Since the beginning of March, the destabilising schism within and between the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Tigray Interim Administration (TIA) has rapidly escalated. The TPLF faction, led by Debretsion Gebremichael and backed by the majority of the Tigray Defence Forces (TDF) leadership, has now consolidated its hold on central and north-eastern Tigray and moved to assert itself over key towns, including Adigrat and parts of Mekelle. Amid the broader strains, this appears to have triggered the departure of TIA President Getachew Reda from Tigray for Addis, possibly ending his fraught time as regional leader. While the possibility of armed intra-Tigrayan conflict remains unlikely for now, the concerning backdrop of escalating Addis-Asmara tensions threatens to plunge the broader region into renewed conflict. On 10 March, TIA Vice-President General Tsadkan Gebretensae publicly warned of a return to war.
Over the weekend, large groups of Al-Shabaab fighters infiltrated areas close to the Somali capital Mogadishu, the bulk of them in the direction of Afgooye. Local media reported Al-Shabaab (AS) ‘sightings’ two nights in a row in multiple locations such as Ceelasha Biyaha and Sinka Dheer. According to local sources, Al-Shabaab reassured the public it had no intent to trigger fighting and ‘harm civilians’ or ‘change people’s lives’. The aim, Al-Shabaab told the residents of these districts, was to take over Mogadishu and create a ‘just Islamic state based on Islamic sharia.’ It would seem AS’s tactics are partly psyops, the aim being to project soft power, reassure civilians, and demonstrate confidence and reach. However, these types of deep incursions into enemy territory from multiple directions may also signal a far bolder military strategy: to steadily take control of Mogadishu as Somalia’s feckless federal government unravels.
Somalia appears on the brink of another seismic political change. Under growing political strain and losing ground to a resurgent Al-Shabaab, the possibility of Mogadishu's fall or negotiated capitulation to the jihadists in the coming months continues to grow. With Al-Shabaab rapidly taking advantage of the growing political chaos, Somalia's transitional federal project is more imperilled than ever. The country's regression from a fragile state to a failing one seems increasingly inevitable.
In early November 2020, as Ethiopian federal troops and their allies invaded Tigray, Addis directed the severing of all telecommunications and Internet services to the region. For the next two years, the world's most prolonged Internet blackout was imposed on Tigray, lasting 670 days until its eventual restoration only after the Pretoria agreement in December 2022. The veil thrown over Tigray had numerous damaging consequences, not least the hardships faced by Tigrayans in both documenting the litany of human rights violations against them and revealing these atrocities to the world. While Tigray's blackout is one of the most extreme examples, with conflict and political repression proliferating across the Horn of Africa, government internet shutdowns are becoming far more commonplace.
The first phase of Al-Shabaab's offensive surge culminated yesterday morning in a devastating complex attack on a hotel in Beledweyne. At least 10 people were killed after the jihadists detonated a car bomb before storming the Qaahira Hotel, targeting a meeting of Gaalje'el elders who were mobilising clan militias in western Hiiraan against Al-Shabaab. The intention was clear—to violently disrupt the assembling of ma'awiisley against Al-Shabaab in Hiiraan and to intimidate clans contemplating resistance.
Renewed conflict may be looming in Ethiopia's Somali region. Having given up arms in 2018, the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) has warned that it is considering a return to insurgency after months of deteriorating relations with the federal government. Last week, ONLF Chairman Abdikarim Sheikh Mahdi 'Maaday' confirmed that the party was exploring all eventualities in light of Addis's refusal to implement key articles of the 2018 peace agreement. The risk of a return to conflict had been apparent for some time, with the ONLF voicing increasing frustration at its own marginalisation as well as perceived infringements on the Somali Regional State's (SRS) independence and rights.
Once again, Somalia is quietly heading towards a large-scale humanitarian catastrophe. Intersecting threats of rising conflict and worsening drought are estimated to push an additional one million people into 'crisis' levels of food insecurity between April and June 2025. The prospect of 4.4 million people at IPC Level 3 hunger could arguably not come at a worse moment, with the international aid and development architecture paralysed by the savaging of USAID. In 2022, Somalia narrowly avoided famine due to coordinated humanitarian efforts, but it is unlikely to receive such assistance this time around.
Somalia's incumbent political elite remains engaged in a grand national self-construal project to recast the image of the country. At the enterprise's core is the notion that Somalia is 'rising' or 'risen,' and the narrative is becoming ever more feverish and urgent. It is partly animated by 'positive psychology'; the desire, perhaps, to project a 'positive image' of Somalia and boost Somali self-esteem, but it is also driven by a negative impulse – hostility to the 'fragile state' lens through which most of the world views Somalia.
The seemingly inexorable slide towards widespread conflict in South Sudan continues to gather pace. In recent weeks, escalating violence between government forces, opposition groups, and various militias has destabilised multiple regions while the fragile national ruling coalition looks ready to splinter-- again. Rising tensions between the two principal signatories of the 2018 peace agreement-- President Salva Kiir and First Vice-President Riek Machar-- and their dominant factions threaten to plunge the volatile country back into widespread violence.
