The Horn of Africa has been inhabited since very early times. At Buur Heybe, in the south, and in the caves and rock shelters of the north, Stone Age occupations have been documented, and the region is one of the places where the shift from hunter-gatherer to cattle herder took place. That moment was painted.
In November and December 2002, a French archaeological team led by Xavier Gutherz identified ten rock shelters covered in paintings on a granite hill in the rural outskirts of Hargeisa: long-horned cows with ceremonial collars and robes, herders with raised arms, dogs, a giraffe. Local people had always known the place — they called it Laas Geel, "the camels' watering hole" — but it had never entered the international scientific circuit. Estimates put the paintings at between 5.500 and 4.500 years old, making them some of the earliest evidence of domestic herding in the Horn. The overhanging granite protected them from rain and sun: the reds and whites are still strikingly vivid. Other sites in the same style, such as Dhambalin and Karinhegane, complete the map.
A thousand years after those paintings, the Egyptians were already sailing south in search of a place they called Punt. The records run from the 25th century BC — the expedition of the pharaoh Sahure, of the Fifth Dynasty — to around 1000 BC, and the most famous episode is the fleet that Queen Hatshepsut sent in the 15th century BC and had carved into the reliefs at Deir el-Bahari. From Punt came gold, ebony, skins, live animals and, above all, aromatic resins: incense and myrrh, the goods that kept the temples of the Mediterranean and the East running.
Exactly where Punt was is still debated. The general consensus places it in the Horn of Africa and its surroundings — Eritrea, eastern Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, Djibouti — and some propose the western coast of Arabia. A 2010 study of oxygen isotopes in the hair of mummified baboons, published by researchers from the University of California, pointed to Eritrea and eastern Ethiopia as the most likely origin of those animals, rather than Somalia or Yemen. What nobody disputes is that the Somali coast was for millennia one of the world's great suppliers of incense: the Boswellia trees of the northern mountains still are.
The "Periplus of the Erythraean Sea", a Greek sailing manual from the 1st century AD, already lists the ports of this coast: Malao (today's Berbera), Avalites (Zeila), Mosylon, Opone, Sarapion and Essina, the last of these in the Merca area. They were stops on a network linking Egypt and the Persian Gulf with India, exporting incense, myrrh, ivory, tortoiseshell and slaves.
On that foundation, between the 9th and 15th centuries, a world of coastal city-states grew up that shared language, coral-stone architecture and Islam with the rest of the Swahili coast. Mogadishu was the most powerful: when the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta landed there in 1331, he described it as "an enormously large city", famous for its cloth, which was exported under the city's name as far as Egypt. Barawa, with its islet of whitewashed houses and its own dialect, Chimwiini, was described by a 13th-century scholar as one of the three most important cities on the East African coast, together with Mogadishu and Merca. In the northwest, Zeila served as the gateway for trade from the Ethiopian highlands.
These cities were not Arab or Persian colonies, though colonial historiography repeated that claim for decades. They were African centres, with local dynasties, their own mosques and a mixed-heritage merchant elite. The Arba'a Rukun mosque in Mogadishu preserves in its mihrab an inscription dated 667 AH — 1268 or 1269 — bearing the name of its founder, Khusra ibn Mubarak al-Shirazi; the Fakr ad-Din mosque dates from the same year.
The 16th century brought the Portuguese. Tristão da Cunha sacked and burned Barawa in 1506; Zeila was attacked in 1517 and in 1528. None of those expeditions achieved permanent occupation, but they diverted routes and weakened the ports, while the axis of Indian Ocean trade shifted southward.
Islam reached the northern coast very early, via the Red Sea, in the 7th century. Tradition holds that the Masjid al-Qiblatayn in Zeila — the "mosque of the two qiblas", with two mihrabs, one facing Jerusalem and the other Mecca — dates from that period, which would make it one of the oldest in Africa. From the ports, the faith made its way inland with caravan traders and Sufi sheikhs, and by the 13th century much of the Somali interior was Muslim.
That is where the sultanates came from. The Sultanate of Ifat, with its capital at Zeila, dominated the northwest from the late 13th century and clashed again and again with the Christian Ethiopian Empire. In 1415 the Ethiopian emperor Yeshaq I captured and killed Sultan Sa'ad ad-Din II; his sons returned from Yemen and refounded the state as the Adal Sultanate, first at Dakkar and from 1520 at Harar, in present-day Ethiopia. At its height, Adal controlled a huge strip of territory, from Cape Guardafui to the Red Sea.
In 1529 Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi — Ahmad Gurey to Somalis, Gragn "the left-handed" to Ethiopians — launched an invasion that came close to ending the Solomonic dynasty. He won at Shimbra Kure and within a few years occupied much of the Ethiopian highlands. It was a pioneering war in the region's use of artillery and firearms, with Ottoman support on Adal's side and, from 1541, a Portuguese expedition of four hundred musketeers under Cristóvão da Gama on the Ethiopian side. Ahmad died at the battle of Wayna Daga on 21 February 1543, and the occupation collapsed with him.
The war left both sides exhausted and opened the way for the Oromo migrations, which reshaped the map of the Horn. Adal fell back on Harar — Emir Nur ibn Mujahid built the wall that can still be seen there — and in 1577 moved to Aussa. Five centuries later, Ahmad Gurey remains a major figure in Somali memory and a painful one in Ethiopian memory: the same event, two opposing national narratives.
While Adal fought in the northwest, the Somali south was under the Ajuran Sultanate, which from the 13th century to the late 17th ruled a territory stretching from Hobyo, on the central coast, to Kismayo, and taking in much of eastern Ethiopia. Ajuran is a rare case in African history: it is often described as the continent's only "hydraulic empire".
Its power rested on control of water. The Ajuran built limestone wells along the inland grazing routes, as well as dams and irrigation canal systems — the kelliyo — on the Shabelle and Juba rivers, which made it possible to grow sorghum, maize and cotton in the land between the rivers, the country's only serious farming zone. Many of those wells remained in use until the 20th century. On the coast they built stone towers and forts, taxed trade and, with Ottoman support, held off the Portuguese advance in the 16th century. Mogadishu, part of the sultanate, sent embassies to China: Zheng He's Ming fleet called at the city in the 15th century and returned with African animals for the imperial court.
