Issue 102

At the end of November, the residents of Mogadishu will be able to supposedly participate in their first direct elections since the late 1960s. Though having repeatedly postponed the polls, the handpicked Independent National Electoral and Boundaries Commission (INEBC) has set the date of the district council elections for 30 November, asserting that close to a million people have registered in the capital for the grand event. And yet, as ever, with the Hawiye-dominated politics of Mogadishu still so frayed and the polls considered a flimsy attempt to foreground a term extension for President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the exercise in direct democracy is hardly laudable.

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.

Armed conflict exacts a heavy and often invisible toll on both combatant and civilian minds as well as on bodies. Those affected by humanitarian emergencies often experience psychological distress, with the World Health Organisation (WHO) reporting that an estimated one in five individuals develop mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

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.