Two Years of War in Sudan Tuesday marked two years since war erupted in Khartoum between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid S...
Fiddling While Middle Shabelle Burns On Tuesday in Mogadishu, hundreds of people, mostly students, were bussed into Shangani to line up and obtain voter ID cards in a highly choreographed affair. Among the first in line was the mayor of Mogadishu, participating in a stunt that Villa Somalia continues to frame as the next step to achieving the first national one-person, one-vote (OPOV) elections since 1967. But rather than realising the long-thwarted democratic aspirations of the Somali people, it is simply another damaging spectacle, just as PM Hamza Barre's trip to Laas Aanood was, that further diminishes the chance of any positive outcome from the upcoming 'national dialogue' process. With Al-Shabaab having seized Adan Yabaal in Middle Shabelle and a host of other strategic locations this morning, Villa Somalia is fiddling while Rome burns.
ONLF Eyes Armed Struggle as Peace Falters Addis's national strategy of divide and conquer towards legitimate political opposition is pushing the Somali Regional State (SRS) to the brink of renewed conflict. Months of escalating tensions between the SRS administration led by Mustafa Mohammed Omar 'Agjar' and the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) have taken another dangerous turn in recent days. Yet another attempt to remove the ONLF Chairman Abdirahman Maaday underhandedly appears to have definitively pushed the former insurgents towards a return to armed mobilisation, imperilling nearly 7 years of fragile peace in the SRS.
Painting Disputed Laas Anood 'Blue' Over the weekend, Somalia's PM Hamza Abdi Barre travelled to the disputed town of Laas Anood in the Sool region in what was billed as a 'historic' visit by Mogadishu and nationalist media-- the first by a sitting PM to the municipality in decades. Dozens of federal lawmakers and senior government ministers joined Barre on the highly choreographed visit, which had been trailed weeks in advance to the delight of hardline unionists and displeasure from Puntland and Somaliland.
Al-Shabaab at the Nexus of Terrorism and Crime The nexus between terrorism and criminal activity has always been hazy. Criminal groups have long deployed violence for a litany of reasons, while at times wielding 'terrorist' tactics to intimidate and coerce. In the late 1980s, for instance, the Colombian Medellin Cartel, headed by the notorious narcotrafficker Pablo Escobar, famously bombed an Avianca passenger jet, killing 107 passengers and crew, as well as a government building in Bogota, in which 57 people were killed and more than 2,200 injured.
Collateral Damage in Trump's Tariff War The death of globalisation appears to be on hold-- for now. In an abrupt volte-face yesterday, US President D...
No More Blank Cheques Last Friday, the head of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM), General Michael Langley, testifying to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, confirmed that Islamic State-Somalia (ISS) had relocated its global command hub to Puntland. Emphasising how ISS was developing its "global footprint" from Somalia, he warned that if left unchecked, the jihadist group could pose direct threats to US national security. This acknowledgement by the head of AFRICOM was a mark of just how consequential ISS, led by Emir Abdulkadir Mumim, has become within Daesh's architecture. And while perhaps bad news for the counter-terror fight in Africa, Langley's statement on ISS and the subsequent offers a glimmer of hope for an embattled Mogadishu, which fears that the new American administration may be inclined to turn its back on Somalia.
The 'Original Sin' of the Pretoria agreement In late October 2022, Tigrayan and Ethiopian federal representatives met in Pretoria, South Africa, under the auspices of the African Union, amidst the raging Tigray war. Back-door US diplomacy in Djibouti and the Seychelles in mid-2022 had failed to produce anything of note, and brutal fighting had renewed in late August. Calculating they could no longer bear such devastating human costs—costs Addis and Asmara seemed willing to absorb—the Tigrayan delegation arrived in Pretoria ready to make peace and reluctantly accepted terms far from ideal.
Cheap Talk: No Signs of National Unity A distinct lack of urgency surrounds Somalia's supposed 'emergency national dialogue.' On the eve of Eid, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud (HSM) reluctantly announced a national dialogue process in the face of collapsing security across the Shabelles and the growing threat to Mogadishu from Al-Shabaab. The Hawiye national opposition, Jubaland President Ahmed Madoobe and others have cautiously welcomed the offer, though they have sought greater clarity on a number of points, not least the scope of discussions. In the week since the announcement, however, Villa Somalia seems to have reverted to 'business as usual', exhibiting the same myopic and unilateral behaviour that precipitated the country's current crisis.
Sheegow, the Bantu, and the cost of injustice In August 2023, government forces forcibly arrested General Sheegow Ahmed Ali, the only senior government officer who hailed from the Jareer Weyne minority, at his home in Mogadishu. Accusing Sheegow of operating a militia, four people were killed in the ensuing violence between security forces and his bodyguards, while over a dozen were also injured. The separate treatment of the popular leader proved highly controversial amongst the long-ostracised Jareer Weyne, triggering protests in both the capital and Beledweyne. Nevertheless, Sheegow was sentenced to 10 years in prison by a military court that November and has remained in jail since. But with Al-Shabaab sweeping across Lower and Middle Shabelle in recent weeks and reports of Sheegow's ill health, the importance of the former official could be returning to the fore.
The Plunder of Sudan's National Museum A camera shakily pans around a room in Sudan's National Museum in Khartoum. Except for a few smashed cabinets...