In the late 17th century, heavy taxation and the abandonment of traditional forms of government sparked internal rebellions, and Ajuran broke apart around 1695. In its place arose the Hiraab Imamate, around Mogadishu, and the Geledi Sultanate on the lower Shabelle, which reached its peak under Sultan Yusuf Mahamud Ibrahim and his victory in the Bardheere jihad in 1843; the Bimal of Merca defeated it in 1848 and 1878 and hastened its decline.
In the north and northeast the map looked different. The Majeerteen Sultanate, of the clan of the same name, controlled the tip of the Horn and lived off incense, livestock, fishing and — no small line of business — salvaging the ships that were wrecked off Cape Guardafui. Under Boqor Osman Mahamuud (1860-1927) it had a bureaucracy, a flag, a hereditary nobility and a professional army. In 1878 Yusuf Ali Kenadid founded the Sultanate of Hobyo further south. And in the northwest, the Isaaq Sultanate, established around the middle of the 18th century, organised the interior of what is now Somaliland. All of them came to the colonial carve-up as states in their own right: it was with them that the Europeans negotiated the treaties.
In the last part of the 19th century, Somali territory was cut into five pieces. Britain signed protectorate treaties with the northern clans from 1884 onwards and created British Somaliland, with its capital at Berbera: its main interest was securing the meat supply for the Aden garrison, across the gulf. France took the enclave of Obock and Djibouti, French Somaliland. From 1889 Italy built up its Italian Somaliland through treaties with the sultanates of Hobyo and Majeerteen and through concessions leased from the Sultan of Zanzibar over Mogadishu, Merca and Barawa, which it bought outright in 1905.
The other two pieces ended up inside neighbouring countries. Ethiopia, under Menelik II, extended its rule over the Ogaden, the Somali herders' plateau in the southeast, and Britain incorporated the Northern Frontier District, also Somali-populated, into its colony of Kenya. In 1925 London ceded the northern half of Jubaland to Italy, Kismayo included, as belated payment for Italian support in the First World War: the territory, called Oltre Giuba, was formally incorporated into Italian Somaliland on 30 June 1926.
That five-way division is the origin of the white five-pointed star on the Somali flag, adopted in 1954: each point represents one of the Somali-populated territories — Italian Somaliland, British Somaliland, French Somaliland, the Ogaden and northern Kenya — and the idea of a "Greater Somalia" that would bring them together. That irredentist project would later explain the Ogaden War, the Shifta conflict in Kenya and much of Somali foreign policy in the 20th century.
Italian rule was completed late and by force. Between 1924 and 1927, the fascist governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi ordered the disarmament and dismantling of the northeastern sultanates, which until then had kept their autonomy. The Majeerteen resisted for almost three years; Boqor Osman's son, Hersi Boqor, kept fighting until he went into exile in Ethiopia in late 1927. In 1935-36 Italy invaded Ethiopia from Somalia and unified its possessions as Italian East Africa. In 1940 it also occupied British Somaliland, and the British retook it the following year: it was then, in 1941, that the protectorate's capital moved from Berbera to Hargeisa.
Before the colonial carve-up was consolidated there were twenty years of war. Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, born on 7 April 1856 in Buuhoodle, was a sheikh of the Salihiyya Sufi order who came back from Mecca convinced that the European and Ethiopian Christian presence was corrupting Somali Islam. In 1899 he founded the Dervish movement and declared war on the British, the Italians and the Ethiopians all at once.
The British nicknamed him "the Mad Mullah", a label that says more about them than about him: Hassan was a skilful strategist and a first-rate poet, and his verses — "Dardaaran", "Maqashiiya uunka" — are still part of the Somali literary canon. Between 1900 and 1904 Britain mounted four overland military expeditions to finish him off, and none succeeded. In 1905 the Illig agreement recognised his control over the Nugaal valley, with Italian backing.
Between 1909 and 1913 the Dervishes moved their capital to Taleh, in the Nugaal valley, where they built a walled complex with fourteen towers and solid stone forts, the largest of which was called Silsilat. The ruins are still standing. The end came from the air: in January and February 1920 the British combined a ground attack with twelve RAF aircraft that bombed Taleh, the first use of military aviation in a conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. Hassan escaped, withdrew to the Ogaden and died on 21 December 1920 in Imi, in Ethiopian territory, of influenza according to the most frequently cited sources.
The human cost was enormous and the estimates are rough: some sources cited in the historiography reckon that the two decades of war and the famines that came with them killed around a third of the north's population. The figure is best read as an order of magnitude rather than a settled fact. For later Somali nationalism, the Sayyid became the first hero of anti-colonial resistance; for other clans who suffered his raids, the memory is considerably more ambiguous.
After the Second World War, the United Nations decided in 1949 to hand Italy back the administration of its former colony, this time as a trust territory and with a fixed deadline: ten years to bring it to independence. The Italian Trust Administration of Somalia ran from 1950 to 1960 and set up the institutions of the future state — parliament, parties, schools, an army — with Mogadishu as its capital. In the north, the British protectorate moved forward on its own and at a different pace.
The two territories became independent five days apart. British Somaliland did so on 26 June 1960 and was recognised by more than thirty countries. Italian Somalia followed on 1 July. That same day, the two united to form the Somali Republic, with Aden Abdullah Osman Daar as president and Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke as prime minister. It was a quick decision, taken amid huge popular enthusiasm and with Greater Somalia on the horizon.
The problems surfaced right away. The two parts brought different administrations, legal codes, colonial languages and education systems, and posts and power were concentrated in the far more populous south. The Act of Union was passed in a rush and with procedural flaws that northern jurists pointed out from the start. In the constitutional referendum of June 1961 the national result was favourable, but in the north a majority rejected the constitution. In December 1961, a group of British-trained northern officers rose up in Hargeisa and Burao; some of the ringleaders openly called for separation. The mutiny failed and became a footnote, but thirty years later that same grievance would return with far greater force.
