot double as political punishment. Constitutional reform cannot let the center unilaterally redefine the powers of the Federal Member States. Universal suffrage cannot substitute for the federal agreement the system was built on. And parliamentary majorities cannot vote federalism itself out of existence. The task, in short, is separating federal capacity from federal domination.
Three Paths for Puntland
The study lays out three constitutional options open to Puntland:
Reconstructed federalism — the least disruptive path, requiring clear allocation of powers, rule-based fiscal federalism, constitutional protection of state autonomy, agreed security arrangements, limits on unilateral federal troop deployments, transparent resource-sharing, and an independent mechanism binding both Mogadishu and the states.
Confederation — if trust in conventional federalism has broken down beyond repair, common institutions could retain narrow functions (external defense, currency, citizenship, select foreign affairs, interstate commerce, international debt, maritime coordination) while most domestic authority shifts to the states.
Separation — the most consequential and least romantic option, raising hard questions on international recognition, citizenship, borders, public debt, currency, trade, security, airspace, maritime jurisdiction and the succession of federal assets and obligations. Its appeal, the study argues, will grow in direct proportion to how thoroughly the first two paths are foreclosed.
Seven Policy Recommendations
The study’s recommendations center on institution-building rather than confrontation: an independent federal dispute mechanism so neither Mogadishu nor Puntland is judge in its own cause; a negotiated federal security compact covering troop deployment, state consultation and command structures; formula-based, audited development financing insulated from political conflict; a higher amendment threshold for constitutional provisions touching state powers; a transparent legal accounting of the presidential mandate controversy, including the disputed applicability of the March 2026 amendments to the sitting president; a Puntland Constitutional Futures Commission to study the three options without predetermined conclusions; and continued strengthening of Puntland’s own rule of law and governance institutions, since its case for autonomy rests on demonstrating better governance, not merely more localized power.
The Eritrea Warning
The study draws a limited but pointed institutional parallel to the 1952–1962 Ethiopia–Eritrea federation, established under UN General Assembly Resolution 390(V) and dissolved by Ethiopia after a decade of eroded autonomy. The legal circumstances differ sharply from Puntland’s, and the lesson isn’t that Puntland is destined to repeat that history — it’s structural: when a political union depends on protected autonomy, dismantling that autonomy tends to radicalize rather than extinguish demands for self-government. The center centralizes to prevent fragmentation; the periphery reads centralization as proof autonomy can’t be trusted. Federalists become confederalists. Confederalists may become separatists.
The Bottom Line
Mogadishu holds legitimate national powers. Puntland holds legitimate constitutional autonomy. What Somalia lacks is a trusted institution to define the boundary between them. The study frames the stakes plainly: restore genuine federalism and Puntland has strong reasons to stay committed to Somali unity; let federalism become nominal and confederation becomes the rational response; foreclose both federalism and confederal accommodation, and separation becomes progressively more attractive. The greatest threat to Somali unity, the study concludes, may not come from those demanding autonomy — it may come from a center that, in the name of strengthening the state, dismantles the constitutional bargain that makes the state worth belonging to.

No Due Process At Sea: Turkey’s Unilateral Strikes And The Case For A U.S.-Puntland Alternative – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/31082026-no-due-process-at-sea-turkeys-unilateral-strikes-and-the-case-for-a-u-s-puntland-alternative-oped/

Garowe, Puntland, Somalia

By Ismail H. Warsame

Before Puntland existed as a political concept, the territory it now occupies was a patchwork of self-governing sultanates. The Sultanate of Hobyo (Obbia) and the Majeerteen Sultanate (Migiurtinia), along with the Nogal region, operated as Italian protectorates under treaties signed in 1889 and 1905. Italian oversight, on paper, was nominal — local rulers, Sultan Ali Yusuf in Hobyo and Boqor Osman Mahmoud in the Majeerteen Sultanate, retained internal sovereignty and their own armed forces.
That arrangement changed under Cesare Maria De Vecchi, conte di Val Cismon, who arrived in Mogadishu on Dec. 8, 1923, as governor of Italian Somalia. De Vecchi found a colony his predecessor had described as bankrupt and largely outside Italian control. His five-year governorship, which he later chronicled in his own book, “Orizzonti d’Impero,” centered on one overriding goal: unifying and centralizing power across a territory then split between the southern Benadir coast, Oltregiuba and the still-autonomous sultanates of the north.
The Campaign of the Sultanates
What followed was the so-called Campaign of the Sultanates, launched under Decree-Law No. 1551 of July 10, 1925, and carried out in three distinct phases. Italian forces first moved on Hobyo, subduing it between September 1925 and January 1926. The Nogal region followed, falling between April and July 1926. The final and most difficult phase targeted the Majeerteen Sultanate itself, from November 1926 to February 1927. De Vecchi declared the campaign complete on Feb. 28, 1927.
Boqor Osman Mahmoud did not surrender easily. As Italian forces closed in, he initially attempted to flee toward Ethiopia by way of the British Somaliland Protectorate. British authorities, acting at Italy’s request, intercepted him and handed him over to Italian custody at Laaso Dawaco, near Bosaso. He was brought to Mogadishu along with nearly 400 relatives and supporters, bringing organized Majeerteen resistance to a formal end on Oct. 18, 1927.
To wage the campaigns, De Vecchi organized a new indigenous auxiliary force, the Dubat, initially deployed as border units to help secure the colony’s still-contested frontiers.
A record written by its own author
Historian Luigi Goglia’s assessment of the period, cited in the Treccani biographical dictionary, is unsparing: De Vecchi’s methods in Somalia carried the terroristic hallmarks of Fascist squadrismo, and his dismantling of indirect rule over Hobyo and the Majeerteen marked him as one of the harshest colonial administrators to serve in Italian East Africa. “Orizzonti d’Impero” is De Vecchi’s own account of that record — self-authored and, as one Italian archival note on the book observes, self-celebratory. His own framing of the campaign’s successes should be weighed against that independent historiography.
The episode remains a foundational one for understanding how the territory now known as Puntland was folded into a unified Somali colonial administration — and how the political and clan fault lines drawn or hardened in that period continue to shape the region’s relationship with Mogadishu today.

Editor’s note: Most of this account relies on secondary Italian historiography (Treccani, ANPI, HistoriaRegni, Italia Coloniale) describing the contents of “Orizzonti d’Impero,” rather than direct excerpts from the digitized PDF itself, which could not be retrieved in this research session. The account of Boqor Osman Mahmoud’s flight and interception at Laaso Dawaco was supplied separately and should be attributed to its originating source if this runs under byline. For direct quotation or page-specific citation from the book, consult the digitized copy at arcadia.sba.uniroma3.it/handle/2307/2796.

By Ismail H. Warsame

Garowe, Puntland, Somalia; Toronto, Canada — The Cameroon-flagged cargo vessel MV Lutuf, hijacked by pirates on Aug. 17 off the coast of Puntland’s Nugaal region, is free. On that single fact, Mogadishu and Garowe agree. On almost everything else, they do not — and the gap between their two accounts says more about the state of Somali federalism than the piracy episode itself.
Somalia’s federal Ministry of Defence announced Saturday that the vessel, also referred to in some reporting as MV Latuf, had been freed after a 10-day operation conducted jointly by Turkish and Somali forces. The ministry said four pirate boats were destroyed and 14 alleged pirates were killed before the remaining hijackers abandoned the ship, allowing federal and Turkish forces to take control. The operation, the ministry said, fell under the defense cooperation agreement between Mogadishu and Ankara aimed at strengthening Somalia’s maritime security. The ministry did not detail the condition of the crew.
Puntland’s Ministry of Security tells a different story. On Aug. 30, it confirmed the vessel and its crew had regained their freedom — but it explicitly rejected the claim of a joint military operation. According to Puntland officials, representatives of the federal government and Turkey instead facilitated a ransom payment to the group holding the ship. The ministry said it had monitored communications between federal officials and the hijackers that it alleges were aimed at arranging the payment, and it warned that ransom payments undermine the international campaign against piracy and invite further hijackings.
Editor’s note: The ransom claim comes from a single source — Puntland’s Ministry of Security — and has not been independently corroborated as of this writing. Likewise, the federal government’s account of a 14-pirate death toll and a four-boat engagement has not been verified by independent documentation. Readers should treat both versions as competing official claims pending further confirmation.
What is not in dispute is the timeline. The Lutuf left the Turkish port of Tekirdag in late July and was seized Aug. 17 in waters near Jiifle, in the Eyl district of Nugaal, Puntland. A local elder from the Jiifle community told the Associated Press that the vessel and crew had been freed, without confirming the mechanism of release.
This is not the first time Mogadishu and Garowe have offered irreconcilable narratives about a maritime security incident on Puntland’s coast this month. It follows the Garmaal drone strike (Aug. 18-20) and the Gaala’ood speedboat incident (Aug. 23), both carried out under Turkish unilateral action and both contested in their casualty figures. The pattern is now familiar enough to name: when a security incident occurs in Puntland’s waters, the federal government and its Turkish partner assert operational success, and Puntland’s own security establishment either disputes the account outright or notes it was conducted without coordination through Puntland’s maritime institutions.
That pattern matters beyond this single vessel. Puntland has argued consistently — and I have argued in these pages — that unilateral Turkish operations conducted in coordination with Mogadishu but without Puntland’s maritime authorities are counterproductive, regardless of their tactical outcome. If Puntland’s ransom allegation holds up, it would suggest the federal government misrepresented not just the operational details but the entire character of the release, telling the public a story of force projection when the actual outcome was a negotiated payment. If the ransom claim does not hold up, it nonetheless reveals how completely trust between Garowe and Mogadishu has broken down — to the point that Puntland’s security establishment is prepared to publicly contradict a federal claim of military success with no immediate corroborating evidence of its own.
Either way, the resurgence of piracy off Puntland’s coast — now intersecting with contested claims about how, and on what terms, hijacked vessels are actually being freed — deserves scrutiny independent of whichever capital’s press release arrives first. This essay will be updated as independent verification becomes available.

The Baidoa Trap: AUSSOM Risks Becoming Mogadishu’s Political Enforcer – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/30082026-the-baidoa-trap-aussom-risks-becoming-mogadishus-political-enforcer-oped/

By Ismail H. Warsame
Garowe, Puntland, Somalia; Toronto, Canada

A memo does not normally announce a mission’s decline. But read closely, the African Union’s Aug. 21 directive authorizing the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) to join the Federal Government of Somalia’s “military operations against the Al-Shabaab terrorist group and its affiliate militias/armed entities” in Southwest State does exactly that. It is the paper trail of a mission searching for relevance in the final months of a mandate it may not survive to be renewed.

The facts of AUSSOM’s predicament are not in dispute. The United States informed the African Union on July 1 that it would end financial support for the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), AUSSOM’s logistical backbone, once the mission’s current authorization lapses Dec. 31. Troop-contributing nations met in Kampala July 29-31 to lobby for an 18- to 24-month extension. The UN Security Council’s Resolution 2809, adopted Dec. 23, 2025, keeps AUSSOM’s 11,826 uniformed personnel funded only through year’s end, “in the face of intensified attacks by Al-Shabaab” it was meant to help defeat. China’s delegate to the council called the funding gap “unsustainable.” That is the mission’s real condition: a clock running out, a donor walking away and a survival case still unmade to the Security Council that will decide its fate by December.
Set the memo against that backdrop and its purpose sharpens. The Commission “expresses utmost concern” over what it calls “growing alliance between local armed militias and the Al-Shabaab terrorist group” around Baidoa, and authorizes AUSSOM to fight both under a single banner. But what is actually unfolding in Baidoa is not, by the public record, a terrorist insurgency. It is the unfinished business of a federal takeover. Somalia’s army seized Baidoa in March, forcing Southwest State President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen to resign days after he had been re-elected to a term Mogadishu called illegal. Federal-backed elections installed Sheikh Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe as his successor June 10. Laftagareen never accepted his removal, and his loyalists, camped outside the city since, have attacked it repeatedly — most recently on Aug. 17, when Somalia’s Ministry of Defense said “nearly 30 attackers” were killed in a raid it attributed to “a mix of Al-Shabaab militants and militias loyal to” Laftagareen. Laftagareen’s spokesman rejected the label outright. No independent source has confirmed that any of the attackers, let alone most of them, actually belonged to Al-Shabaab rather than to a rival Somali political faction that lost a fight for power and wants it back.

