Somalia is currently experiencing the worst drought in a generation. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud’s (HSM) foremost priorities seem to be the drought and the return of the missing soldiers from Eritrea
Earlier this month, on 6 July 2022, a man named Hashi Omar Hassan was killed by an explosive device attached to his car in the capital Mogadishu. More than two decades earlier, Hashi had been sentenced to 26 years in an Italian prison for the killing of Italian reporter Ilaria Alpi and her Slovenian cameraman, Miran Hrovatin. In 2015, Hashi was acquitted on appeal, released from jail, and awarded three million euros as compensation for wrongful imprisonment.
In an interview with the BBC that aired on 13 July, Olympic star Sir Mohamed Muktar Jama Farah – Mo Farah, to his legions of fans – revealed that he was trafficked as a child to the UK. Born Hussein Abdi Kaahin in Somaliland, he lost his father to a stray bullet in 1987 during the civil war, when Mo Farah was four. He said that he was flown to the UK from Djibouti at age nine by a woman he had never met. She provided him with documentation that had his photo but a different name – Mohamed Farah – which he used to enter the UK, where he believed he was going to be living with relatives. Instead, he was forced to work as a domestic servant, doing housework and providing childcare.
Somalia is facing one of its gravest humanitarian crises in decades, with nearly 5.9 million people almost half the population requiring urgent assistance. Chronic conflict, recurrent locust infestations, seasonal flooding, erratic rainfall linked to climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic have compounded the suffering across the country. The situation is worsened by a prolonged political crisis, the most severe in twenty years, with an electoral cycle lapsed and President Farmaajo refusing to vacate Villa Somalia. This political deadlock has significantly hindered the delivery of humanitarian aid. Over the past four years, the regime has repeatedly obstructed or politicized relief efforts, prioritizing control over impartial assistance. New bureaucratic procedures imposed on aid agencies have created operational challenges, forcing organizations to choose between ceding decision-making control or risking blacklisting for resistance.