The parliamentary republic lasted nine years and worked reasonably well by the African standards of the time: competitive elections, an active press, a peaceful handover of the presidency to Sharmarke in 1967. It ended abruptly. On 15 October 1969, President Sharmarke was assassinated by one of his bodyguards in Las Anod. Six days later, on 21 October, the army took power without meeting any resistance.
General Mohamed Siad Barre, commander of the army, chaired the Supreme Revolutionary Council, dissolved parliament, banned political parties and renamed the country the Somali Democratic Republic. In 1970 he proclaimed "scientific socialism" (hantiwadaagga cilmiga ku dhisan), nationalised banks, industries and land, and aligned Somalia with the Soviet Union, which in return built military bases, including the one at Berbera.
The most lasting achievement of those years was not economic but linguistic. Until 1972 Somali was a language with no official script: the administration worked in Italian, English and Arabic, and rival attempts at an alphabet — Osman Yusuf Kenadid's Osmanya, Borama, Kaddare, the Wadaad script in Arabic characters — competed with one another. In October 1972 the regime adopted by decree a Latin alphabet developed by Somali and foreign linguists, among them Shire Jama Ahmed, Musa Haji Ismail Galal and B. W. Andrzejewski. It uses every letter of the English alphabet except p, v and z. Then came the rural literacy campaigns of 1974 and 1975, which mobilised tens of thousands of secondary school students; the regime itself claimed literacy rates close to 80 %, a figure specialists consider inflated but which reflects a real leap. The official newspaper was renamed Xiddigta Oktoobar, "The October Star".
In 1974-75 a devastating drought, remembered as Dabadheer ("the long one"), forced the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of nomads. And in July 1977 Barre played his biggest card: invading the Ethiopian Ogaden to complete Greater Somalia. The Ogaden War lasted from 13 July 1977 to 23 March 1978. Somalia went in with some 31.000 to 39.000 soldiers, 250 tanks and 53 aircraft, and within a month controlled about 70 % of the region.
Then the Soviet Union switched sides. Ethiopia had just had its own Marxist revolution and Moscow decided it was the better bet: it cut off supplies to Mogadishu and set up an arms airlift for Addis Ababa that was, by volume, the second largest in its history after the one it sent to Syria in 1973. More than 15.000 Cuban troops arrived under General Arnaldo Ochoa, along with about 1.500 Soviet advisers led by General Vasili Petrov. The counter-offensive retook Jijiga and the Kara Marda pass and drove the Somali army out in March 1978. According to the most widely cited estimates, Somalia lost about a third of its army and half of its air force; death tolls range from 5.676 to 8.000 on the Somali side, plus some 25.000 civilians according to the figures cited. Half a million people were displaced.
The defeat broke the regime. Barre expelled the Soviets, switched to the Western bloc — in 1980 he granted the United States access to the facilities at Berbera — and at home replaced socialist rhetoric with an increasingly naked use of clan: privileges for his own, the Marehan, and repression against those he considered disloyal. The 1978 coup attempt was followed by campaigns against the Majeerteen of the northeast in 1979-80 and, in the years after, against the Isaaq of the north.
The civil war did not begin in 1991: it began in the north, in 1988. The Somali National Movement (SNM), formed by Isaaq exiles, attacked Burao on 27 May 1988 and Hargeisa on the 31st. The regime's response was the systematic bombing of its own cities. The Somali air force took off from Hargeisa airport, turned around and bombed the city again and again, alongside close-range artillery. General Mohammed Said Hersi Morgan, Barre's son-in-law and military governor of the north, had signed an internal memorandum months earlier that researchers know as the "Letter of Death", in which he proposed a campaign of annihilation against the Isaaq.
The figures are disputed and are best attributed. Estimates of civilian deaths in the literature range from 50,000 to 200,000; for Hargeisa in particular, a figure of around 50,000 is often cited. The US embassy calculated that 70% of the city was damaged or destroyed, and other estimates go as high as 90%. Close to 500,000 people fled to Ethiopia — one of the fastest and largest forced displacements recorded in Africa, according to UNHCR — and another 400,000 were internally displaced. In 2001, an investigation commissioned by the United Nations and carried out by the jurist Chris Mburu concluded that "the crime of genocide was conceived, planned and perpetrated by the Somali Government against the Isaaq people". Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented massacres and extrajudicial executions.
The regime fell on 26 January 1991. Barre fled Mogadishu and died in exile in Lagos on 2 January 1995. But the guerrillas' victory did not produce a government: it produced a war among them. In Mogadishu, the United Somali Congress split between supporters of Ali Mahdi Muhammad and those of General Mohamed Farah Aidid, and the city was cut in two by the "green line". The Somali state simply ceased to exist.
In 1992, agricultural collapse, the looting of harvests and the blocking of aid caused an appalling famine in the south; the most cited estimates put the death toll at between 200,000 and 300,000. The United Nations set up UNOSOM I, and then the United States led UNITAF, which deployed some 37,000 troops at its peak. The mission turned into a manhunt for General Aidid and ended on 3 October 1993, when two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down over Mogadishu: 18 American soldiers died and, according to the most cited estimates, so did between several hundred and more than a thousand Somalis. American public opinion turned, and international troops withdrew completely in March 1995, leaving the country in the hands of the warlords.
While the south tore itself apart, the north took another path. Between February and May 1991, elders, sheikhs and SNM commanders met in a series of clan conferences — Berbera in February, the great Burao conference in May — and on 18 May 1991 they proclaimed the restoration of independence of the territory that had been British Somaliland, under the name Republic of Somaliland, with Abdirahman Ahmed Ali Tuur as its first president.
Hargeisa's legal argument is precise: on 26 June 1960 British Somaliland became independent as a sovereign state, recognised by dozens of countries, and five days later voluntarily united with former Italian Somalia; what was declared in 1991, they argue, is not secession but the dissolution of a voluntary union that was never properly formalised and that ended in the bombing of its own cities. Mogadishu replies that the Somali Republic was internationally recognised as a single state for thirty-one years, that the territorial integrity of African states is a principle enshrined by the African Union, and that Somaliland is just another federal region of Somalia. Both positions can be argued and neither has prevailed.
