Hargeisa is the capital of a country that officially does not exist. Somaliland declared independence from Somalia on 18 May 1991, after the collapse of the Siad Barre regime, and has since run its own state —government, parliament, currency, police, passport, visa— without a single country in the world formally recognising it. The result is a strangely ordinary place: a city of well over a million people, with universities, book fairs, hotels, restaurants and traffic jams, that appears on maps inside one of the most fragile states on the planet.
It is also the natural gateway for anyone who wants to see the north-west of the Horn of Africa. This is where you get permits, hire vehicles and, when required, are assigned an escort from the Special Protection Unit (SPU) to hit the road. And from here it is an hour to Laas Geel, one of the best-preserved rock art galleries in Africa, and three hours to the Gulf of Aden coast.
The city itself is not monumental: it was flattened in 1988 by the Somali regime's air force, and almost everything you see today was built after 1991. What it does have is a particular intensity. The downed fighter jet presiding over Freedom Square, the money changers' tables piled with bundles of notes in the open air, the camel market at dawn, the library of the Hargeisa Cultural Centre with its cassettes rescued from the war. This guide covers it with a practical eye —what to see, how to get around, what things cost, which permits you need— and with honesty about what travelling here involves.
Hargeisa was founded around 1860 as a religious settlement by Sheikh Madar at a watering point in the highlands, on the caravan route between the interior and the port of Berbera. Under the British Somaliland protectorate it grew as an administrative centre, and in 1941 the British moved the capital there from Berbera. With independence in 1960 and the union with Italian Somalia, the city was sidelined, and discontent in the north led to the formation of the Somali National Movement (SNM). Repression reached its peak in 1988: Siad Barre's air force systematically bombed the city, destroying, according to the most widely cited estimates, between 70 % and 90 % of the urban area and killing tens of thousands of civilians, in what is now known as the Isaaq genocide. After Barre's fall, in May 1991 the elders gathered in Burao declared Somaliland's independence and Hargeisa became its capital. The city was rebuilt from the rubble with diaspora money and today is the political, economic and cultural centre of a de facto state still waiting for international recognition.
Read the full history ↓5,000-year-old rock art, a capital rebuilt from the rubble of 1988, and a state with its own currency, passport and elections that the world took thirty-four years to start recognising.
Read the history of Somaliland: Hargeisa and the interior (more stable, limited recognition) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Hargeisa is not an old city. Before the mid-19th century, this spot in the Galgodon highlands, some 1.334 metres above sea level, was little more than a watering place in the seasonal valley of the same name: a stop on the route linking the pastoral interior and the Ethiopian highlands with the port of Berbera, on the Gulf of Aden. Caravans loaded with hides, coffee, myrrh and frankincense came down this way, and cloth, rice and dates that arrived by sea from Arabia and India went back up.
The permanent settlement took shape around 1860 around Sheikh Madar Ahmed, a religious teacher of the Qadiriyya order who founded a farming and spiritual community there. That model, a jamaa or religious settlement that farms, teaches and gives refuge, was common in 19th-century northern Somalia and explains how several towns in the region began. Permanent water in the valley did the rest.
The wider context is Gulf of Aden trade and Somali Islam. The northern coast had been part of the Indian Ocean networks for more than a thousand years, with Zeila and Berbera as its main ports, and the interior was home to pastoral clans (mostly Isaaq in this area) whose economy revolved around camels, sheep and goats. Hargeisa grew on that hinge between the sea and the interior.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 sharpened European interest in both shores of the Gulf of Aden. The British had held Aden since 1839 and needed fresh meat for their garrison. Between 1884 and 1888 they signed a series of protection treaties with the northern Somali clans, and that is how the British Somaliland protectorate was born, run first from India and later from London.
British Somaliland was an unusual colony: London never set out to develop it, only to secure Aden's meat supply and stop another power from settling across the water. Administration was minimal, investment scarce and the push into the interior came late. Berbera, the port, was the capital for decades.
The first big challenge to the protectorate came from the interior itself. Between 1899 and 1920, the Dervish movement led by Mohammed Abdullah Hassan (the “Mad Mullah” of the British press, the Sayyid in Somali memory) fought two decades of war against the British, Italians and Ethiopians. The rebellion ended in 1920 with one of the first aerial bombing campaigns in African colonial history, aimed at the fortress of Taleh.
During the Second World War, Italy invaded and briefly occupied the protectorate in August 1940, and the British took it back in the spring of 1941. That was when they decided to move the administrative capital from Berbera to Hargeisa: the highland climate was healthier and far more bearable than the extreme heat of the coast. It was a typically colonial line of reasoning, but in this case it lasted. Hargeisa has been the capital ever since.
On 26 June 1960, British Somaliland became independent as the State of Somaliland. More than thirty countries recognised it during its five days of existence. On 1 July 1960, when Italian Somalia became independent, the two territories merged into the Somali Republic, with its capital in Mogadishu. The union was celebrated as the first step towards Greater Somalia, but it was done in a rush and without a jointly signed act of union. Somaliland would point to that legal weakness thirty years later.
Discontent in the north set in quickly. The capital, the civil service, the army and the top posts all ended up in southern hands. In a 1961 constitutional referendum the north voted mostly against, and that same year a group of Sandhurst-trained northern officers staged a failed coup in Hargeisa. The feeling of having joined an unequal union took hold.