That distinction is not a technicality. It is the difference between a counterterrorism mandate and a mandate to help one side of an intra-Somali succession dispute crush the other. AUSSOM’s own rules of engagement are grounded in the AU’s Policy on the Protection of Civilians and international humanitarian law. This same memo instructs AUSSOM to “maintain political neutrality and impartiality” and “steer clear of any political infighting” — a safeguard that exists precisely to prevent the conflation now underway. A mission that brands an ousted state president’s militia as Al-Shabaab, then deploys under its counterterrorism authority to finish him off, has not steered clear of political infighting. It has volunteered to conduct it.
Meanwhile the war AUSSOM was actually built to fight has not paused to wait for Baidoa’s politics to resolve. In the vicinity of Mogadishu, Al-Shabaab has recovered much of the ground Somali forces took from it in Middle Shabelle in the 2022-2025 offensives, and clan militia in Hiiraan are holding the countryside largely on their own, without the mobilization that produced the government’s earlier gains. Mogadishu’s own offensive into Galmudugh stalled this year for the same reason: a failure to organize the Ma’awisley the way it once did in Hiiraan and Middle Shabelle. That is where AUSSOM’s mandate says its war is. Instead, in the season when its funding is most in question and its case to Washington and the Security Council most urgent, the mission is lending its counterterrorism authority to a fight over who governs Baidoa.

This is not an analysis offered lightly. It is a serious charge, and it deserves a serious answer from Addis Ababa: Is AUSSOM fighting Al-Shabaab, or is it fighting Laftagareen and calling him Al-Shabaab because that label survives budget season in New York in a way “Somali political succession dispute” cannot? The Commission’s memo does not answer that question. It assumes it. Puntland, which has watched Mogadishu dismantle federal member states one by one while brokering a security agreement of its own with U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) on Aug. 2, has every reason to ask it plainly, and every reason not to accept a mission’s survival as sufficient justification for how that mission chooses its enemies.

The same suspicious circumstances now extend beyond Baidoa. Southwest State’s Security Minister, Osman Isaaq Mohamed, has publicly called on Kenya to arrest Laftagareen and hand him over through Interpol to the Somali government, accusing him of responsibility for the recent Baidoa attacks. Mogadishu’s federal government has not itself made the demand, but the administration the minister serves is Mogadishu’s own creation, installed in Baidoa by federal troops and answerable to Mogadishu in all but name. Laftagareen, who resigned and fled to Nairobi on March 30 after being violently overthrown, has been based there since, and Kenyan authorities have granted him no formal status beyond refuge. No court, in Kenya or Somalia, has ruled on the allegations against him. Handing over a man ousted by force, on an unproven accusation timed to a military campaign against his own loyalists, would be unfair and unforgivable. Kenya must be careful to avoid drawing itself into Somalia’s quarrel.
Lost in the maneuvering over mandates, labels and extraditions are the residents of Baidoa and the wider Southwest State, who did not choose this fight and cannot escape it. A hospital official told The Associated Press that four civilians were killed and 98 wounded, including 28 women, in the Aug. 17 clashes alone. People of good will, in Somalia and beyond, should not wait for the politics to resolve before helping those caught in the crossfire.

AUSSOM’s mandate runs out Dec. 31. Whether it runs out with dignity or without it will depend on whether the mission spends its final months fighting the insurgency degrading Somalia’s countryside, or spends them helping Mogadishu finish off a domestic rival under borrowed authority. The Commission owes the Somali people, and its own troop-contributing states, a clearer answer than the one in this memo.

Puntland’s Quiet Confederation: While Mogadishu Fights Over A Broken Constitution, Garowe Has Already Moved On – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/28082026-puntlands-quiet-confederation-while-mogadishu-fights-over-a-broken-constitution-garowe-has-already-moved-on-oped/

The Economist
Middle East & Africa | Irro’s gambit
“Somaliland wants to help secure the Red Sea”
Aug 20th 2026 | Nairobi

The Economist’s argument that Somaliland can help secure the Red Sea by trading military access and port facilities for recognition is more aspirational than credible. Somaliland does have strategic geography, an improving port at Berbera, and a leadership eager to leverage both for diplomatic gain. But the article overstates how much security influence a partially recognized entity can actually wield, and it underestimates the legal and political barriers that still define Somaliland’s place in the region.

Geography is not sovereignty

Somaliland’s coastline on the Gulf of Aden is undeniably valuable, and Berbera’s location gives it relevance in any discussion of Red Sea logistics or maritime security. Yet geography alone does not make a polity a dependable security partner in the way a recognized sovereign state can be. The article blurs the line between being strategically located and being politically capable of delivering binding security arrangements.

That distinction matters because Somaliland is still internationally disputed. Israel’s recognition in late 2025 made it the first country to formally recognize Somaliland, but the African Union immediately reaffirmed Somalia’s territorial integrity and called for that recognition to be revoked. In other words, Somaliland’s diplomatic status remains contested, and no amount of strategic self-promotion can erase that fact.

The Djibouti comparison fails

The article suggests Somaliland could become a new Djibouti, but that comparison is misleading. Djibouti hosts foreign military bases from recognized agreements backed by a sovereign government that is accepted by the international system, while Somaliland lacks the same legal standing and diplomatic depth. A base-hosting model depends not only on geography, but on legitimacy, enforceable contracts, and predictable external recognition.

Berbera may be expanding, and it may be attractive to outside powers, but that does not make Somaliland a substitute for Djibouti. Even if foreign governments quietly explore access there, a contested arrangement in Somaliland would remain politically fragile and easy to challenge by Mogadishu, the African Union, and regional rivals. The article treats possible interest as if it were settled capability.

Security leverage is overstated

The piece implies that Somaliland can contribute meaningfully to securing the Red Sea by offering bases to the United States and Israel. But Red Sea security is shaped by larger forces: the Houthi threat, Ethiopian maritime dependence, Gulf rivalries, U.S. strategy, and the Somalia-Ethiopia-Turkey-Israel web of competing interests. Somaliland can be one node in that system, but it cannot control the system.

The article also risks confusing symbolic diplomacy with operational readiness. A willingness to host foreign forces does not automatically translate into effective security provision, especially in a territory whose sovereignty is contested and whose neighbors view military entanglement there with suspicion. The result could be more instability, not less.

Recognition is not guaranteed

The strongest political claim in the article is that security cooperation will help unlock wider recognition. That is speculative at best. Somalia rejects Somaliland’s secession, the African Union rejects unilateral recognition, and broader international practice has so far held firm against endorsing Somaliland’s independence. Even Israel’s recognition did not change the basic reality that most states still treat Somaliland as part of Somalia.

So the article’s logic is inverted: it assumes that if Somaliland offers enough strategic value, recognition will follow. In practice, recognition is driven by international law, regional precedent, and geopolitical calculations that are far bigger than one port, one president, or one transactional security proposal. Somaliland may gain attention, but attention is not the same as statehood.

A more realistic reading

A fairer reading is that Somaliland is trying to convert its location into bargaining power. That is a rational strategy for a government seeking relevance, investment, and diplomatic visibility. But the article goes too far when it frames that strategy as evidence that Somaliland can help secure the Red Sea in a substantive, state-like way.

The better conclusion is simpler: Somaliland can offer geography, not guaranteed security; facilities, not sovereign authority; and political signaling, not recognition. The Economist piece is strongest as a report on ambition, but weak as an assessment of capability. Israeli recognition and Jewish lobbyists in the West cannot fake this reality on the ground.

The Unbalanced Approach Of Djibouti To The Somali Civil War – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/27082026-the-unbalanced-approach-of-djibouti-to-the-somali-civil-war-oped/

Mogadishu’s Curse: Why Somalia Must Neutralize Its Capital Or Replace It – OpEd https://www.eurasiareview.com/26082026-mogadishus-curse-why-somalia-must-neutralize-its-capital-or-replace-it-oped/

Three Men Who Shaped Modern Somalia And A Selective Memory Of Its Sultanates: Which Way Should Puntland Go? – Analysis https://www.eurasiareview.com/25082026-three-men-who-shaped-modern-somalia-and-a-selective-memory-of-its-sultanates-which-way-should-puntland-go-analysis/

https://www.eurasiareview.com/25082026-three-men-who-shaped-modern-somalia-and-a-selective-memory-of-its-sultanates-which-way-should-puntland-go-analysis/

Garowe, Puntland, Somalia — Local reports say eight men were killed Sunday afternoon in an attack by a Turkish military speedboat at a coastal area known as Gaala’ood, located between Eyl and Garacad in Puntland’s Nugaal region. Neither Puntland authorities nor Turkish officials have commented on the incident.
If confirmed, the incident would mark a second deadly encounter in the same stretch of coastline within a week, following the August 18–20 drone strike near Garmaal that killed four men after a small boat delivered supplies to the hijacked cargo vessel M/V LUTUF. That earlier strike, also unconfirmed by Turkish authorities, prompted Puntland’s Ministry of Security to demand clarification and warn that unexplained foreign military operations in its waters could damage security cooperation with international partners.
Today’s reported incident differs in method from the earlier strike — local accounts describe a direct engagement by a speedboat rather than an aerial or drone strike — raising questions about whether foreign naval forces are now conducting closer-range operations along the coast in addition to aerial surveillance and strikes.
No details have yet emerged on the identities of those killed, whether they were fishermen or suspected pirates, or the precise circumstances of the encounter. Community elders in the Garmaal case strongly disputed that the earlier victims were pirates, insisting they were ordinary fishermen; similar disputes may arise here pending confirmation.

By Ismail H. Warsame

Garowe, Puntland, Somalia
There is a particular cruelty in discovery arriving decades after neglect. President Said Abdullahi Deni’s working visit to Mudugh region, now into its second week and still underway, has taken him from Galkayo through Balibusle and Seemade, with Jeriban and the port town of Gara’ad still ahead on the itinerary. This is not simply a tour of a neglected province. It is a double exposure, in the photographic sense: two images superimposed on a single frame, each one indicting the other. And its extended duration is itself part of the exposure — a president who has needed more than a week to traverse the scale of what his own state left unattended.
The first exposure is institutional. It is the record of every Puntland administration since the state’s founding under President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed in 1998 — a record of a region treated as peripheral to a state it helped build. The second exposure is human. It is the resilience of a community that gave Puntland its founding legitimacy in blood and sacrifice, and then was left to govern its own survival while Garowe looked elsewhere.