What Somaliland did build was a state that works. The 1993 Borama conference shaped a hybrid system that combines modern institutions with an upper house of elders, the Guurti, and brought Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal to the presidency. There were serious internal conflicts between 1994 and 1996, but they were resolved through negotiation between clans. In 1994 it created its own currency, the Somaliland shilling; in 1996 it issued its first passport, biometric since 2014. The constitutional referendum of 31 May 2001, which ratified independence, was approved by 97.1% of voters according to official results. Since then there have been competitive presidential elections and peaceful handovers of power between political rivals: Dahir Riyale Kahin won in 2003 by 80 votes, Ahmed Silanyo in 2010, Muse Bihi in 2017 and Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi "Cirro" in November 2024, when the ruling party accepted defeat. It is a record no neighbour in the region can match.
Recognition, however, did not come. For thirty-four years no UN member state recognised Somaliland, although several countries maintain representative offices in Hargeisa and accept its travel documents. On 26 December 2025, Israel became the first UN member state to formally recognise it, within the framework of the Abraham Accords; the Somali government called the move an unlawful act and an attack on its sovereignty, and requested an emergency meeting of the Security Council. As of mid-2026, no other country had followed suit, although Ethiopia — which in January 2024 signed a memorandum with Hargeisa to gain access to the sea via Berbera — has come closest.
Territorial control is also disputed. In February 2023 the Las Anod conflict broke out in the Sool region between the Somaliland army and Dhulbahante clan militias; according to the UN's OCHA, between 154,000 and 203,000 civilians were displaced. Somaliland forces withdrew some 100 kilometres to the west in August 2023, and on 19 October that year the Somali federal government recognised the SSC-Khatumo administration, something Puntland, which claims the same regions, did not accept.
In the vacuum left by the warlords, Mogadishu's neighbourhoods began organising Islamic courts to administer justice and security. In 2006 those courts federated into the Islamic Courts Union, drove out the militias and, for the first time in fifteen years, the capital had something resembling public order. It lasted months: in December 2006, Ethiopia invaded with US backing and ousted the courts.
That invasion was the midwife of Al Shabaab. The group had been born as the armed youth wing of the courts and was marginal; foreign occupation turned it into a mass movement. Between 2009 and 2010 it controlled most of the centre and south of the country. In August 2011 it announced a "strategic withdrawal" from Mogadishu in the face of the advance of the African Union mission (AMISOM), and since then it has lost the cities but kept much of the countryside, financing itself through taxes, extortion and the charcoal trade. In February 2012 it formally pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda.
Its attacks left their mark on the region: the assault on the Westgate shopping centre in Nairobi in 2013 (67 dead), the massacre at Garissa university in 2015 (148 dead) and the truck bomb of 14 October 2017 in Mogadishu, with more than 500 dead, the deadliest attack in Somalia's history. Estimates of its strength vary widely: the Somali president spoke in 2022 of 15,000 to 18,000 fighters, while a UN panel of experts estimated between 7,000 and 12,000 in 2023. Its leader Ahmed Abdi Godane was killed in a US drone strike on 1 September 2014; he was succeeded by Ahmad Diriye.
In parallel, the state was gradually rebuilt. After a decade of transitional governments, the Federal Government of Somalia was constituted on 20 August 2012, with a parliament and a clan power-sharing formula known as "4.5": four equal shares for the major clans — Darod, Hawiye, Dir and Isaaq on one hand, Rahanweyn or Digil-Mirifle — and half a share for minority groups. Federal member states were created: Puntland (which had existed since 1998), Jubaland, South West State, Galmudug and Hirshabelle. Somaliland stayed out of the scheme by its own choice.
The road since then has been uneven. A military and clan-militia offensive against Al Shabaab in 2022-2023 recovered territory in the centre of the country and then stalled; the African Union mission went from AMISOM to ATMIS in 2022 and to AUSSOM in 2025, with troop cuts and funding problems; in March 2024 Puntland withdrew its recognition of the federal government over the dispute about constitutional reform. In 2023 most of Somalia's external debt was cancelled, and in 2024 the country joined the East African Community. Mogadishu, meanwhile, is rebuilding: between 2020 and 2025 more than 6,000 new buildings went up.
There are two keys without which none of the above makes sense: poetry and the clan.
The British explorer Richard Burton wrote in the 19th century that the country "teems with poets" and that every chief had his own; the expression "nation of poets" was later popularised by the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence. In a largely nomadic society that, until 1972, had no official script for its language, verse was the archive, the newspaper and the court. The classical genres have fixed metre and compulsory alliteration — the hikaad: the gabay, of fourteen to sixteen syllables, is the most solemn; the geeraar and the jiifto, of seven, are shorter; the heello and the belwo, which emerged in the 1920s, are sung. Poems circulate, get answered and spark polemics that last for years, like the famous Guba series. Mohammed Abdullah Hassan fought with verses as much as with rifles, and in the 20th century Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame "Hadraawi", who died in 2022, was called the Somali Shakespeare. Under Barre's dictatorship, the opposition circulated its poems on cassettes and through the BBC Somali Service, which for decades was the country's go-to radio station.
The other key is the clan. Somali society is organised by patrilineal descent — the abtirsi, "the counting of the fathers", which any child learns by heart going back twenty or thirty generations — in a structure of clan families, clans, sub-clans, lineages and, at the base, the mag or diya group, from a few hundred to a few thousand people who are collectively liable for the blood compensation of any of their members. The major families are the Darod, the Hawiye, the Isaaq, the Dir and the Rahanweyn or Digil-Mirifle. The customary law that regulates all this, the xeer, is a system of contracts between lineages that survived the colonial state, the socialist state and the collapse of 1991: during the years without government it was, literally, the only thing left standing.
That same system explains both the resilience and much of the conflict. Siad Barre proclaimed the abolition of the clan — there were even symbolic "burials" of tribalism — and ended up governing through it. Current federal politics institutionalised it in the 4.5 formula, which guarantees power-sharing but freezes clan identities within the state, something many Somali intellectuals criticise harshly. In Somaliland, by contrast, the same mechanisms of mediation between elders were the tool that made it possible to end the internal wars of the 1990s. It is the same social structure producing opposite results depending on how it is used.
