Issue No. 304

With northern Ethiopia and Eritrea teetering on the brink of a return to full-scale conflict, the grim morass that has become Tigrayan politics shows no sign of easing. Recent days have again been dominated by accusations and counter-accusations by the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in Mekelle and the deposed Tigray Interim Administration (TIA) leader Getachew Reda from Addis over violent clashes in Southern Tigray

Yesterday marked the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Tigray war and the third since the signing of the Pretoria agreement. Five years since Ethiopian federal forces, Amhara militias, and an invading Eritrean army launched a joint offensive that would leave between 300,000 and 600,000 Tigrayans dead and over 120,000 women and girls raped.

President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM) stands at a defining crossroads, for his leadership, his legacy, and Somalia’s fragile democratic future. Alarming signs point to a deliberate strategy to extend his mandate beyond constitutional limits. Villa Somalia has reportedly circulated the so-called “Zero Paper” among Somali political circles and international partners to test the waters and gauge reaction. The proposal, titled “Somalia’s Exceptional Reform Window: A Mandate to Complete the Constitution and Reset Governance,” calls for a two-year extension under the pretext of completing the constitution and finalizing reforms.

Watching Al-Shabaab's prodigious propaganda output over the past decade, one might be convinced that there was a theological gulf between the jihadists and Islamic State-Somalia (ISS). Likewise, the Daesh faction-- now scattered through the Cal-Miskaad Mountains by Puntland's Operation Hilaac-- has sought to cast their counterparts as 'gradualists', viewing the accommodation of Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabaab as a betrayal of monotheism, or tawhid. But beyond the occasional barbed statement-- and localised clashes in the Bari region-- the theological divergence between these two Somali Salafist jihadist groups is marginal, and reflects more of a battle for legitimacy and airwaves than ideological supremacy.

Across 18 months, through incessant bombardment and induced starvation, the capital of North Darfur held out against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Assault after assault was repelled by predominantly Zaghawa fighters under the army-allied Joint Forces, aware of the massacres of indigenous Darfurians at El Geneina, Nyala, and across Darfur at the hands of the Sahelian Arab paramilitaries in 2023 and 2003. But, eventually, the pressure proved too great, and the city of El Fasher has now fallen to the Emirati-backed RSF-- with all the litany of atrocities feared seemingly coming to pass. Ineffectual pleas from a disengaged international community for the paramilitaries not to burn, kill, rape, and pillage have inevitably fallen on deaf ears. And while Quad-centred negotiations collapsed in Washington, El Fasher's fall redraws Sudan's map in stark and potentially irreversible terms.

October is a sober month of anniversaries in Somaliland. In October 2003, well before Al-Shabaab was the fearsome movement it is today, it announced its clandestine presence in two separate killings that left three foreign nationals dead and shocked the polity. Five years later, Al-Shabaab carried out five separate suicide bombings in Bosaaso and Hargeisa on 29 October 2008 on several government and international targets, leaving 25 dead and more than 30 injured

The Afar have had more than their fair share of grievances. A marginalised minority in three countries today, the Cushitic, largely agro-pastoralist people were once organised into Islamic Sultanates that stretched along the Dankalia coastline, profiting from the wealthy littoral trade of salt and enslaved people on the Red Sea. But Italian, French, and Ethiopian partitioning shattered the image of the 'Great Afar' in the late 19th and 20th centuries, wreaking irreparable havoc on these constellations and interfering with Afar kinship structures—primarily split into the Asaimara (Red) and Adoimara (White) groupings.

The lightning is over-- for the time being. Last week, after 11 gruelling months, Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni announced the victory of Operation Hilaac (lightning) against the Islamic State-Somalia (ISS) faction in the Cal Miskaad mountains. Declaring triumph at the opening of the 57th Puntland parliament session, he asserted that the group had been nearly entirely dismantled, barring a few pockets of cells "still hiding" in Cal Miskaad, and thanked international partners for their assistance —singling out the US, UK and UAE in particular.

Obscurity and discord appear to be the name of the game this week in Villa Somalia. Hostility between South West President Abdiaziz Laftagareen and a slice of the splinter national 'opposition', Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden and Mohammed Mursal, two former speakers of parliament, bubbled over publicly, with the former barring these latest Villa Somalia allies from travelling to Baidoa. In Hirshabelle, meanwhile, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud appears to be gearing up to oust his fellow Justice and Solidarity Party (JSP) member in Jowhar, Ali 'Guudlawe'. And preparations for the district-level Banaadir direct elections continue apace, with the date now scheduled for 30 November and nearly 1 million people dubiously registered. But make no mistake; the political churn is a tool for Villa Somalia to muddy its principal obligation to hold federal presidential elections in May 2026.