A debt older than the state
Mudugh’s claim on Puntland is not sentimental. It is foundational. The residents of this region were among the backbone of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, the resistance movement that bore the weight of Siyad Barre’s repression in the 1980s and paid for it in displacement, imprisonment and death. When Puntland was declared in 1998, it was built on the political and military capital that communities like Mudugh’s had already spent.
That contribution did not end with the state’s founding. In the chaotic 1990s, as General Mohamed Farah Aideed’s United Somali Congress militia pushed into central Somalia, it was residents of Galkayo who stood in its way and defended the town against a force that had already shown what it could do to those who could not resist it. This was not a contribution asked for by any government. It was a community defending itself because no state existed yet to defend it — and later, because the state that did exist chose not to.
Mudugh’s community also resisted what is locally known as “Udub-riix” — a Somali term describing the slow, engineered displacement of one community from its native land by another, a hostile takeover of a locality achieved not by open conflict but by attrition. That the community had to organize against this quieter form of dispossession, in addition to militia incursion, is a measure of how many fronts it has had to defend at once, largely without state support.
That is the second exposure: a population that fought for Puntland’s creation and then, for the better part of three decades, was left to fend for itself in security, in basic services and in what the essay’s own framing rightly calls “a modicum of existence.” No state should require this level of self-reliance from the very communities that made its existence possible.

What the route reveals
The itinerary itself tells the story better than any communique could. Galkayo to Balibusle to Seemade, with Jeriban and the port town of Gara’ad still to come — this is not a ceremonial circuit. It is a transect through underdevelopment, each stop a data point in a pattern of dashed expectations, and the fact that a full week has not exhausted the list of neglected towns is itself the finding. A visiting president moving through these towns is, whether intended or not, conducting an audit of his predecessors and of his own government’s record to date. The evidence does not flatter any of them.
Gara’ad, still ahead on the route, will be instructive on its own when the president reaches it. It is one of five natural deep-sea ports in the Horn of Africa, alongside Djibouti, Berbera, Lamu and Mombasa — a  seaport that should place it among the region’s premier trade assets. Instead, Gara’ad has no outlet road adequate to receive and dispatch goods and services, leaving a deep-sea harbor stranded from the very trade routes it was built by nature to serve. A port town on Puntland’s coast should be an asset — a node of trade, revenue and connectivity to the region it serves. Instead it stands as a symbol of potential deferred, much like Bosaso’s own long-contested development has shown what happens when state attention is inconsistent and often reactive rather than planned. Coastal access without state investment is not an asset. It is a missed opportunity with a view, and whether Gara’ad’s stop produces more than another photograph will be a fair test of what this entire visit was for.

Discovery is not delivery
There is a temptation, common to visiting heads of state everywhere, to treat the act of witnessing as itself a form of remedy — as though acknowledgment discharges the obligation that neglect created. It does not. President Deni is, by this account, discovering both the spirit of Mudugh’s community and the scale of the state’s failure toward it, and he is still discovering it: the visit has not yet concluded, and its final leg through Jeriban to Gara’ad will determine whether this becomes a turning point or simply the longest photo opportunity in Puntland’s recent history. That discovery is necessary. It is not sufficient.
The honest question the essay poses — is it too little, too late — deserves an honest answer, and the answer is that it depends entirely on what follows the visit, not on the visit itself. A presidential convoy through backward towns of Balibusle and Seemade changes nothing structurally. What would change something is a resourced plan: investment in Gara’ad’s port capacity, security infrastructure that does not depend on communities arming and organizing themselves, and a budgetary commitment that treats Mudugh as a shareholder in Puntland’s prosperity rather than a periodic photo opportunity.
Puntland was not built by Garowe alone. It was built by the SSDF’s fighters and by the towns that stood against Aideed’s militia without being asked and without being paid. A state that forgets the ledger of its own founding does so at the cost of its legitimacy in the regions that underwrote it. Mudugh’s patience has already been extraordinary. It should not be mistaken for infinite.
Ismail H. Warsame is the founder of the Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN) and Warsame Digital Media (WDM). He served as founding Chief of Staff and Director General at the Puntland State Presidency (1998-2004) and is co-author of the 2019 WardheerNews policy paper calling for confederation and warning against constitutional term extension. He writes on Somali federal politics, Puntland governance and Horn of Africa security.

When you read WDM, ask yourself a simple question: did you pay for it? No. You didn’t. And yet you carry yourself like some silent saint — reading in the shadows, lips sealed, hands idle, eyes pretending to be innocent. What is this hypocrisy? You don’t pay, you don’t comment, you don’t share — yet you soak up the fire like a sponge and walk away as if glancing through a few paragraphs was a favor you did WDM.
Do you think WDM survives in your silence? Do you imagine that truth spreads itself while readers sit on their hands? This is the tragedy: our readers behave like the Somali opposition — thunderous in private WhatsApp groups, invisible in public stance. They consume, they nod in agreement over tea, but when it comes to standing up and being counted, they fold like a cheap umbrella in the first gust of wind.
This isn’t gratitude. It’s graveyard silence. You read essays meant to enlighten, to warn, to arm you with truth in a season of lies — and you don’t light a single candle of reaction. Not even the flicker of a “like.” Not even the courage of a simple share. You read, you nod to yourself in secret, and then you lock the truth away in your head like contraband, as if knowledge were something to hoard rather than something to spread.
What is your measure of gratitude — to scroll past and vanish? Do you think knowledge grows stronger buried under your mattress, untouched, unspoken? While you hide behind your silence, the enemies of truth are counting their blessings. Every reader who consumes and disappears is a small victory handed to them for free. Cowardice dressed up as neutrality is still cowardice.
Reading without engaging is like going to a wedding, eating the food, and sneaking out the back without clapping for the bride and groom. It is worse than that, even — it is like attending a funeral, sitting through the prayers, and refusing to say “Innaa Lillahi wa innaa ilayhi raaji’uun.” What kind of guest behaves this way? What kind of audience?
WDM writes so that Somalis — at home and in the diaspora, in Garowe and in Toronto, in Mogadishu and in Minneapolis — might see their politics more clearly than the propaganda machines want them to. But the truth was never meant to travel a one-way street. If you believe silence is neutral, you are mistaken. Silence is not neutrality — it is complicity with ignorance. It is betrayal of the very enlightenment you just quietly consumed and quietly walked away with.
So here is the challenge, plain and unadorned: break the chains of mute readership. If you can’t pay, at least react. If you can’t contribute, at least share. If you can’t fight for the truth in public, at least stand up in the small way available to you and clap. WDM does not ask for your blood, your money, or your name in lights. It asks for your finger on the “share” button — the smallest act of courage there is, and still too much for too many.
Remember this, and remember it well: reading in silence doesn’t make you a thinker. It makes you a ghost — present in the room, invisible in the struggle, and utterly unaccounted for when history asks who stood where.

A WDM Editorial

Garowe, Puntland, Somalia; Toronto, Canada
A social media post attributed to Ethiopia’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (IFA), reportedly showing Somaliland separated from or erasing Somalia, has again set off alarm across Somali social media. WDM has not independently viewed the clip in question, and readers should treat the specific image’s content and date as unconfirmed pending direct verification. What can be established, and what matters more than any single graphic, is the institutional and historical context the incident sits inside.
The pattern is real
This is not the first time. In May 2019, Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a map that erased Somalia altogether while showing Somaliland as a separate entity. The ministry apologized within days, saying the map had “crept” onto its website and calling the error “unacceptable.” No one at the time offered a convincing account of how a map with that specific configuration, Somalia gone, Somaliland present, made it onto an official government platform by accident.
Seven years on, the recurrence of a similar visual from IFA lands differently. IFA is not a random commentator. By its own account, it operates as a think tank within Ethiopia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tasked with shaping the country’s foreign policy positions. That institutional link is worth stating plainly rather than assuming: it means Mogadishu has standing to demand an official response, not just a deleted post, and it means Addis Ababa cannot dismiss the episode as the work of an unaffiliated blogger. It is also fair to note, for balance, that IFA’s own social media presence describes itself as “independent,” a tension between self-description and institutional reality that any formal Somali complaint should point to directly rather than paper over.
Why the timing matters
Whatever the truth of this specific image, it arrives against a documented sequence that gives it weight:
January 2024: Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland for Red Sea access, which Somaliland’s leadership described as including Ethiopian recognition in exchange for a 50-year lease. Mogadishu called it a violation of its territorial sovereignty.
December 11, 2024: Under Turkish mediation, Ethiopia and Somalia signed the Ankara Declaration, in which both governments “reaffirmed their respect and commitment to one another’s sovereignty, unity, independence, and territorial integrity,” with any Ethiopian sea access to be negotiated while respecting Somalia’s territorial integrity.
Ongoing: Ethiopia remains one of AUSSOM’s principal troop contributors, with roughly 2,500 personnel authorized under the mission, a security relationship Mogadishu still needs even as it disputes Addis Ababa’s conduct elsewhere.
A map that dissolves Somalia’s borders, published by an institution sitting inside the same ministry that signed Ankara, does not square with the spirit of that declaration. Whether the specific image reflects deliberate signaling or institutional carelessness, the recurrence itself is the story: this is the second documented instance of an official Ethiopian platform erasing Somalia while recognizing Somaliland, not an isolated glitch.
What actually works
The instinct to demand expulsion of Ethiopian troops or a severed embassy is understandable and, on the present facts, premature. Ethiopia’s AUSSOM presence is a security cost Somalia still needs while its own forces mature, not a favor Addis Ababa is extending. Trading that leverage away in anger would cost Mogadishu more than it costs Addis Ababa.
The more durable response is institutional:
A formal démarche, not a social media statement, demanding written correction from both IFA and Ethiopia’s Foreign Ministry, citing Ankara explicitly and requiring the archive itself be corrected.
A standing cartographic verification unit inside the Foreign Ministry, tasked with monitoring Ethiopian government, African Union, and commercial airline materials for recurring sovereignty errors, with each instance dated and archived for AU and UN reference.
Keeping tracks separate. Bilateral maritime negotiations with Ethiopia should proceed on their own track, distinct from AUSSOM’s security architecture. Conflating the two hands Addis Ababa a lever it should not have.
Closing the internal gap. As long as Mogadishu-Hargeisa dialogue stays frozen, external actors will keep exploiting the ambiguity. Sovereignty is asserted abroad, but it is secured, or lost, at home.
For the Somali public and diaspora, the useful response is documentation over amplification: archive the material, report it through official channels, and press diaspora representatives to reaffirm the Ankara framework rather than call for unilateral escalation. Somali GIS experts, historians, and legal scholars producing authoritative multilingual maps, in Somali, English, Arabic, Amharic, and Turkish, would do more to settle this argument permanently than any volume of outraged reposting.
Firmness on sovereignty and discipline in defending it are not in tension. They are the only combination that has ever worked.

Editor’s note: This piece synthesizes and fact-checks a WAPMEN subscriber discussion thread. The specific social media clip described by the original poster has not been independently viewed by WDM; institutional and historical claims above have been verified against primary and contemporaneous news sources.

https://www.eurasiareview.com/20082026-eliminating-the-strongman-system-somalias-unfinished-constitutional-task-oped/

By Ismail H. Warsame
Garowe, Puntland, Somalia; Toronto, Canada
ismailwarsame@gmail.com | @ismailwarsame

Editor’s note: This is a developing story. Casualty figures and territorial control claims below come from Somalia’s Defense Ministry, Reuters, The Associated Press and regional outlets including Hiiraan Online and Radio Shabelle. Claims made by spokesmen for ousted South West State President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen have not been independently verified and are identified as such.