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Before Mogadishu existed, there was the anchorage. The "Periplus of the Erythraean Sea", the Greek sailing manual from the 1st century AD, mentions a port called Sarapion on this stretch of coast, which most researchers place in the area of the present-day capital. It was one of the stops on the route linking the Red Sea with India: ivory, incense, tortoiseshell and slaves went out through it, and cloth, iron and ceramics came in.
Geography explains the settlement. Banaadir — the name comes from the Persian bandar, "port" — is a flat strip of dunes and sand with very little natural shelter, but it lies right where the northeast monsoon delivers the ships coming down from Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The city grew without a bay or a river, relying on brackish wells and on trade.
That total dependence on the sea shaped the city's character: cosmopolitan, mercantile, outward-looking. Mogadishu was always more connected to Aden, Muscat or Gujarat than to the Somali interior two hundred kilometres away, and that tension between the port and the nomadic interior runs through its entire history.
Between the 12th and 15th centuries, Mogadishu was a commercial power. The Sultanate of Mogadishu minted its own coinage, maintained relations with Aden, Hormuz and Gujarat, and eventually became part of the great Ajuran Sultanate. The Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta landed here in 1331 and described it as "an exceedingly large city", with a sultan who spoke Somali and Arabic, surrounded by judges and sheikhs, and with ritualised hospitality: newly arrived merchants were assigned a local host who took care of their business.
The city was famous for its textiles. The cotton cloth produced here was exported under the city's name — maqdishu — as far as Egypt and the Gulf, and was one of the most important industries on the East African coast. In exchange, silks, Chinese porcelain, spices and pearls were imported.
Admiral Zheng He's Ming fleet called at Mogadishu in the 15th century: Chinese records tell of Somali embassies that reached the imperial court and of African animals — giraffes, zebras — that caused a sensation in Beijing. The archaeological remains of that era — fragments of Song and Ming porcelain on the beaches, the coral-stone mosques — still turn up among the rubble of the war.
Mogadishu's historic quarter consists of two neighbouring, rival districts: Hamar Weyne ("the great city") and Shangani, on the coast. They are a classic example of an Indian Ocean "stone town": houses of coral blocks and lime mortar, inner courtyards, wooden lattices, carved doors and alleys so narrow they stay in shade all day.
The country's oldest mosques are here. The Arba'a Rukun mosque preserves in its mihrab an inscription dated 667 AH — 1268 or 1269 — naming its founder, Khusra ibn Mubarak al-Shirazi. The Fakr ad-Din mosque, from the same year, bears the name of the first sultan of Mogadishu. A little further on, at the tip of Shangani, stands the old harbour lighthouse, built in the Italian period on top of an earlier tower.
Historically, the two districts operated as separate confederations, with their own merchant families, their own mosques and even ritualised rivalries. The people of Hamar Weyne, the Reer Hamar or Benadiri, are an urban group of mixed origin — Somali, Arab, Persian, Indian — with their own dialect and customs, and they were one of the communities hit hardest by militia looting in 1991-92, precisely because they were merchants with no clan militia of their own to defend them.
The war rolled over all of this. Many buildings collapsed, others were occupied by displaced families, and heritage was also lost to uncontrolled reconstruction. Today Hamar Weyne is once again a bustling market and is the closest thing to a historic centre the capital has left.
Italy first moved in as a tenant: in 1892 the Sultan of Zanzibar granted it a concession over the Banaadir ports, and in 1905 sold them outright. That same year Mogadishu became the capital of Italian Somaliland, and over the following three decades a European city was built on top of it.
The most ambitious monument was the cathedral. It was built between 1923 and 1928 to a design by the architect Antonio Vandone, in Neo-Norman style, modelled on Cefalù Cathedral in Sicily: a Latin-cross plan, three naves and two towers 37.5 metres high. It was promoted by the fascist governor Cesare Maria De Vecchi and was for decades the largest church in East Africa. Around it rose the Arch of Triumph to Umberto I, the national theatre, the market, villas with galleries and the seafront avenue with its beach: the Lido, which is still called that.
The end of that Mogadishu was as violent as everything else. The last bishop, Salvatore Colombo, was shot dead inside the cathedral in 1989 — the crime was never solved — and the church was looted and wrecked in 1991. In 2008 much of what remained was destroyed; in 2012 the walls and some arches were still standing. In 2013 the diocese announced a restoration plan that, as of 2023, had not begun.
Lido beach went its own way. After Al Shabaab's withdrawal in 2011 it filled up again on Fridays with families, cafés and football matches, and became the most cited symbol of the capital's fragile normality. It was also the target of attacks — the worst in January 2016, against a seafront restaurant — which sums up life in the city rather well.
When Siad Barre fled on 26 January 1991, the militia that had ousted him — the United Somali Congress — split in two and turned Mogadishu into a battlefield. Supporters of the businessman Ali Mahdi Muhammad held the north and those of General Mohamed Farah Aidid the south, separated by a strip of destruction that became known as "the green line". The port, the airport and the food warehouses became military targets.
The famine that followed, especially between 1991 and 1992, claimed between 200,000 and 300,000 lives in the south of the country, according to the most cited estimates. The international community responded with UNOSOM I and, from December 1992, with the US-led UNITAF, which deployed some 37,000 troops to escort the aid.
The mission turned into a pursuit of General Aidid. On 3 October 1993, a US special forces operation to capture some of his associates in the Bakara market ended with two Black Hawk helicopters shot down and an urban battle lasting almost twenty-four hours. 18 American soldiers died, and estimates of Somali deaths range from several hundred to more than a thousand. The images of bodies dragged through the streets shaped the foreign policy of Washington and the UN for years, with consequences that reached as far as Rwanda.
International troops withdrew completely in March 1995. Mogadishu remained for another sixteen years in the hands of militias, Islamic courts, Ethiopian occupation and Al Shabaab, which withdrew from the city in August 2011 after the offensive by the African Union mission.
Since 2011, Mogadishu has been going through a reconstruction as visible as it is uneven. Tens of thousands of people from the diaspora came back with capital and ideas; hotels, private universities, TV channels and restaurants opened; the port and Aden Adde International Airport returned to normal operation, with regular flights to Istanbul, Nairobi, Djibouti and the Gulf. According to counts cited by the press and in urban studies, more than 6.000 new buildings went up in the city between 2020 and 2025.
