Two weeks go by, and at least one new maritime agreement on the Somali peninsula has reared its head, with another retaliatory pact to potentially soon follow. The first was between Taiwan and Somaliland, following Hargeisa's Foreign Minister Abdirahman Dahir Osman's visit to Taipei in late July, during which he secured a cooperation agreement between the coastguards of Taiwan and Somaliland. And the inevitable Beijing-Mogadishu response has now arrived, with the Chinese Embassy in Somalia announcing that it has discussed enhancing "cooperation" with the federal government's Coast Guard. As ever, the officials reaffirmed their commitment to "safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity of China and Somalia."
On 26 April 1937, the Spanish town of Guernica was reduced to rubble by German Luftwaffe bombers. Conducted in support of Franco's nationalist troops, the bombing marked a turning point in modern warfare, where civilians were considered no longer collateral damage — they were targets. A few weeks later, Pablo Picasso transformed the event into an enduring visual outcry: Guernica, a monumental black-and-white painting that captured the agony of civilians crushed beneath impersonal, mechanised violence. Nearly a century later, under a different sky — that of northern Ethiopia — the weapons have changed. Drones now replace planes, and the devastation they inflict is quieter, remote-controlled, but no less lethal. Today, the war is waged by algorithms, and yet the bodies are still real.
Somalia's latest plunging crisis has divided not only the usual domestic political actors but the 'international community' as well - if such a thing even exists anymore. Though nominally on the same page in regard to fighting Al-Shabaab, foreign perspectives on the diagnosis of Somalia's ills – and the appropriate remedies -- have proven radically different. And since Al-Shabaab's dramatic territorial advances beginning late February, many of the international responses to the country's escalating political and security emergencies have been working at cross purposes with one another. Meanwhile, Villa Somalia's interactions with foreign partners have continued to vacillate between blatant rent-seeking and hypernationalism.