Baidoa, the administrative capital of South West State, came under assault Aug. 17 in the most violent episode yet of a political rupture that has been building in Mogadishu’s relationship with its federal member states since March.
Somalia’s Defense Ministry said the attack began around 5 a.m. local time, when militia loyal to Laftagareen and fighters from Al-Shabaab struck military positions using two vehicles rigged with explosives. Federal troops repelled the assault and said they killed nearly 30 attackers. A hospital official in Baidoa told the AP the fighting also killed four civilians and wounded 98 others, including 28 women. Laftagareen’s spokesman disputed the government’s account and claimed, in a Facebook post that could not be independently confirmed, that his forces had captured parts of the city and called on federal troops to surrender. Federal and regional officials denied that claim and said security operations were ongoing to clear remaining fighters.
However the competing claims settle, one fact is not in dispute: This was not a spontaneous eruption. It is the latest, and by far the bloodiest, in a string of attacks Laftagareen-aligned militia have carried out against federal and Southwest security forces since the March 30 takeover. Fighting broke out May 22 on Baidoa’s northern outskirts, at Idoow Dhagoole, when Southwest forces said they foiled an attempted militia incursion. Eight days later, on May 30, Laftagareen fighters entered the city at dawn and briefly seized the Afar Irdood junction in central Baidoa, disrupting security around the presidential palace and airport before withdrawing; regional officials put the death toll at six to eight. Bay region’s police commander said at the time the city had been “fully secured,” a claim federal and regional authorities would have to repeat within weeks.
How Baidoa got here
South West State had functioned, however imperfectly, as one of Somalia’s more stable federal member states under Laftagareen, who had governed since December 2018. That stability cracked in March, when Somalia’s federal parliament passed constitutional amendments extending the terms of federal institutions from four years to five. Puntland, Jubaland and other federal member states rejected the amendments as adopted without national consensus. Laftagareen sided with them, withdrawing his support for President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s electoral roadmap.
When South West’s regional parliament moved to re-elect Laftagareen under its own timeline on March 28, the federal government declared the vote illegal. Two days later, federal troops entered Baidoa alongside armed groups aligned with Laftagareen’s regional opponents. At least two people were killed and 25 wounded in that clash. Laftagareen resigned hours later, then reversed himself from exile in Nairobi, saying he had been “pushed out illegally” and remained South West’s legitimate president. Sheikh Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe was installed in his place June 10, elected by the regional assembly with 88 of 90 votes cast.
The pattern is now familiar across Somalia’s federal system: A member state resists a Villa Somalia-driven timeline or policy, and Mogadishu answers not through negotiation but through the deployment of national forces to install a more compliant administration. Puntland has resisted the same pressure through political and military disengagement rather than confrontation. Jubaland’s relationship with Mogadishu has followed a similarly adversarial arc. South West State, lacking Puntland’s institutional depth or Jubaland’s armed autonomy, could not resist in the same way — and so the confrontation moved from parliamentary maneuvering to gunfire in Baidoa’s streets.
Regional stakes
Baidoa’s instability is not purely a Somali internal affair. The city sits inside what regional analysts describe as Ethiopia’s southern “buffer belt” — a security zone running through Bay, Bakool, Gedo and Hiiraan regions that Addis Ababa has long treated as a forward line protecting its own territory from Al-Shabaab infiltration and cross-border insurgent movement. Ethiopian troops operating under the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia have for years helped secure Baidoa Airport, though reports from July indicated Ethiopian forces there had been instructed to withdraw amid speculation that Egyptian troops, newly authorized as AUSSOM contributors, could take their place — a realignment that adds a layer of strategic anxiety in Addis Ababa on top of the security fallout from renewed fighting. Kenya, which has stationed troops in Somalia’s south under the same AU mission and remains sensitive to any spillover that could destabilize its own border areas, is likewise watching the Southwest crisis as part of a wider pattern of federal-versus-state confrontations, alongside Jubaland’s parallel standoff with Mogadishu over Gedo, that could unsettle the security architecture both Addis Ababa and Nairobi have built along their frontiers with Somalia.
What comes next
President Mohamud’s own mandate, under the original 2012 Provisional Constitution’s four-year timetable, expired May 15. Villa Somalia argues the March amendments retroactively extend that mandate to 2027; Puntland, Jubaland and South West’s opposition reject that reading. That unresolved dispute over the legitimacy of the federal government itself sits underneath every subsequent escalation, including Monday’s attack on Baidoa.
Baidoa is not an isolated flashpoint. It is a proof point. If Mogadishu can use national forces to settle a succession dispute in one federal member state, the same logic can be applied elsewhere — and Puntland’s own wariness toward federal overreach becomes harder to dismiss as posturing.
This is a developing story and will be updated as verified information becomes available.

By Ismail H. Warsame/Garowe/Toronto
President

Hassan Sheikh Mohamud says his visit to Galmudug carried “a clear message of peace & unity” and reaffirmed a commitment to security, state-building, democratic transition and a prosperous Somalia.
Fine words. But in southern Galkayo, the camera lenses appear considerably less diplomatic.
Look at the photographs released from the visit. Forget the prepared statement for a moment. Forget the carefully arranged greetings, the political choreography and the familiar vocabulary of peace, unity, security and prosperity. Look instead at the security posture surrounding the presidential movement.
The pictures show a heavily guarded visit. Uniformed personnel are conspicuous. Security appears tight around the President and his entourage. Whatever the precise operational reasons for those precautions, the visual impression is unmistakable: this does not resemble the relaxed arrival of a national leader visiting a politically settled city. It resembles the movement of a president through territory regarded by his own security apparatus as sensitive.
There lies the irony.
Peace Arrives Surrounded by Guns
President Hassan Sheikh tells Somalis that he has brought Galkayo a message of peace. Yet peace apparently required an impressive escort of armed men.
Perhaps this is Somalia’s newest political doctrine: peace must travel in a military convoy.
No sensible person objects to presidential security. Somalia remains a dangerous country, and any Somali president requires protection wherever he travels. But Galkayo is not just another destination on the presidential itinerary. It is a historically divided and politically delicate city, administered by Puntland in the north and Galmudug in the south. Every presidential movement there carries symbolism far beyond an airport reception.
That is precisely why appearances matter.
A federal president genuinely seeking to lower tensions around Galkayo should look like a mediator between Somali communities, not a political commander inspecting one side of a strategic fault line.
The distinction is fundamental.
A President of Somalia—or President of One Side?
The presidency of the Federal Republic is supposed to stand above the quarrels of Federal Member States. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is constitutionally the president of the entire federation, not merely the political patron of administrations friendly to Villa Somalia.
Southern Galkayo therefore presents him with a test of statesmanship.
If the purpose is peace, where is the visible federal effort to engage both administrations sharing this troubled city? Where is the corresponding political outreach to Puntland? Where is the unmistakable signal that Villa Somalia understands the extraordinary sensitivity of moving presidential politics into one half of a divided urban community?
You cannot preach national reconciliation while appearing politically comfortable on only one side of a divided city.
Galkayo has buried too many people for such theatre.
The Camera Has No Press Secretary
Politicians have an advantage over photographs: politicians can explain themselves.
Photographs cannot.
A presidential communications office can write that a visit represents peace, prosperity, democracy and national unity. A camera merely records what stood before its lens.
And sometimes the camera becomes the most inconvenient journalist in the country.
The images from southern Galkayo do not prove that Hassan Sheikh came seeking confrontation, and it would be irresponsible to claim that they do. But they certainly illustrate the atmosphere of security and political sensitivity surrounding the visit. That atmosphere cannot simply be erased by attaching the word peace to a social-media statement.
The question therefore is not whether the President had soldiers protecting him. Of course he did.
The question is why a visit advertised as a national peace mission should take place in such a politically charged environment without an equally visible effort to reassure the other administration governing the same city.
That is where the political problem begins.
Puntland Is Watching
Puntland authorities are undoubtedly watching developments around southern Galkayo closely. They would be negligent if they were not.
Galkayo is not an ordinary border town. It is a divided city whose stability depends upon restraint, communication and a careful political equilibrium between Puntland and Galmudug. Miscalculation by either administration—or intervention by Mogadishu perceived as favouring one side—could disturb an arrangement purchased through years of painful experience.
This is therefore no place for political muscle-flexing.
If Villa Somalia intends reconciliation, it should communicate directly and transparently with Garowe. If it intends security cooperation, that cooperation should respect federal jurisdictions. And if Hassan Sheikh genuinely wishes to demonstrate national leadership, he should behave not as the political ally of one administration but as the president responsible for citizens on both sides of Galkayo.
That would be statesmanship.
Everything else is photography.
Prosperity Cannot Be Declared From a Podium
There is another irony in the presidential message.
Somalia is forever being promised prosperity by politicians surrounded by machine guns.
Prosperity, unfortunately, has stubborn requirements. It needs predictable government, functioning institutions, secure roads, investment, independent courts, political accommodation and citizens confident enough to build businesses without wondering which armed dispute will erupt next.
It cannot be announced into existence.
Neither can democratic transition.
Nor can national unity.
These things are constructed painstakingly through political compromise and institutional behaviour. They are especially fragile in places such as Galkayo, where irresponsible national politics can reopen wounds that local communities have spent years trying to close.
Leave Galkayo’s Peace Alone
Galkayo does not need another political experiment imported from Mogadishu.
Its people need commerce, roads, schools, functioning municipal institutions, freedom of movement and cooperation between the two administrations. They need the city gradually transformed from a symbol of Somali division into an example of how divided communities can nevertheless coexist.
The Federal President could contribute enormously to that objective.
But first he must demonstrate that his presidency belongs equally to the people north and south of Galkayo.
Peace cannot arrive wearing the colours of one political camp. Unity cannot be proclaimed while federal relationships deteriorate. And prosperity cannot be photographed into existence.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud says his visit carried a message of peace.
Good.
Now comes the harder part:
Make the politics look like the message.
Because in southern Galkayo, the cameras have already delivered their own communiqué.