That boom has its dark side. The growth is largely speculative, land ownership is a legal mess after thirty years without a land registry, and construction has pushed ahead over the heritage of the old town. The city has also grown with hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people who live in precarious camps on the outskirts, driven out by drought and by the conflict in the interior.
And security is still the central problem. Al Shabaab no longer controls neighbourhoods, but it keeps the capacity to carry out attacks that regularly hit hotels, restaurants and government buildings. The extreme case was the truck bomb of 14 October 2017 at the Zoobe junction, which killed more than 500 people, the deadliest attack in the country's history. The city lives with concrete walls, checkpoints and fortified "green zones".
For the traveller, all this comes down to one practical conclusion: Mogadishu is fascinating and essential for understanding Somalia, and it is also one of the highest-risk destinations on the planet. It is visited, when it is visited, with a local operator, fortified accommodation and an armed escort, and that is not a decorative recommendation.
Laas Geel lies about 50 kilometres from Hargeisa, on a granite outcrop where two dry riverbeds meet. It consists of ten rock shelters with panels painted in red, white, ochre and black: cows with enormously long horns wearing collars and ceremonial robes, herders with their arms raised in worship, dogs, a giraffe. The style, which archaeologists call "Ethiopian-Arabian", is repeated at other sites in the region such as Dhambalin and Karinhegane.
The French archaeological mission led by Xavier Gutherz documented it in November and December 2002, during a survey looking for Neolithic sites. The local herders had always known about it and avoided camping under the shelters: they said spirits lived there. Dating places the paintings between 5,500 and 4,500 years old, which makes Laas Geel one of the earliest records of domestic herding in the Horn of Africa, and one of the best-preserved ensembles on the continent: the granite overhang protected it from direct rain.
And yet it is not on the World Heritage List. The reason is political, not archaeological. Only States Parties to the 1972 Convention can nominate sites, and only within their own sovereign territory. Somaliland is not internationally recognised and therefore cannot submit a nomination; Somalia, which did ratify the Convention in 2020 (the last African country to do so, the 194th State Party), does not control the territory or the site. The result is a vacuum: Laas Geel is left outside the international protection system and the technical funding that would come with it. Few specialists doubt that, without that problem, it would already be a World Heritage Site.
The real protection is local. There is a rangers' hut, an admission fee is charged, you need a permit from Somaliland's Ministry of Tourism, issued in Hargeisa, and you get there in your own vehicle. There are no fences or walkways: you walk among the shelters a metre away from five-thousand-year-old paintings, something that would be unthinkable at any other comparable site in the world.
From the mid-18th century, the interior of what is now Somaliland was organised by the Isaaq Sultanate, founded according to tradition by Sultan Guled Abdi, with its centre first at Toon and later at Berbera. It was a state built on herding and trade: it controlled the caravan routes coming down from Harar and the Ethiopian highlands to the ports of the Gulf of Aden.
Britain arrived for logistical rather than territorial reasons. After occupying Aden in 1839, it needed a steady supplier of meat and livestock for the garrison, and between 1884 and 1886 it signed a series of protection treaties with the northern clans (Isaaq, Gadabuursi, Issa, Warsangali, Dhulbahante) that gave rise to British Somaliland. The deal was minimal: London undertook to protect and not to interfere, and in return obtained trading exclusivity and the use of the ports.
That logic of cheap administration defined the protectorate for seventy years. The British governed with a tiny bureaucracy from Berbera and, from 1941, from Hargeisa; they invested almost nothing in infrastructure, agriculture or industry; the Foreign Office itself described it as a transit territory. Schools were few and came late, and the first serious secondary school, in Sheikh, only opened in 1958.
The contrast with Italian Somalia, which had plantations, roads, a monumental capital and, in the 1950s, a funded UN plan to prepare for independence, is one of the keys to what happened after 1960: two territories with completely different administrations, colonial languages, legal systems and levels of bureaucracy, unified in five days.
Hargeisa began as a watering stop. In the second half of the 19th century, Sheikh Madar, of the Qadiriyya Sufi order, founded a religious and farming settlement here beside the bed of the Hargeisa river, at one of the stops on the caravan route to Harar. In 1901 it had barely a thousand inhabitants.
Its rise was administrative. Being in the high interior, with a cooler climate and water, it was more liveable than Berbera, and in 1941, after the British retook the protectorate occupied by Italy, the capital moved there. It has grown non-stop ever since: it is the largest city in the north, and today estimates (there is no census) put it at over a million people.
Present-day Hargeisa is literally built on its own ruins. The 1988 bombing destroyed around 70% of the city according to the US embassy at the time, and other estimates go as high as 90%. It was rebuilt with practically no international aid: with capital from local merchants and, above all, with remittances from the diaspora, which are still one of the pillars of the economy today. The Somali informal money-transfer system, hawala, moved that money when there were no banks and no state.
Two scenes sum up the city. One is the money changers' market in the centre, where mountains of bundles of Somaliland shillings are piled on wheelbarrows in the open air (inflation has made the highest-value banknote worth about as much as coins) and where nobody steals: social control is the security system. The other is the livestock market on the outskirts, one of the largest in the Horn, where the camels and goats that later leave through Berbera for Arabia are sold. Since 2008 the city has also hosted the Hargeisa International Book Fair, which every summer fills theatres and courtyards with poets, diaspora writers and a young audience, and has become the most important cultural event in the region.
On 31 May 1988, the Somali National Movement (SNM) attacked Hargeisa, four days after taking Burao. Siad Barre's government responded by razing both cities. On the third day of fighting, close-range artillery shelling began, together with air strikes: Somali air force fighter jets took off from Hargeisa's own airport, turned and bombed the city, again and again, in flights lasting a few minutes. Several of the pilots were foreign mercenaries hired by the regime.