In 1969, General Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in a coup and set up a one-party regime that ruled Somalia for twenty-one years. After defeat in the Ogaden War against Ethiopia (1977-1978), the regime grew ever more repressive and clan-based. In April 1981, exiles from the north founded the Somali National Movement (SNM) in London, a mostly Isaaq guerrilla movement that operated from bases in Ethiopia.
The 1980s were brutal for the north: a state of emergency, mass arrests, summary executions, confiscated businesses and a military administration that treated the region as hostile territory. In 1982, a group of Hargeisa professionals known as the “Uffo Group” (doctors, teachers and engineers who were trying to fix up the hospital and schools on their own) was arrested and convicted of sedition. The episode became a symbol of how far out of proportion the regime's repression had gone.
In May 1988, after a deal between Somalia and Ethiopia left the SNM without a safe rear base, the guerrillas launched a desperate offensive and took much of Hargeisa and Burao. Siad Barre's response defines this city's modern history and is the underlying reason for the later split.
The Somali Air Force bombed Hargeisa systematically and indiscriminately, sometimes with mercenary pilots hired abroad, using planes that took off from the city's own airport, a few kilometres from their targets. Artillery, ground assaults and summary executions came on top of the bombing. The most widely cited estimates put the destruction at 70 % to 90 % of the city and the death toll at around 50.000, the vast majority Isaaq civilians. Hundreds of thousands more fled to refugee camps in Ethiopia. Today these events are known as the Isaaq genocide or the “Hargeisa holocaust”, and since 1991 many mass graves have been exhumed around the city.
Oddly enough, that campaign left the city its best-known symbol. Several fighter jets were abandoned at the airport after the regime fell. In 1998, mayor Abdi Cawo had a Somali Air Force MiG-17, shot down nearby during the campaign, moved to Freedom Square and mounted on a pyramid-shaped base decorated with murals of the bombing and the SNM's war. The result is a war memorial with no euphemism at all: the weapon that destroyed the city, on display in the centre of the rebuilt city.
Siad Barre's regime collapsed in January 1991, and Somalia fell into the civil war and state collapse that still shape it today. The north went the other way. In May 1991, a large conference of notables, clan elders and SNM commanders met in Burao and declared Somaliland's independence restored within the borders of the former British protectorate, with Hargeisa as its capital. The legal argument was that the State of Somaliland had been sovereign and recognised for five days in 1960, and that the union with the south, never formalised in a joint act, could be dissolved.
The road was not smooth. There were two internal civil wars in the 1990s, in 1992 and from 1994 to 1996, settled through clan conferences (Borama in 1993 was the decisive one) that combined modern institutions with the traditional system of elders, embodied in the upper house known as the Guurti. Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, a former prime minister of Somalia, led the stabilisation process until his death in 2002.
In 2001, a referendum approved a constitution that enshrined independence. Since then Somaliland has held competitive presidential elections in 2003 (won by just 80 votes, with the loser accepting the result), 2010, 2017 and 2024, with peaceful handovers of power. In November 2024, opposition candidate Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi “Irro”, of the Waddani party, won with around 64 % of the vote and ended fourteen years of Kulmiye government. International observers called the election free and fair.
None of that has been enough for recognition. No country in the world formally recognises Somaliland, although several have representative offices in Hargeisa, and the territory issues passports, collects taxes and signs trade agreements. In January 2024, a memorandum of understanding with Ethiopia, which offered sea access in exchange for possible recognition, set off a regional diplomatic crisis with Mogadishu and a heated debate at home. Meanwhile, Hargeisa lost control of the eastern city of Las Anod in 2023 to SSC-Khatumo forces, a conflict that redrew the territory's effective borders and is still unresolved.
Today's Hargeisa was rebuilt almost entirely after 1991, much of it with money sent from abroad. Remittances from the Somaliland diaspora (in the United Kingdom, the Gulf states, Scandinavia and the United States) paid for homes, shops, schools and hospitals, and they are still one of the pillars of the economy. The hawala system that moves that money, with Dahabshiil as its flagship, largely began here.
The other economic pillar is livestock on the hoof. Somaliland exports millions of sheep, goats and camels through the port of Berbera, mainly to Saudi Arabia, and Hargeisa's camel market is one of the largest in East Africa. On top of that, the financial sector has made a striking technological leap: the Zaad and e-Dahab mobile wallets handle more than half of the country's trade. The largest banknote is worth about fifty US cents, and money changers stack bundles of cash on tables right in the street.
Culturally, the city has two institutions worth the trip. The Hargeisa Cultural Centre, backed by the Red Sea Cultural Foundation, holds Islamic manuscripts, old books, traditional objects and a wall of cassettes with thousands of recordings of Somali music and poetry rescued from the war. And the Hargeisa International Book Fair, founded in 2008 and held every summer, has become one of East Africa's most important literary festivals, with writers from across the continent.
In short, Hargeisa is a city that has rebuilt itself twice: physically, on top of its own rubble, and politically, by inventing a state that works without appearing on any official map. The MiG in Freedom Square is a reminder of why. The packed cafés on 26 June Street, the universities and the book fair tell what came next.