By Ismail H. Warsame

GALKAYO, Somalia — On Monday, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud stood at Abdullahi Issa Stadium in the Galmudugh-administered south of Galkayo and asked residents to protect the peace of a city he could not fully enter. He had traveled by road from Dhusamareb with Galmudugh President Ahmed Abdi Kariye “Qoorqoor,” was received by a large crowd, and spoke of unity, reconciliation and Somalia’s state-building project. He did not cross into the Puntland-administered north. Puntland authorities, who had placed their security forces on heightened alert days earlier and accused the president of courting “discord and conflict,” made certain of it.
That image — a head of state confined to one half of a city that shares a single name, a shared economy and, in places, a single street — is the story of Somalia’s federal crisis in miniature. It also is not new. It is the latest chapter in a rupture that has been building for years and has now hardened into something close to formal non-recognition.
A divided city with a long memory
Galkayo has been split along a rough administrative line since the mid-1990s conflicts between the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, precursor to Puntland’s founding administration, and Habar Gidir sub-clan militias who would later anchor Galmudugh. The north fell under Puntland’s jurisdiction when the state was established in 1998; the south evolved into Galmudugh’s commercial and political center after that administration’s creation in 2006. Neighborhoods such as Baraxley, on the Puntland side, have long stood as reference points for how finely drawn — and how contested — the boundary remains. A 2020 suicide bombing at the very stadium where Mohamud spoke Monday, which killed 17 people including senior military officers, is a reminder of how quickly Galkayo’s fault lines have turned lethal.
What makes this month’s visit different is the political context surrounding it. Puntland has, since March 2024, operated as a self-governing state that no longer recognizes Mogadishu’s authority over its territory, a position hardened by the federal government’s move to extend its own mandate through constitutional amendment rather than election. Puntland has rejected that extension as illegitimate, and Deni’s administration treats Mohamud’s presidency as having outlived its constitutional term. Set against that backdrop, a presidential visit to any part of Galkayo was never going to be received in Garowe as a routine goodwill tour. Puntland’s Thursday-night statement warning that Mohamud would be “held responsible for any consequences” reads less like diplomatic caution than a line drawn in the sand.
Provocation, or the optics of one
Puntland’s account and the president’s own remarks in Galkayo do not fully align. Officials in Garowe have accused Mohamud of deploying federal troops and weapons along the Puntland-Galmudugh boundary to inflame tensions — a charge echoed by the opposition Future Somalia Council, which has called on Mogadishu to withdraw forces from the area. Mohamud’s public message in the stadium, by contrast, was one of reconciliation: he urged residents to preserve the peace Galkayo has built and warned against a return to the armed conflict that has repeatedly scarred the city. Somalis watching this unfold are entitled to ask which is the truer signal — the words spoken to a crowd, or the movement of forces reported along the line dividing it. Details of exactly how closely Puntland’s security establishment monitored the visit from across that line remain, as of this writing, informal and unconfirmed by independent reporting; they belong in the category of atmosphere rather than fact until corroborated.
What is verifiable is this: the president who once, under his predecessor’s tenure, could move freely across Galkayo now cannot. Former President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed crossed the dividing line during his term. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, by every account of this visit, did not attempt to.
Deni crosses back to the north
By Monday afternoon, President Deni had returned to the Puntland-controlled north of Galkayo, positioning himself directly across the dividing line from the stadium where Mohamud addressed the crowd. From there, according to reporting reaching WAPMEN, Deni renewed his warnings to the federal president, reiterating that Puntland holds Mohamud personally responsible for any escalation arising from the visit or from the movement of federal-aligned forces in Mudugh. The optics are difficult to overstate: two men who each claim to speak for the Somali state, positioned on opposite sides of the same city, each unwilling to set foot on the other’s ground. Independent, dated confirmation of Deni’s precise movements and statements from Monday was still emerging at the time of writing, and should be treated as developing until corroborated by named on-the-record sources.
Why it matters beyond Galkayo
The symbolism should not be mistaken for the substance. Puntland’s containment of the president to the Galmudugh half of Galkayo is consistent with a broader pattern this summer — the dismantling of federally aligned paramilitary elements in Mudugh, the expansion of security cooperation with Washington at Bosaso, and Garowe’s insistence that Mogadishu’s writ no longer extends to Puntland’s institutions or its territory. Each episode reinforces the same argument: that federalism, as designed in Somalia’s provisional constitution, is being tested past its structural limits by a government whose own legitimacy is now openly disputed by one of its largest member states.
A president who can visit only the half of a city his rivals allow him to visit is not projecting national authority. He is illustrating its absence. Somalia’s partners — the African Union, the United States, the United Nations Assistance Mission — would do well to read Monday’s stadium speech not as a sign of resilience, but as evidence that the political settlement holding the federal republic together has, in Galkayo at least, already come apart.
Garowe, Puntland, Somalia; Toronto, Canada.

Editor’s note: Reporting on troop movements and direct observation of the president’s visit from Puntland-controlled territory is drawn from Puntland government statements and regional outlets (Horseed Media, Hiiraan Online, Kaab TV, WardheerNews, allAfrica, Aug. 14-18, 2026) and has not been independently verified beyond those sources. Deni’s reported return to northern Galkayo and renewed warnings on Aug. 18 reflect information reaching WAPMEN and remain unconfirmed by named on-the-record sources at publication. This is a developing story; details will be updated as confirmed reporting emerges.
Contact: ismailwarsame@gmail.com

Why Turkey’s Personality-Based Diplomacy In Somalia Will Eventually Backfire – Analysis https://www.eurasiareview.com/17082026-why-turkeys-personality-based-diplomacy-in-somalia-will-eventually-backfire-analysis/

By Ismail H. Warsame/Garowe/Toronto

There are political defeats announced at press conferences, and there are defeats revealed by abandoned camps, surrendered weapons and disappearing columns of armed men. What unfolded across Puntland in recent weeks belongs firmly to the second category.
In barely three weeks, Puntland State dismantled what it describes as a federally sponsored parallel security network operating inside its jurisdiction. What began with defections and armed confrontation ended with bases abandoned, fighters surrendering or integrating into Puntland forces, and federal-aligned commanders reconsidering their loyalties.
Villa Somalia may dispute Puntland’s interpretation. What is much harder to dispute is the outcome: the parallel armed structure challenging Garowe’s authority has largely disappeared from Puntland territory.
That is no small development.
The Collapse Came Quickly
The unraveling accelerated around July 20, when Puntland forces intercepted a PSF column near Laag, capturing fighters and thirteen vehicles. It was an early indication that the armed formation confronting Puntland authorities was losing both territorial freedom and organisational cohesion.
Then came the defections.
Scores of fighters crossed over near Galkayo airport. More surrendered around Bosaso. Bases that had once projected defiance began emptying.
By August 4–5, Galkayo had become the most dangerous point of confrontation. Puntland forces and the remaining federal-aligned elements faced one another in a city already carrying enough historical baggage to make any armed adventure there reckless.
A child reportedly died during the violence. That death must remain part of the record. Political victories should never turn civilian casualties into footnotes.
Puntland nevertheless moved decisively.
On August 5, the government issued a 48-hour ultimatum to armed formations operating outside its security command: surrender, integrate or face enforcement action. Politicians and officials accused of supporting parallel forces were warned of possible prosecution.
The message was unmistakable:
Puntland would no longer tolerate two governments, two chains of command and two competing security authorities inside one state.
What followed was less a prolonged battle than an institutional collapse.
A key PSF position in Bosaso was vacated. Federal-aligned forces in Armo withdrew. Remaining forces holding camps north of Galkayo subsequently abandoned their positions and moved southward.
The militia architecture that had taken money, political effort and recruitment to assemble came apart with remarkable speed.
Danab, Takar and the Limits of Parallel Command
The story did not end with the PSF.
At Ligle camp outside Garowe, Brigadier General Jimcaale Jaamac Takar had commanded forces associated with the federal security structure while operating beyond Puntland’s normal chain of command.
That arrangement was always politically combustible.
Following mediation by Nugaal traditional elders and a committee chaired by former Puntland President Senator Abdirahman Mohamed Farole, Takar agreed to return his forces to Puntland’s security structure and register them under the Daraawiish command.
This was perhaps more significant than capturing another military camp.
Puntland achieved through negotiation what otherwise might have required another confrontation.
There is a lesson here for both Garowe and Mogadishu: Somalia cannot build national security by manufacturing competing armies inside federal member states.
A national army cannot become a national institution if every political dispute produces another battalion, another commander, another payroll and another flag of convenience.
The Bigger Problem: Clan Militias
Puntland should resist the temptation to declare the job finished.
Federal-aligned formations were only part of a much older security problem.
Galkayo, Bosaso, Qardho, Garowe and other Puntland centres have struggled with armed groups whose loyalties are sometimes stronger toward subclan, politician or patron than toward constitutional authority. Revenge killings, privately maintained battle wagons and politically connected militias did not originate with Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, and they will not disappear merely because the PSF confrontation has subsided.
WDM has repeatedly argued precisely this point.
If Puntland insists that Mogadishu cannot maintain an armed organisation outside Puntland’s lawful chain of command, Garowe must apply exactly the same principle to everybody else.
There cannot be one law for a federally sponsored militia and another for the battle wagons parked behind the compound of an influential businessman, politician or clan notable.
One Puntland requires one constitutional security authority.
No exceptions.
From Defeat to Demobilisation
Perhaps the most consequential part of Puntland’s response has been what happened after the surrender.
Instead of treating every former fighter as a permanent enemy, Puntland has begun registering, retraining and absorbing eligible personnel into its own security institutions.
That is the correct institutional instinct.
The fighter is not necessarily the political project that recruited him.
Many young men carrying rifles in Somalia follow salaries, commanders, clan pressure or immediate circumstances rather than sophisticated constitutional theories. Punishing an entire rank and file for the political calculations of those who organised them would merely manufacture another pool of disgruntled armed men.
Disarm them. Vet them. Train them. Discipline them. Put them under one lawful command.
That is how a militia disappears.
Simply chasing it into another district is not demobilisation.
Puntland had every political reason to regard these men as adversaries. Instead, absorbing those willing to submit to state authority turns yesterday’s security problem into tomorrow’s institutional asset.
That is not weakness.
It is statecraft.
Villa Somalia Has Questions to Answer
This episode raises questions extending far beyond Puntland.
Why was the Federal Government supporting or maintaining security formations inside a federal member state with which it was already engaged in a profound constitutional dispute?
What national security objective required competing armed command structures in Bosaso, Garowe or Galkayo?
Why was political dialogue apparently less attractive than recruitment?
And if internationally donated police equipment was indeed redirected into these formations, another question becomes unavoidable: were resources intended to strengthen Somalia’s national security institutions being used in an internal political confrontation?
Somalia has Al-Shabaab controlling territory. ISIS has demonstrated its capacity in the northeast. The country remains dependent upon international security assistance.
Under those circumstances, spending scarce resources constructing parallel security structures against a federal member state is not national security.
It is political adventurism dressed in uniform.
Raskamboni Was the Warning
There is also an uncomfortable precedent.
The Raskamboni confrontation in Jubaland demonstrated the danger of deploying federally controlled forces into an unresolved political dispute with a federal member state. Large numbers of Somali National Army personnel were displaced, surrendered or crossed into Kenya during that confrontation.
Whatever competing narratives surround Raskamboni, one lesson should have been obvious:
The Somali National Army cannot become Villa Somalia’s enforcement department for settling federal political disagreements.
A national army belongs to the nation.
Once soldiers are perceived as instruments for removing regional administrations, intimidating political opponents or restructuring local power arrangements, the institution ceases to look national to the communities it is supposed to defend.
Puntland has now delivered essentially the same warning from another direction.
Once may be dismissed as a mistake.
Twice begins to look like policy.
Mogadishu’s Expensive Nothing
And what exactly does Villa Somalia have to show for this Puntland adventure?
Empty camps.
Captured vehicles.
Surrendered fighters.
Commanders returning to Puntland.
Weapons absorbed into the very security structure the project was apparently intended to challenge.
If the objective was to weaken Puntland, the result has been almost comically opposite. The confrontation has given Garowe political justification to consolidate its security apparatus, absorb irregular forces and insist more forcefully than before upon a monopoly of legitimate force.
Mogadishu supplied the crisis.
Puntland converted it into consolidation.
There is an old political rule worth remembering: never spend enormous resources building your opponent’s argument for him.
Galkayo Must Never Become the Battlefield
Yet Puntland should take no victory lap through Galkayo.
That city is too important and too fragile.
Its communities have spent years rebuilding relationships after devastating cycles of conflict. Its division between Puntland and Galmudug makes every military movement politically sensitive. A careless deployment, inflammatory speech or armed provocation can transform an administrative disagreement into something far more dangerous.
The death of a child during the latest confrontation should therefore haunt every official involved.
Galkayo does not need another militia.
It does not need Mogadishu’s militia.
It does not need Puntland clan militia.
It does not need Galmudug clan militia.
It needs police, courts, accountable government, commerce and peace.
Above all, the people of Galkayo should not be made collateral damage in somebody else’s struggle for political supremacy.
The Quiet Triumph
Puntland’s achievement is consequently larger than the capture of a few camps.
Within weeks, it confronted an armed challenge, survived the confrontation, encouraged large-scale defections, negotiated the return of an important commander, absorbed surrendering personnel and reasserted its security command across much of its territory.
That is a politico-military achievement.
But its real significance will depend on what comes next.
If Garowe merely replaces federally aligned armed groups with tolerated clan militias, nothing fundamental will have been achieved. If politically connected gunmen remain untouchable while ordinary citizens face the law, the victory will be hollow.
If the battle wagon of a federal proxy is illegal, the battle wagon of a clan elder, businessman, opposition politician or government ally must be equally illegal.
There can be no selective monopoly of force.
But if Puntland uses this moment to establish one security command, one legal order and one standard for every armed group, then something considerably more important will have occurred.
It will have converted a political confrontation into institutional consolidation.
Villa Somalia, meanwhile, should study what happened rather than attempt to rebuild what has just collapsed.
Somalia cannot afford governments financing Somali guns to confront other Somali guns while Al-Shabaab watches from the sidelines.
The Federal Government has enough enemies.
It does not need to manufacture new ones among its own federal member states.
Puntland has made its position unmistakable: federalism does not mean surrendering self-government, and national security does not mean planting parallel armies inside constituent states.
Mogadishu tested that proposition.
For now, Puntland has answered it on the ground.
And the answer came not from another communiqué, another constitutional seminar or another Villa Somalia speech.
It came from militia-empty camps.