The figures are disputed and must be attributed. The literature on the so-called Isaaq genocide gives a range of 50,000 to 200,000 civilian deaths for the northern campaign as a whole between 1987 and 1989; for Hargeisa in particular, the figure usually cited is around 50,000. Some 500,000 people crossed the border into Ethiopia (UNHCR described it as one of the fastest and largest forced displacements recorded in Africa) and another 400,000 were displaced within the country. Africa Watch (now Human Rights Watch) and Amnesty International documented massacres, summary executions and mass detentions. General Mohammed Said Hersi "Morgan", Barre's son-in-law and military governor of the north, had written an internal memo months earlier, known as the "Letter of Death", proposing a campaign of annihilation against the Isaaq. In 2001, the jurist Chris Mburu, in an investigation commissioned by the United Nations, concluded that the crime of genocide had been conceived, planned and perpetrated by the Somali government against that people.
Since 2012, mass graves have been exhumed on the outskirts of Hargeisa, with hundreds of remains, many with their hands tied. The forensic work continues.
The city's central monument is a plane. In Freedom Square, on a pedestal covered in murals showing burning houses, mutilated bodies and executions, stands a Somali air force MiG-17, shot down during the bombing and recovered by the rebels. Below it, a fresco shows a woman holding the Somaliland flag and looking up at the sky. It is the country's most eloquent symbol: the city displays the plane that bombed it.
Somaliland's state apparatus was not built with international aid or peacekeeping missions: it was put together in a series of clan conferences, under trees and in sheds, between 1991 and 1997.
The sequence began with preliminary meetings in Oog and Berbera in February 1991, where ceasefires were agreed between the clans that had fought on the SNM side and those that had sided with the government. The great Burao conference, in May 1991, ended with the declaration of 18 May: the restoration of the independence of the territory of former British Somaliland. Abdirahman Ahmed Ali "Tuur" was the first president.
The early years were hard: there were two serious internal conflicts, in 1992 in Berbera and between 1994 and 1996 around Hargeisa and Burao. They were resolved through negotiation. The Borama conference, from January to May 1993, with 150 delegates and several months of deliberation, produced the architecture that still applies: a National Charter, a system called beel that brings clan elders into the formal institutions, and an upper house of elders, the Guurti, alongside an elected lower house. It also produced the second president, Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal, former prime minister of Somalia in 1967-69.
From there, the attributes of statehood followed one after another: its own currency in 1994 (the Somaliland shilling), a passport in 1996 (biometric since 2014), a constitution ratified by referendum on 31 May 2001 with 97.1% of the vote according to the official results, and elections. The 2003 presidential election was won by Dahir Riyale Kahin by 80 votes over Ahmed Silanyo, and the opposition accepted the result; in 2010 Silanyo won and Riyale handed over power; in 2017 Muse Bihi won; and in November 2024, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi "Cirro", from the opposition, defeated the ruling party and took office without incident. Four peaceful transfers of power between rivals in twenty years is a record no neighbouring country can match, and it is the main argument Hargeisa uses to claim recognition.
Sheikh is about 65 kilometres south of Berbera, at the top of the escarpment that separates the interior plateau from the coastal plain. You get there on one of the most spectacular roads in the Horn: it winds between rock walls and, in just over twenty kilometres, drops almost 1,500 metres down to the heat of the Gulf of Aden. The town is cool, green in the rainy season, and still has British administration buildings standing.
It is famous because of a school. Sheikh Secondary School opened in 1958 and was, until 1989, the most prestigious educational institution in the country: it admitted only 50 students a year, selected by exam from across the whole protectorate, and a good part of the later Somali and Somaliland political elite passed through its classrooms, including Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal and Ali Khalif Galaydh. Its teachers also composed "Soomaaliyeey toosoo" ("Somalis, wake up") there, which would become Somalia's anthem.
The school was destroyed in the fighting of 1989 and lay in ruins for more than a decade. In September 2002 a British couple, Dick and Enid Eyeington, moved to Sheikh to rebuild and reopen it, and in January 2003 it was up and running again with 53 students. In October that same year the two of them were shot dead on the school grounds: a crime that shocked Somaliland, precisely because it contradicted its image as a safe territory, and that the government pursued hard.
The school survived the blow and is still running, now under the name Pharo Secondary School, with a dual Somaliland and international curriculum. In miniature, it is the whole story of the place: a colonial project, destruction, a reconstruction pulled off through sheer effort, and violence that turns up when you least expect it.
For thirty-four years, Somaliland functioned as a state without being one: government, army, police, currency, passport, customs, its own visa and effective control of its territory, but not a single formal recognition from a UN member state. Several countries keep representative offices in Hargeisa and accept its travel documents (among them the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya and the United Kingdom, according to official Somaliland information), but that is not recognition.
The arguments on both sides are well known. Hargeisa maintains that British Somaliland was a recognised sovereign state between 26 June and 1 July 1960, that the union with former Italian Somalia was voluntary and was never properly formalised in a treaty ratified by both parliaments, that the union's constitution was rejected by a majority in the north in the 1961 referendum, and that the government it had joined later bombed its cities. Mogadishu responds that the Somali Republic was recognised for thirty-one years as a single state, that the African Union enshrined the inviolability of borders inherited from colonisation as a principle to avoid a cascade of secessions, and that Somaliland is a region of the country. A 2005 African Union fact-finding mission report went so far as to say the Somaliland case was "unique and self-justified" and would not set a precedent, but the organisation never acted on it.
On 26 December 2025 the equation changed. Israel formally recognised Somaliland as a sovereign state (the first UN member to do so) in an agreement signed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar and the Somaliland president, presented within the framework of the Abraham Accords. The Somali government called it an "illegal step" and a deliberate attack on its sovereignty, and requested an emergency session of the Security Council, which met at the end of December. The United States, which had been expected to make a similar move, did not follow straight away. As of mid-2026, Israel was still the only one.
The other front is regional. In January 2024, Ethiopia (landlocked since 1993) signed a memorandum of understanding with Hargeisa to obtain port and naval access at Berbera in exchange, according to the Somaliland version, for future recognition; Somalia considered it a violation of its sovereignty, and the diplomatic crisis lasted the whole year until a de-escalation declaration was signed in Ankara. And at home, the 2023 Las Anod conflict left Somaliland without control over much of the Sool region, with between 154,000 and 203,000 civilians displaced according to UN OCHA. In short, the question is more open than ever, and this text describes positions without taking sides.
