Issue 101

Despite rumours of declining health, Djibouti’s President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh’s (IOG) is maneuvering to extend his grip on power amid growing tensions over succession. The 77 year-old leader, who took power in 1999 as his uncle’s hand-picked successor, has pushed through constitutional changes that allow him to run again in 2026, with the age limit having been scrapped on 2 November – moves that have further ignited both public discontent and simmering rivalries between Djibouti’s Afar and Issa communities. Guelleh, has maintained a relatively low public profile in the past year. In late September 2024, social media reports claimed he had been hospitalised and flown to Paris due to critical illness, with some even suggesting internet outages in Djibouti aimed at suppressing news of his condition. His Finance Minister, Ilyas Moussa Dawaleh, flatly disputed reports that Guelleh was critically ill, confirming only that the president had an issue with his right knee. But these denials, along with his refusal to establish a clear succession plan, have only intensified speculation about Djibouti’s political future. As IOG clings to power, the prospect of a succession crisis looms large, threatening instability in the nation.

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.

Many thousands of miles from the Horn of Africa, the small Caribbean nation of Haiti and its capital, Port-au-Prince, remain engulfed in brutal gang warfare. Since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, the country has slipped ever further into chaos, with rival paramilitary gangs seizing control over most of the capital and inducing a widespread humanitarian crisis. No elections have been held since 2016, most government services have ground to a halt, and the transnational drug gangs-- led by notorious individuals such as Jimmy Chérizier 'Barbecue'-- continue to act with impunity, with the Haitian police badly outnumbered and outgunned. Over two years ago, and in light of a problematic history of foreign interventionism in the country, the US and others—following a request from ousted Haitian PM Ariel Henry—pushed for a nation from the Global South to take the lead in responding to the collapsing state.

Reports of another major Ethiopia-Somaliland deal turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Last Tuesday, fresh from a lengthy visit to Abu Dhabi, Somaliland President Abdirahman 'Irro' immediately departed for Addis to meet with Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed. As it was both his first visit to Hargeisa's most consequential ally and came so soon after travelling from their shared Emirati patron, speculation abounded in the Somaliland capital about what might be on the cards. That turned out to be somewhat of a damp squib, however, with no bombshell announcement this time like the much-quietened Memorandum of Understanding last year.

Over two decades after the contested 2004 Oromia-Somali Regional State (SRS) referendum, the restive boundary refuses to fully quiet. The longest internal boundary in Ethiopia, it stretches over 1,400 kilometres down to the Kenyan border and has been the site of intermittent violence for years, peaking between 2017 and 2019. And in mid-July, after a period of relative calm, clashes broke out once again, displacing over 250,000 people in just a couple of months. Coalescing around several intersecting issues, the violence has flared amid unilateral moves from the SRS administration to redraw over a dozen new districts as part of its 'internal' administrative map, regarded as a clear provocation to Oromo nationalists in an attempt to solidify control over disputed territories.