Does Galkayo Peace Depend on Them?
WARSAME POLICY & MEDIA NETWORK (WAPMEN)
Critical Analysis, News and Commentaries
August 15, 2026

Galkayo does not need another political experiment. It has survived too many already.
Reports now indicate that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has travelled to Dhusamareb and is expected to proceed to southern Galkayo — the Galmudugh-administered half of one of Somalia’s most politically sensitive cities. Puntland has placed its security forces on heightened alert and accused the Federal Government of attempting to manufacture “discord and conflict.” Galmudugh, predictably, argues that a Somali president has the constitutional right to visit any part of the Federal Republic.
Under ordinary circumstances, that argument would be difficult to dispute.
These are not ordinary circumstances.
The issue is not whether a federal president may visit Galkayo. The issue is whether this president, at this particular moment, amid an unresolved constitutional crisis and an open political confrontation with Puntland, can enter one half of a divided city without turning a presidential visit into a political weapon against the other half.
That is the question Villa Somalia cannot escape.
Galkayo’s Peace Was Not Made in Villa Somalia
Galkayo’s relative peace is one of the quiet achievements of modern Puntland-Galmudugh relations. It was not handed down by presidential decree from Mogadishu. It was built painfully from below.
The city carries the scars of civil war, clan confrontation, revenge killings, displacement and repeated political manipulation. Its communities know better than most Somalis what happens when politicians turn local grievances into national power games.
Yet something important changed.
Residents on both sides increasingly chose coexistence over confrontation. Southern Galkayo gradually developed its own local political and economic interests instead of remaining psychologically chained to the warlord politics of Mogadishu’s civil-war era. Puntland and Galmudugh authorities learned — sometimes painfully — that neither side could wish the other away.
Business crossed the dividing line. Families crossed it. Vehicles crossed it. Officials communicated. Elders intervened. Security forces occasionally cooperated.
Galkayo began behaving less like a battlefield and more like a city.
That achievement belongs primarily to its residents.
No visiting politician has the right to gamble with it.
The President Has Another Problem: His Own Mandate
There is also an elephant walking toward Galkayo alongside the presidential convoy: legitimacy.
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s original four-year presidential mandate reached its end on 15 May 2026. His continued tenure rests on constitutional changes that Puntland, major opposition figures and other political actors reject as unilateral and illegitimate.
Villa Somalia maintains that constitutional amendments extended the presidential and parliamentary terms. Its opponents maintain that no sitting political leadership can rewrite the constitutional clock governing its own tenure without broad national agreement and then declare itself the beneficiary.
That dispute has never been resolved by consensus.
Attempts to bridge the political divide failed. Talks involving Hassan Sheikh, Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni and opposition figures did not produce a settlement. Instead, Somalia was left with two competing political realities: Villa Somalia asserting continued constitutional authority and significant Somali political actors insisting that the original mandate has expired.
Whatever one’s interpretation of the constitutional argument, one fact is unavoidable:
A president whose own legitimacy is nationally disputed should be reducing political temperatures, not touring political fault lines with a box of matches.
Galkayo is precisely such a fault line.
A Federal President Must Belong to Both Halves of Galkayo
Here lies the deeper constitutional issue.
The President of the Federal Republic is not the president of Galmudugh against Puntland. He is not the president of southern Galkayo against northern Galkayo. He is not supposed to become another combatant in disputes between Villa Somalia and a Federal Member State.
He is supposed to stand above them.
If Hassan Sheikh visits southern Galkayo while his government remains locked in confrontation with Puntland, the responsibility falls upon him to demonstrate extraordinary restraint.
Will he meet representatives of communities from both sides of Galkayo?
Will he publicly affirm Puntland’s constitutional status and the existing Puntland-Galmudugh security arrangements?
Will he assure northern Galkayo that the visit is neither an attempt to redraw political realities nor a platform for mobilising anti-Puntland forces?
Will he speak as President of Somalia — or as an ally of one administration confronting another?
These are not ceremonial questions.
They go directly to the meaning of federal presidential authority.
A federal president who cannot appear impartial toward the residents of a divided city has no business pretending that his presence there is merely routine.
Don’t Import the Garowe–Villa Somalia War Into Galkayo
Puntland must also exercise discipline.
Its political dispute is with Villa Somalia, not with the people of southern Galkayo.
That distinction must be repeated loudly and consistently.
Galmudugh residents should not be made to believe that Puntland views Hassan Sheikh’s visit as an excuse for confrontation with them. Nor should Galmudugh politicians allow themselves to be used as political infantry in Mogadishu’s dispute with Garowe.
The people of Mudugh have paid enough for other people’s ambitions.
A Garowe-Villa Somalia constitutional dispute must remain exactly that.
Do not tribalise it. Do not militarise it. And above all, do not Galkayo-ise it.
The city already has enough home-grown problems without importing somebody else’s.
The International Community Should Pay Attention
Somalia’s international partners should also resist the familiar temptation to watch silently until something goes wrong and then issue statements expressing “deep concern.”
For years, donors have preached dialogue, federal cooperation, constitutional consensus and political inclusivity. Those principles become meaningless if they disappear precisely when they are most needed.
The relationship between Villa Somalia and important international partners has already been strained by disagreements over governance, electoral arrangements, federalism and political consensus. Mogadishu’s move away from established multilateral coordination mechanisms toward more bilateral engagement has likewise raised questions about how much external pressure remains for inclusive political settlements.
But Galkayo is not the place to test diplomatic ambiguity.
International partners do not need to choose between Puntland and Galmudugh. They need to choose peace over political adventurism.
Puntland and Galmudugh Must Take Control of the Situation
The two administrations should therefore communicate directly and immediately.
Their security commanders should establish a permanent operational channel throughout any presidential visit. Local elders and peace committees from both halves of Galkayo should be brought into consultations. Political disagreements must be separated completely from community relations.
Most importantly, clear red lines should be understood beforehand.
A presidential visit is one thing.
Political mobilisation against Puntland from southern Galkayo is another.
A ceremonial security escort is one thing.
The appearance of new militia formations, inflammatory speeches or attempts to alter established security arrangements is another.
Those distinctions should be understood before the first presidential vehicle enters the city — not after somebody fires the first bullet.
Where useful, neutral international observers from the AU, IGAD or UN system should be encouraged to watch developments. Their presence would make political manipulation more difficult and de-escalation easier.
Galkayo Is Not Political Real Estate
The greatest danger is that Somalia’s politicians still look at cities as pieces on a political chessboard.
Galkayo is not a bargaining chip.
It is not Villa Somalia’s pressure point against Puntland.
It is not Puntland’s frontline against Galmudugh.
And it is certainly not an appropriate theatre for settling the constitutional quarrel over Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s disputed continuation in office.
There are children attending school in Galkayo. Traders moving goods across its streets. Families connected across administrative boundaries. Investors trying to rebuild confidence. Elders who remember exactly what happened when the city previously descended into violence.
They have more at stake than any visiting politician.
The people of Galkayo have spent years learning the difficult lesson that coexistence is cheaper than conflict.
Somalia’s political class should try learning it too.
Does Galkayo’s Peace Depend on Them?
In the immediate sense, yes.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, President Said Abdullahi Deni and Galmudugh President Ahmed Abdi Kariye “Qoorqoor” now carry exceptional responsibility. One reckless speech, one provocative deployment, one militia movement or one political miscalculation could undo years of patient community reconciliation.
But ultimately, Galkayo’s peace must not depend on three politicians.
That is precisely the point.
Its peace must rest on law, institutions, local agreements, responsible security forces, elders, commerce and the determination of ordinary residents on both sides never again to become cannon fodder for somebody else’s political ambition.
Presidents come and go.
Galkayo remains.
And anyone arriving there — federal president, state president or political opportunist — should understand one simple rule:
Come in peace, behave impartially, respect the city’s delicate balance — or keep your political quarrels out of Galkayo.
WDM Editorial Board
Warsame Policy & Media Network (WAPMEN)
Commentary and Critical Analysis

By Ismail H. Warsame | Toronto

A claim resurfaces periodically in Somali popular history: that an ancient Egyptian pharaoh was “of Somali origin.” It is a compelling story, but it is not what the historical or scientific record shows. The real story is more interesting — and more defensible.
The Land of Punt
For over two thousand years, ancient Egypt maintained trade relations with a place its texts called Ta-Netjer, “Land of the God,” known to history as Punt. Egyptian expeditions brought back gold, myrrh, frankincense, ebony, and live animals including giraffes and baboons. The most famous expedition, under Queen Hatshepsut around 1470 BCE, is memorialized in detailed reliefs at Deir el-Bahari.
Punt’s exact location has been debated by Egyptologists since the 1820s, when Jean-François Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs first opened the question. Early researchers searched everywhere from Yemen to Zimbabwe before the debate settled into two competing camps: the Horn of Africa or the Arabian Peninsula.
Where the Evidence Points
The case for a Horn of Africa location has strengthened considerably in recent decades:
Isotope analysis of mummified baboons found in Egyptian tombs — animals that were reportedly imports from Punt — traced their origins to the region spanning modern Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Somalia, with a 2020 follow-up study finding the closest match in eastern Somalia and the Eritrea-Ethiopia corridor.
The goods the Egyptians brought back — gold, ivory, ebony, and African wildlife absent from Arabia — point toward an African rather than Arabian source.
Auguste Mariette, one of the earliest excavators of the Punt reliefs, settled on the Somali coast as Punt’s likely location, noting the region’s long association with frankincense and myrrh.
Puntland’s own name is a direct nod to this history. Today, most historians place Punt broadly across the coastal territories of Somalia, Djibouti, Eritrea, Sudan, and northeast Ethiopia, though a minority still argue for an Arabian or partly Arabian location, and the exact boundaries remain unsettled among specialists.
Where the Evidence Does Not Point
Being a trading partner of ancient Egypt — even a favored one, tied to the gods in Egyptian religious imagination — is not the same as ethnic or dynastic origin. The pharaonic line is documented in the archaeological and genetic record as a Nile Valley Egyptian civilization. “Somali” itself is a much later ethnic and national identity; projecting it onto a Bronze Age ruling dynasty conflates a real, still-debated geography question with a claim the evidence simply does not support.
A Coastline With a Long Memory
This is not the region’s only claim to ancient strategic importance. Cape Guardafui, at the very tip of the Horn, has functioned as a maritime chokepoint for millennia — a role WDM has previously examined in the context of Italian colonial-era navigation fees and the cape’s modern significance to Red Sea and Gulf of Aden shipping. The Punt evidence adds an earlier chapter to that same story: this coastline was central to global trade routes not just under 20th-century colonial administrations, but as far back as Pharaonic Egypt.
Why This Distinction Matters
Somalia’s ancient ties to Egypt through Punt are a genuine and remarkable part of the region’s history — one grounded in isotope science, Egyptological scholarship, and millennia of documented trade. That history stands on its own. It does not need embellishment, and claims that overreach it — like asserting a pharaoh was ethnically Somali — end up undermining a story that is already well-supported by evidence.

—-
Sources: World History Encyclopedia; PBS/NOVA; Simple English Wikipedia, “Land of Punt”; NSF Stories on mummified baboon isotope research; Wikipedia, “Land of Punt.”