The final domino for Villa Somalia's ill-conceived one-person, one-vote (OPOV) elections may be about to topple. After multiple false starts, it now appears that over two years since his term expired, South West State President Abdiaziz Laftagareen plans to conduct his own indirect regional elections absent from the federal government. With Darood-majority Puntland and Jubaland having withdrawn from the federation, only South West remained as the only non-Hawiye majority Federal Member State (FMS) tied to the OPOV plans, offering Villa Somalia a fig leaf of legitimacy. But with pressure still mounting on President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and the country badly adrift, Laftagareen appears to be poised to secure his position for the foreseeable future-- with Ethiopian support.
Between 19-22 February, several major Oromo opposition parties met in Addis to discuss Oromia's sustained upheaval, including the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) insurgency. For several years now, the region has been gripped by still-worsening humanitarian, political, and security crises, while the regional opposition has been essentially co-opted into the government or splintered and unable to mount a response to the deteriorating situation. In this light, the two principal Oromo opposition parties-- the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC)-- met in Addis alongside representatives from the ruling Prosperity Party and Oromo civil society actors.
Yesterday, Al-Shabaab demonstrated just how potent it remains. Just 18 miles from Mogadishu, Al-Shabaab fighters stormed the town of Bal'ad, which lies on the arterial road from the capital to Jowhar in Hirshabelle. As Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed touched down in Mogadishu in the morning, four mortar projectiles were launched by the jihadists toward Aden Adde International Airport, injuring several civilians. Meanwhile, at least 5 South West State soldiers were killed in an IED blast near Huddur in Bakool, and an explosion at a restaurant in Mogadishu's Kahda district wounded several people.
An internal memo reported by the Associated Press and US court disclosures has revealed the scale of the Trump administration's intended evisceration of USAID. Last month, Washington ordered a 90-day suspension for all USAID programmes, sending the established aid and development sectors into a tailspin and immediately severing thousands of programmes across the world. Waivers could be nominally applied for, but it appears that the depth of the cuts will be permanent, with the Trump government apparently seeking to eliminate 5,800 of the 6,200 multi-year USAID foreign aid contracts, an equivalent of USD 54 billion in assistance.
Reports from Ethiopia's western Gambella region suggest a sudden resurgence in cross-border cattle raids from the Murle ethnic group of South Sudan. Communities on either side of the porous border have long wrestled with cyclical cattle invasions, which are a particularly prominent feature of South Sudan's Jonglei region's profound instability. While the recent attack was the first cross-border raid since mid-2023, it is emblematic of the contraction of the Ethiopian state and the bleeding of instability across the Horn of Africa.
In November 2012, Somalia's federal parliament invited then-Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to address MPs, a gesture of respect only accorded someone deemed a 'special friend' of the Somali nation. The event was considered a way of thanking Türkiye for its swift and impressive humanitarian response to the large-scale famine in Somalia a year earlier, which claimed over 250,000 lives. In 2011, PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan travelled to Mogadishu with his wife to rally humanitarian support-- the first visit of a head of state from outside of Africa in decades. A photo of a distraught Erdogan and his wife clutching two Somali children at an emergency facility for victims, flanked by then-President Somali Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, helped jolt the Muslim world into action. Türkiye convened a summit of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) states and raised over USD 300 million for emergency relief.
Over the weekend, Somalia's federal government and Ethiopia finally agreed to the composition and deployment of Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) in Somalia, both bilaterally and under the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) auspices. In a signing ceremony in Mogadishu on Saturday, Ethiopia's spy chief, Redwan Hussein, and ENDF Chief of Staff Berhanu Jula signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with their Somali counterparts, which is expected to regulate the operational mandate of Ethiopian forces moving forward.
Much of the federal government's electoral agenda hinges on South West State President Abdiaziz Laftagareen. The regional leader, inserted into his position in Baidoa in December 2018, is the only remaining senior 'elected' non-Hawiye politician still aligned with the federal government. For much of 2024, Laftagareen played a careful balancing act between Addis-- upon which his security depends-- and Mogadishu-- the distributors of his political budget. Where he aligns himself in the coming months regarding the model for South West's long-overdue regional presidential elections could prove the final domino for the growing opposition against Villa Somalia's constitutional and electoral rewrites.
This week, dozens of senior Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commanders, Sudanese politicians aligned with the paramilitaries, and foreign officials gathered at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) in central Nairobi. The widely publicised and controversial ceremony—backed by Kenya, Ethiopia, and the UAE—marks the launch of a "parallel government" intended to challenge the authority of the UN-recognised military administration currently based in Port Sudan.
Last week, Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2024. Once again, Somalia remained mired at the bottom of the table, alongside Venezuela and South Sudan. Only the latter ranked lower than Somalia, which scored just 9 out of 100 in the rankings-- a drop of -2 from 2023. Despite promises of reform, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's administration has again become notorious for its corruption, as was the case during his first term between 2012 and 2017.
On 9 February, during a press briefing in Addis, the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva called on Ethiopia to unite behind the government's economic reform agenda. Buoyed by the progress made by Addis, she said that the "reform Ethiopia has embraced is tough and takes time, but it will yield tremendous results." So far, these reforms– including the rapid liberalisation of the economy– have caused significant financial reverberations amid a period of widespread internal conflicts and rapid state contraction.