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.