A WDM Editorial

Sometimes history is recovered from archives. Sometimes it emerges from the mouth of a man who was actually in the room.
Ambassador Hussein Ali Duale — better known as Ambassador Awil — has been both witness and participant in some extraordinary chapters of modern Somali political history. His extended Geed Fadhi interview therefore deserves more than the usual Somali political reaction of applause from one camp and denunciation from another.
It deserves an examination.
And once examined against Awil’s previously published memoir material and accounts of the events he discusses, parts of his testimony are remarkably well corroborated.
Three episodes stand out: the intervention by Somaliland leaders with Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi during Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s presidency; Awil’s argument that Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s uncompromising approach toward Somaliland helped drive Hargeisa toward Israel; and Awil’s own participation in the failed military revolt in northern Somalia in December 1961.
These are not three disconnected anecdotes. Together they illuminate a persistent Somali political habit: when domestic political accommodation fails, Somali actors repeatedly seek leverage outside the Somali political arena.
That habit is older than today’s leaders, older than Somaliland’s declaration of separation and almost as old as the Somali Republic itself.

The Riyale-Awil Mission to Meles Zenawi
The most politically explosive part of Awil’s story concerns the government of President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed.
Here, precision matters.
It would be excessive to claim, without additional documentary evidence, that Awil, Somaliland President Dahir Riyale Kahin and Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi entered into a formal “conspiracy” to overthrow Abdullahi Yusuf.
But what Awil himself says happened is serious enough without exaggeration.
His account did not begin with the recent Geed Fadhi interview. Material from his memoirs published by Geeska Afrika in 2016 provides an unusually detailed description of the episode.
According to Awil, after Ethiopian troops had entered Somalia, Meles invited President Riyale to Addis Ababa. Awil, then Somaliland’s finance minister, accompanied him because the foreign minister was abroad.
Meles reportedly asked Riyale for his assessment of Ethiopia’s intervention and specifically expressed concern that Ethiopian forces could become trapped in an uprising by Hawiye constituencies in Mogadishu.
Riyale’s response, according to Awil, was extraordinary.
He advised Meles not to permit Abdullahi Yusuf to use Ethiopian forces against the Hawiye and portrayed Yusuf’s objectives as essentially retaliatory rather than state-building.
Then Meles asked Awil to speak.
Awil says he went considerably further. He described Abdullahi Yusuf in deeply hostile political and clan terms and argued that Yusuf’s objective was not the reconstruction of Somalia but the destruction of Hawiye political and economic power.
That is not an allegation made today by Abdullahi Yusuf’s supporters.
It is Awil’s own account of what Awil told Meles Zenawi.
There is an important distinction.
We cannot independently establish that everything said during that closed meeting happened exactly as Awil remembers it. Nor can we establish that the advice given by Riyale and Awil determined subsequent Ethiopian policy.
But we can establish that Awil publicly recorded this version of events years before the present interview.
That gives his latest recollections substantial historical weight.
Advising the Power Behind the TFG
The political significance is difficult to overstate.
Ethiopia was not an ordinary neighbouring government at the time.
Its military intervention in late 2006 had been decisive in driving the Islamic Courts Union from Mogadishu and allowing the Transitional Federal Government to establish itself in the capital. Ethiopian troops consequently possessed enormous military leverage over the political environment in which Abdullahi Yusuf governed.
And here were two senior Somaliland figures — its president and finance minister — advising Meles about how Ethiopia should handle the president of Somalia.
Whatever terminology one prefers — lobbying, political intervention, strategic advice or manoeuvring — this was certainly not neutrality.
It also exposes one of the magnificent contradictions of Somali politics.
Somaliland has spent decades condemning interference from Mogadishu in its affairs.
Yet one of its most senior former officials proudly recounts travelling with his president to Addis Ababa and advising the Ethiopian prime minister about how he should constrain the policies of the Somali president.
Apparently interference is objectionable only when the aircraft flies in the opposite direction.
There is another fascinating piece of evidence. In the same memoir material, Awil recalled Somaliland’s immediate condemnation of Abdullahi Yusuf after his election in October 2004. He also recounted an Ethiopian official telling him that Somaliland’s condemnation could damage Yusuf’s international momentum.
The hostility therefore preceded the later meeting with Meles.
This was not spontaneous advice delivered over Ethiopian coffee.
There was political history behind it.

Did They Bring Down Abdullahi Yusuf?
Here WDM should resist turning evidence into mythology.
Abdullahi Yusuf’s resignation in December 2008 resulted from a much larger crisis: his confrontation with Prime Minister Nur Hassan Hussein, deteriorating relations with Ethiopia, international pressure, the insurgency and profound disagreements over the Djibouti political process.
It would therefore be historically reckless to declare that Riyale and Awil “removed Abdullahi Yusuf.”
They did not possess that power.
But Awil’s testimony supports something narrower and still politically consequential: Somaliland’s leadership attempted to influence Ethiopia’s policy toward Abdullahi Yusuf at a time when Ethiopia was the external actor with the greatest immediate leverage over his government.
That is the defensible conclusion.
WDM does not need to inflate the evidence. The evidence is damaging enough at its actual size.
Hassan Sheikh, Somaliland and Israel
Awil’s second argument requires a different standard.
He reportedly contends that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s refusal to compromise or pursue meaningful reconciliation with Somaliland helped push Hargeisa toward Israel and eventual Israeli recognition.
This should be described precisely for what it is:
Awil’s political interpretation.
It is not yet an independently established chain of causation.
Somaliland’s pursuit of international recognition is decades old. It dates to its 1991 declaration that it had restored the sovereignty of the former British Somaliland protectorate. Its diplomatic outreach therefore cannot reasonably be explained by Hassan Sheikh’s current policies alone.
The more defensible argument is subtler.
If Awil’s point is that the deterioration of Mogadishu-Hargeisa relations convinced Somaliland’s leadership that negotiations within the Somali political framework were exhausted, and consequently increased its incentive to seek unconventional international partnerships, that is a legitimate political argument.
But Israel’s decision to recognize Somaliland must also be understood through Israel’s own strategic interests.
Foreign governments rarely redesign regional policy simply because Somali politicians have stopped talking to one another.
The Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, Yemen, Berbera and the wider security architecture of the Horn matter.
Somaliland wanted recognition.
Israel had strategic calculations of its own.
Those interests eventually intersected.
Hassan Sheikh’s policies may have contributed to the political environment. They cannot alone explain the outcome.
That distinction strengthens Awil’s argument rather than weakening it because serious political analysis should never confuse contributing conditions with exclusive causes.
Then Comes the Most Remarkable Admission: 1961.

The third episode is far easier to verify.
Awil was indeed one of the young northern military officers involved in the failed coup of 10 December 1961, barely eighteen months after the independence and union of the former British Somaliland and Italian-administered Somalia.
Historical accounts specifically identify Awil Ali Duale alongside Abdillahi Aden “Congo,” Abdillahi Said Abby and other junior officers involved in the revolt.
Their grievances concerned the political and military arrangements following union.
Northern officers believed that former Somaliland personnel were being treated unfairly in promotions, command structures and appointments. Some travelled to Mogadishu to raise their complaints with senior military leadership but felt that those grievances had been dismissed.
Then grievance became mutiny.
The conspirators detained senior officers, including Colonel Mohamed Ainanshe and — in another extraordinary historical intersection — Abdullahi Yusuf himself. Radio Hargeisa and other strategic facilities were targeted. The attempt quickly collapsed after loyal soldiers discovered what had happened.
Awil’s involvement is therefore not speculation.
Accounts based partly upon the recollections of Awil and Abdillahi Aden explicitly identify both men as participants.
Somaliland Separatism Did Not Begin With Siad Barre
And this fact should force a correction to one of the laziest narratives about Somali history.
It is often suggested that northern separatism began exclusively with the atrocities of Mohamed Siad Barre’s regime during the 1980s.
That is historically incomplete.
The brutality of the Barre regime, particularly the devastation inflicted upon northern cities and populations during the late 1980s, profoundly shaped the Somaliland political project that emerged in 1991.
That cannot responsibly be minimized.
But dissatisfaction with the union existed much earlier.
The December 1961 coup proves it.
Barely eighteen months after union, officers from the former Somaliland territory were already prepared to use military force against the newly unified state.
That does not prove that every northerner opposed union. They certainly did not.
Nor does it retroactively validate Somaliland’s later claim to independence.
It establishes something historically more useful: the union encountered serious political and institutional grievances almost immediately, and some northern officers concluded as early as 1961 that those grievances justified attempting to reverse the political order.
Awil was one of them.
That makes his testimony particularly valuable.

The Awil Paradox
And here lies the fascinating contradiction in Ambassador Awil’s political biography.
The young Awil participated in an attempted revolt against the Somali administration in the north.
The older Awil served the Somali Republic as a military officer and ambassador.
Decades later, the Somaliland minister Awil accompanied President Riyale to advise Ethiopia’s prime minister about the government of another man from his military generation — Abdullahi Yusuf.
And today the elder statesman Awil explains Somaliland’s strategic turn toward Israel partly as a consequence of failed political accommodation with Mogadishu.
One man.
More than six decades.
Almost the entire unresolved argument of the Somali Republic compressed into a single political biography.
Union.
Rebellion.
Diplomacy.
Civil war.
Somaliland.
Ethiopia.
Federalism.
Israel.
It would be difficult to invent a more Somali political journey.
But This Is Bigger Than Awil
Mogadishu should not celebrate these revelations too enthusiastically.
The disease exposed by Awil’s testimony is not confined to Somaliland.
Successive Somali governments, opposition groups, federal member states, armed movements and political factions have repeatedly sought foreign leverage against domestic Somali competitors.
Addis Ababa yesterday.
Nairobi tomorrow.
Ankara, Abu Dhabi, Doha, Washington or somewhere else the day after.
The capital changes.
The habit survives.
A Somali politician loses an argument at home and suddenly discovers an urgent diplomatic appointment abroad.
A regional administration quarrels with Mogadishu and begins cultivating foreign patrons.
Mogadishu quarrels with a federal member state and mobilizes international partners against it.
Then everybody returns home and delivers a speech about sovereignty.
Somali sovereignty must be the hardest-working word in the Somali language.
It is invoked immediately before being subcontracted.
The Lesson From Awil’s Testimony
The importance of the Geed Fadhi interview therefore lies beyond whatever embarrassment it causes today’s politicians.
Awil belongs to a disappearing generation of Somali public figures who personally witnessed the Republic’s earliest crises.
Their testimony should be recorded, challenged and preserved.
But oral history is evidence, not holy scripture.
Memories must be compared with memoirs. Memoirs must be checked against contemporary documents. Ethiopian archives should eventually be examined against Somali accounts. Abdullahi Yusuf’s recollections should be placed beside Awil’s. Participants who remain alive should be interviewed independently.
That is how political memory becomes history.
And after applying that standard, the essential findings remain substantial.
The 1961 episode is historically corroborated: Awil participated in the failed northern officers’ coup.
The Meles episode is supported by Awil’s own previously published memoir account: he says he accompanied President Riyale to Addis Ababa and personally advised Meles against Abdullahi Yusuf’s policies while Ethiopian troops were operating in Somalia.  What cannot presently be established is that this meeting constituted a formal conspiracy or that it caused Yusuf’s eventual resignation.
The Hassan Sheikh-Israel proposition is best treated as Awil’s political analysis, not yet as independently proven causation. Somaliland’s search for recognition long predates Hassan Sheikh’s present political confrontation with Hargeisa.
Those corrections do not diminish the story.
They make it stronger.
Because WDM has no need to manufacture an indictment when history has already written one.
For sixty-five years, Somali political actors have struggled with the same fundamental question: when political grievances arise, do we resolve them through Somali institutions, or do we search for an external power capable of defeating our Somali opponent for us?
In 1961, some officers reached for the gun.
Decades later, politicians travelled to Addis Ababa.
Today they travel the world searching for diplomatic recognition, military partnerships and foreign political leverage.
The actors change.
The patrons change.
The flags change.
The instinct survives.
And perhaps that is the most disturbing conclusion emerging from Ambassador Awil’s testimony.
He has not merely told us something about Somaliland, Abdullahi Yusuf or Hassan Sheikh Mohamud.
He has inadvertently narrated one of the enduring failures of Somali politics itself: when reconciliation becomes difficult, the foreign capital becomes easier.
That is not simply Ambassador Awil’s history.
It is Somalia’s unfinished history.
— Warsame Digital Media (WDM)
Commentary and Critical Analysis

A WDM Editorial

There is an old Mudugh expression fit for moments when yesterday has become too embarrassing to defend: “Let us be reborn again.”