Somalia's Last Chance Saloon At the 11th hour, with Al-Shabaab literally at the gates of Mogadishu and only under immense international pressure, has Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud reluctantly reached out to the national opposition. On 30 March, exactly one year after forcing sweeping constitutional amendments through parliament that all but eviscerated the federation, the president called – through gritted teeth - for a national conference to forge "unity" in the face of looming defeat and possible state collapse. Villa Somalia has pushed the country's fragile, transitional political model to the brink, with the jihadists having taken ready advantage of the chaos. But while the prospects of talks have been tentatively welcomed in some corners, their parameters remain unclear. What is apparent, though, is that the federal government will have to abandon its monopolistic constitutional and electoral agenda if it is to stall Al-Shabaab's advance and begin patching up Somalia's elite political consensus.
As Al-Shabaab continues to advance ever closer to the Somali capital, and the threat of Mogadishu's capture appears increasingly real, the jihadist group has telegraphed neither its purposes nor political demands. While plenty of comparisons may have been made to the sudden fall of Damascus at the hands of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) earlier this year, there are several key differences, not least the careful recalibration of the Syrian group's image away from its jihadist roots. Al-Shabaab, on the other hand, has displayed little willingness to consider any ideological concessions or negotiations since it first emerged over 20 years ago. For a rebel group that believes it is on the cusp of victory, Al-Shabaab remains obdurately inscrutable, leaving its opponents and onlookers to divine its true intentions.
On the night of 26 January 1885, thousands of assembled Sudanese Mahdist forces broke through the defences of the Egyptian garrison in Khartoum, ending a 10-month siege on the capital. The trigger of the Mahdist assault was an advancing British military expedition intended to relieve their besieged Egyptian counterparts, with London having subjugated Cairo in 1882. They arrived two days too late to the capital, however, and subsequently withdrew from the country, ending the Turco-Egyptian rule over Sudan. Subsequently, the fall of Khartoum to the Mahdists, an Islamic political movement, ushered in the 13-year period known as the 'Sudanese Mahdiyya' until its overthrow by Anglo-Egyptian forces in 1898.
Another day and more territory in central Somalia falls to Al-Shabaab. Just this morning, in the Masjid Ali Gadud district, jihadist fighters launched a dawn raid on a Somali National Army (SNA) base, seemingly overrunning the camp and killing several government soldiers. Across the Shabelles, Al-Shabaab is continuing to dictate the battlefield, and with the extremists' progress unmistakable, the threat to Mogadishu continues to grow. Yet Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's government remains waiting for a foreign deus ex machina rather than consider conceding political ground within the Abgaal and at the national level to halt their advance.
While international attention has been trained on the political schism within Tigray and the drumbeat of war between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Fano insurgency in the Amhara region has escalated further. On 19 March, several of the most prominent Fano militias launched "Operation Unity" in the Amhara region, targeting dozens of Ethiopian military installations and inflicting significant casualties. The attack across Gojjam, Gondar, and Wollo demonstrated a previously unseen level of coordination between these Fano factions.
A powerful caucus of Hawiye clan chiefs is conducting discreet talks with Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud in Mogadishu to defuse Somalia’s worsening political crisis, aggravated in recent weeks by the ongoing Al-Shabaab offensive in the Shabelle Valley and the attempted encirclement of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The initiative is still in its infancy, the details still somewhat hazy, and there is no guarantee it will succeed, but it does certainly offer a realistic prospect of ending the escalating divisions and political stalemate in Somalia.
Last Saturday, 15 March, a young man named Mohamed Jama Gahnug doused himself in fuel and set himself ablaze in Berbera, Somaliland, after – though accounts differ – being ignored by his girlfriend. Just a couple of days later, in the same city, another man, Ali Mohamed Abdalle, consumed poison following an argument with his partner. Both men survived, though Gahnug suffered severe burns, and Abdalle is still recuperating in the hospital. The two men’s extreme reactions to rejection in just a handful of days have reignited widespread discussions about love and tragedy in Berbera – after all, is Berbera not the quintessential home of tragic love, the city of Elmi Boodhari’s epic ancient romantic tale?
Eritrea and Ethiopia are unmistakably preparing for war. Since the Pretoria agreement in 2022 that ended the Tigray war, ties between the allies in the conflict have steadily worsened. From the misleading heights of the 2018 Addis-Asmara rapprochement, bilateral relations today are at their lowest ebb in years. In recent weeks, senior Ethiopian federal officials have increasingly resurfaced forceful historical, anthropological, and economic justifications for restoring 'access' to the Red Sea through Assab. Any Ethiopian attempt to seize the strategic port city, however, would likely come as part of a broader push for regime change in Asmara. In turn, both sides have further begun mobilising significant forces in anticipation of renewed conflict, while Eritrea has also sought to rally support from its allies in Cairo and Riyadh. But with the Horn of Africa and the fragile security of the Red Sea region so unstable, any return to war in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea would be calamitous.
Al-Shabaab's offensive momentum continues across central Somalia. Yesterday morning, as President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud travelled to Mogadishu's airport to depart for Adan Yabaal in Middle Shabelle, a major improvised explosive device (IED) was remotely detonated near his presidential convoy. Thankfully, the president was unharmed, but the explosion pulled down buildings at the Ceel-gaabta junction and wrecked a bulletproof SUV in the convoy. Several people were consequently killed in the blast, including two journalists, Mohamed Abukar Dabashe and Sultan Ayub Wardhere, while a number of presidential red berets were also injured. The condemnation of the attack in Mogadishu was swift, with the UK calling it a "cowardly act."