It is not an invitation to erase history. It means forgiving past wrongdoing, burying old quarrels, abandoning failed habits and starting afresh from today.

Mudugh badly needs such a rebirth.

Suddenly, almost everything appears to be restarting. Roads. Sanitation. Galkayo airport. Gara’ad Port and its supporting infrastructure. Security. Public safety. Government administration. Projects that should have been ordinary functions of government are being rediscovered with the excitement of archaeological findings.

Welcome back, government.

The full force of the Puntland State administration has descended on Galkayo, headed by President Said Abdullahi Deni. Ministers, officials, commanders, Mudugh representatives and assorted political ornaments are appearing everywhere. Meetings are being held. Instructions are being issued. Roads are being inspected. Security is being discussed. Cameras are clicking.

One could almost believe that Mudugh had just been discovered on the map.

Mudugh Representatives Discover Mudugh

The more uncomfortable spectacle, however, belongs to Mudugh’s own representatives.

For years, the region has produced ministers, parliamentarians, senior officials and political personalities in impressive quantities. If political titles were development projects, Mudugh would resemble Singapore.

Unfortunately, titles do not pave roads.

They do not collect rubbish.

They do not secure neighbourhoods.

They do not stop revenge killings.

They do not modernise an airport.

They do not turn Gara’ad Port into the commercial engine it was built to become.

And they certainly do not substitute for competent representation.

Now, with the President physically present, some Mudugh representatives appear to be showing their political backsides, scrambling to demonstrate achievements that should have been visible long before the presidential convoy arrived. Their less-than-impressive competence is suddenly on public exhibition.

There is something almost comic about officials explaining Mudugh’s problems to a President after spending years occupying offices supposedly created to solve those very problems.

Who exactly were they waiting for?

But Not Everything Was Made in Galkayo

There is, however, another side of this story that cannot honestly be dumped at the feet of Mudugh officials alone.

Some development projects in Puntland have reportedly been caught in the prolonged political and constitutional dispute between Puntland and the Federal Government in Mogadishu. International development resources intended for Puntland have been alleged to have been delayed, frozen or otherwise obstructed as relations between Garowe and Mogadishu deteriorated.

If that is so, Mudugh became collateral damage in somebody else’s political war.

That raises questions neither government should be allowed to escape.

Why should a road in Mudugh become hostage to a constitutional dispute in Mogadishu? Why should sanitation in Galkayo depend upon whether politicians in Garowe and Mogadishu are speaking to each other? Why should ordinary Puntland citizens lose development opportunities because two levels of government cannot agree on federal politics?

Development funds are not political pocket money.

If international donors earmarked resources for Puntland projects, those resources were intended for citizens — not as bargaining chips for whoever happened to occupy Villa Somalia.

But Puntland must answer the other half of the question as well.

Why Was There No Negotiation?

If donor resources earmarked for Puntland were indeed frozen or withheld, what sustained diplomatic and technical effort was undertaken to have them released?

Where were the negotiations?

Where was the international campaign?

Where were the formal representations to donors?

Where was the public accounting showing which projects were affected, how much money was involved, who was withholding it and under what legal or administrative authority?

Political disagreement with Mogadishu does not relieve Puntland of the responsibility to fight for every dollar legitimately intended for its people.

Garowe could maintain its constitutional position against the Mogadishu administration while simultaneously negotiating over development finance. One does not require surrendering the other.

You can quarrel over the Constitution on Monday and negotiate the release of a road-development grant on Tuesday.

That is called government.

If Mogadishu weaponised development funding against Puntland, it should be exposed and challenged. If Puntland allowed frozen funds to remain frozen because political communication had collapsed, that too deserves scrutiny.

The citizen who drives through a pothole does not particularly care which politician won the constitutional argument.

He still drove through the pothole.

Deni Has Also Arrived — Belatedly

President Deni cannot therefore escape the satire merely because Mogadishu may carry part of the responsibility.

His presence and apparent determination to address Galkayo’s accumulated problems are welcome. The mobilisation of the Puntland Government indicates that the President understands the seriousness of the situation and appears prepared to do something about it.

That deserves recognition.

But Mudugh may reasonably ask:

Why now?

Why did roads have to deteriorate so badly before becoming urgent? Why did sanitation become a civic embarrassment? Why did insecurity, revenge killings and armed clan tensions persist before the machinery of government arrived in force? Why has the enormous economic potential surrounding Gara’ad Port not already transformed regional infrastructure planning?

Apparently, Puntland has discovered a revolutionary principle of public administration:

Problems are easier to notice after they become crises.

Still, better a late government than an absent one.

“Let Us Be Reborn Again”

Mudugh does not need another season of blame. It has enough graves, grievances, political rivalries and wasted opportunities already.

So let Mudugh invoke its own wisdom:

Let us be reborn again.

Let the Puntland Government admit what it neglected.

Let Mogadishu answer for any development resources it obstructed.

Let Puntland explain what it did to recover funds allegedly withheld.

Let international donors explain where Puntland’s earmarked allocations went.

Let Mudugh representatives admit where they failed.

Let communities abandon revenge politics.

Let businessmen invest rather than finance political quarrels.

Let elders extinguish conflicts instead of institutionalising them.

Let security forces enforce one law against everybody.

And let President Deni convert this sudden concentration of government attention into permanent institutions rather than another presidential visit followed by disappearing convoys.

Galkayo does not need cosmetic rehabilitation. Mudugh requires roads, sanitation, functioning municipal institutions, a modern airport, secure commercial corridors, effective policing and serious integration of Gara’ad Port into Puntland’s economic future.

Above all, it needs law and order.

Without security, the road leads nowhere. Without public safety, investors leave. Without competent administration, Gara’ad becomes infrastructure surrounded by missed opportunities. Without accountability, today’s grand restart becomes tomorrow’s abandoned project.

Mudugh has paid too much and waited too long.

So yes, forgive yesterday.

Let us be reborn again.

But rebirth means changing behaviour, not merely changing speeches.

President Deni appears finally to be paying attention. Mudugh’s representatives have finally been placed under the uncomfortable spotlight of their own performance. Projects are restarting. Security is receiving attention. Galkayo is again being treated as a strategic Puntland city rather than a permanently postponed problem.

Good.

Now finish the job.

And recover every development dollar belonging to Puntland while you are at it.

Because there is one particularly fitting lesson in this belated awakening:

It is never too late to realise that you were already too late.

— WDM
Commentary and Critical Analysis

An Expired Parliament Elects a Speaker While an Expired Presidency and Cabinet Carry On

A WDM Editorial

Somalia has apparently discovered a constitutional innovation unknown to political science: institutions can expire and still reproduce themselves.

The Federal Parliament’s four-year mandate ran out on April 14, 2026. The President’s term followed a month later. Yet Parliament kept sitting — and on this month elected a new Speaker, Abdulqadir Mohamed Nur Jama, to replace Adan Madobe, who left the chamber after being installed as President of South West State. The Presidency continues issuing decisions. The Cabinet continues governing.

This is not institutional renewal. It is expired institutions attempting to validate one another. That is not a constitutional government. It is political necromancy.

The Mandate Cannot Be Resurrected by a Vote

The question is elementary: if Parliament’s mandate has expired, from where does it derive the authority to elect a new Speaker?

Villa Somalia’s answer is that the mandate was never really gone — that parliament passed constitutional amendments extending both the legislative and presidential terms by a year, to 2027. That claim deserves to be stated plainly, because a fair accounting cannot ignore it. But it does not settle the matter. The amendments were pushed through without the buy-in of federal member states or former presidents, and opposition figures — including former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed’s Somali Salvation Forum — argue a legislature cannot lawfully extend its own life by voting on itself. Electing a Speaker under a mandate of contested provenance does not cure the legitimacy question. It advertises it.

The Presidency Has Expired Too

Parliament is not alone. The President’s constitutional term, absent the disputed extension, closed in mid-May. That places the continued exercise of presidential authority under the same question. The Cabinet cannot float constitutionally above the institutions from which executive authority derives. If the government’s own extension is what’s keeping the calendar valid, then the entire federal executive’s legitimacy now rests on the same disputed hinge as the Speaker’s chair.

Everyone is nonetheless expected to behave as though nothing constitutionally significant has happened: ministers exercise powers, officials attend ceremonies, motorcades move through Mogadishu, and statements go out with seals and flags.

Expired Institutions Validating Expired Institutions

This is where the Speaker election becomes genuinely troubling. A parliament of disputed mandate elects a leadership; that leadership recognizes the executive; the executive recognizes the parliament. It is a circular-reference machine — you recognize me, I recognize you, therefore Somalia must recognize both of us. But legitimacy cannot be manufactured by officeholders validating one another. A government does not renew itself merely by continuing to govern, and a Speaker does not make a disputed parliament legitimate merely by occupying the chair.

To be fair, there is a counter-case worth naming: some commentators argue that a caretaker legislature filling a leadership vacancy is an act of institutional continuity, not usurpation — that the alternative, a total legislative vacuum, is worse than a procedurally imperfect Speaker election. That argument has some force. But continuity and legitimacy are not the same thing, and conflating them is precisely how “necessity” becomes the permanent excuse for staying in office.

The Dangerous Precedent

If a parliament of a contested mandate can elect its own leadership, what stops it from doing more? Amending fundamental laws. Approving governments. Redesigning elections. Manufacturing a new political calendar indefinitely, one extension at a time. Once expiration carries no practical consequence, constitutional terms stop being law and become polite suggestions — and Somalia, of all countries, knows what happens when political personalities outgrow institutions.

Federalism Pays the Price

Federal member states are expected to respect institutions emanating from Mogadishu, while Mogadishu treats its own mandates as negotiable through unilateral amendment. That arrangement cannot hold. Federalism depends on mutual constitutional confidence; when the centre manufactures authority through contested institutions, member states will keep asking why decisions from those institutions should bind them. That is not an attack on federalism — it is the predictable cost of exhausting federal legitimacy.

Somalia Does Not Need Another Political Fiction

There is still a Parliament building, still MPs, still a Speaker’s chair, still a President, a Cabinet, motorcades and flags. Everything looks wonderfully governmental. What’s missing is an undisputed mandate underneath it.

Somalia needs a lawful, broadly agreed political transition — credible elections and respect for constitutional timelines, negotiated with federal member states and opposition actors, not decreed by amendment. It does not need expired institutions appointing officials, recognizing one another, and asking the Somali people to applaud the exercise as democracy.

The constitutional clock does not stop because politicians dislike what happens when it reaches midnight. If constitutional terms mean anything, they must mean something precisely when those holding power would prefer them not to. Otherwise Somalia is no longer practicing government by mandate — it has invented something easier: rule until further notice.