The "Periplus of the Erythraean Sea", written by a Greek merchant from Alexandria in the 1st century AD, covers this coast port by port. It mentions Avalites, which almost all researchers identify with Zeila, and, further east, Malao, "a better market than this, about eight hundred stadia's sail away", which is Berbera. Myrrh, frankincense, cassia, ivory and tortoiseshell went out from there; Egyptian textiles, glass, iron and wine came in.
What stands out is the continuity. Two thousand years later, Berbera and Zeila are still the same points on the map, exporting largely the same products: frankincense, gums and, above all, livestock. The geographer Al-Idrisi, in the 12th century, was already marking Berbera on his maps as a first-rate trading centre.
The engine behind all this is the Ethiopian highlands. This coast is the natural outlet to the sea for Harar, Dire Dawa and the whole of eastern Ethiopia, and camel caravans came down the same mountain passes for centuries. The economic geography of the Somali north is explained entirely by that relationship: an interior that produces and a coastline that ships. And that is why, today, Somaliland's most important strategic project is once again exactly the same: the corridor connecting Berbera with Ethiopia.
It's hard to believe today, looking at a dusty town of fewer than twenty thousand people on a spit of sand, but for centuries Zeila was one of the most important cities in the Horn of Africa. It was a port of Islamic trade, capital of the kingdom of Adal in the 9th and 10th centuries, and later seat of the Ifat Sultanate. Incense, myrrh, slaves, gold, silver and camels passed through here, as did the bulk of the trade from the Ethiopian highlands.
Its most famous monument is the Masjid al-Qiblatayn, the "mosque of the two qiblas", which has two mihrabs: one facing Jerusalem, the direction of prayer of the first Muslims, and another facing Mecca. Tradition dates it to the 7th century, which would make it one of the oldest mosques in Africa, and it is the oldest in the city. Around it lie the remains of other mosques, cemeteries with stelae and coral walls.
The Portuguese attacked and burned it in 1517 and came back in 1528. It then passed into Ottoman and Egyptian hands, and around 1841 the merchant Haji Sharmarke Ali Saleh took over its governorship and managed to concentrate a good share of the regional trade. In 1888 a boundary agreement between Britain and France left it on the British side, and that was the start of its decline: the building of the port of Djibouti and the railway to Addis Ababa, at the end of the 19th century, took away all the traffic that had kept it going for a thousand years.
Today Zeila is a remote fishing town a few kilometres from the border with Djibouti, with ruins among the houses, coral reefs off the coast, mangroves and the Saad ad-Din islands archipelago, where colonies of seabirds nest. It is one of the most important and least studied archaeological sites in the Horn.
For centuries, Berbera hosted one of the largest trade fairs in the western Indian Ocean. Every year, with the monsoon, the city filled up: dhows arrived from Arabia, the Persian Gulf and India, caravans came in from the Ethiopian interior, and a seasonal market sprang up that lasted for months. 19th-century accounts describe Berbera's population swelling to more than 70,000 people during the season, in 1833, only to empty out afterwards.
The explorer Richard Burton landed here in 1854 on his expedition to Harar and described the fair in detail. His second attempt, in April 1855, ended with his camp attacked on the outskirts of Berbera: John Hanning Speke was wounded and Burton took a javelin that went through both his cheeks and left him the scar that appears in all his portraits.
Britain occupied the city in 1884 and made it the capital of British Somaliland until 1941, when the administrative seat moved to Hargeisa. From that period —and from the earlier Ottoman and Egyptian one— Berbera keeps an old town of coral-stone houses with wooden balconies, historic mosques and colonial buildings, many of them damaged in the fighting of 1988.
The city also has one of the best coastlines in the Horn for diving: little-explored reefs, very warm water —Berbera is one of the hottest inhabited places on the planet in summer— and long beaches east of the city.
Berbera airport has a 4,140-metre runway, one of the longest on the continent. Somalia didn't build it: the Soviet Union did, in the mid-1970s, as part of the military complex Moscow set up here during its alliance with Siad Barre's regime. The base included modern port facilities, missile depots and a communications station, and gave the Soviet fleet a prime position over the entrance to the Red Sea.
It didn't last. When Moscow switched to the Ethiopian side during the Ogaden War in 1977, Barre expelled the Soviets and offered the facilities to the other bloc. In 1980 the United States signed an access agreement with an investment of around 40 million dollars. Between 1980 and 1991, according to aviation records, the Berbera runway was also on NASA's list of emergency landing sites for the Space Shuttle, a fact that sounds like an urban legend but isn't. The agreement fell along with Barre's regime.
History is repeating itself today with other players. In 2016 the Emirati operator DP World signed a 30-year concession for the port of Berbera with an announced initial investment of 442 million dollars; in 2018 Ethiopia joined the consortium with a 19 % stake. A new terminal was built, along with a free economic zone and the "Berbera corridor" road to the Ethiopian border, and the airport was refurbished and reopened to commercial traffic.
The stated goal is for Berbera to compete with Djibouti as Ethiopia's outlet to the sea; today Ethiopia channels more than 90 % of its foreign trade through that country. In January 2024, Addis Ababa and Hargeisa also signed a memorandum of understanding on port and naval access that sparked a diplomatic crisis with Mogadishu. Two thousand years after the Periplus, Berbera's business is still the same: being the gateway to the highlands.
Behind the coastal plain, the land climbs abruptly. The Cal Madow range —"the black one", for the dark colour of its forested slopes— runs parallel to the Gulf of Aden in the Sanaag region, and its highest point, Shimbiris, reaches almost 2,500 metres north-west of Erigavo. It is the roof of the country.
On the seaward slope, between 700 and 2,000 metres, the mist rising from the gulf feeds a montane forest that shouldn't exist at this latitude: junipers (Juniperus procera), box trees, acacias, fig trees. The most famous is the Daallo forest, which looks out over a cliff more than a thousand metres above the coast. Botanical surveys estimate around a thousand plant species in the range, some 200 of them endemic to this single massif; an expedition of botanists from Uppsala University in 1995 described eight new species and recommended declaring the forest a natural monument.
The wildlife matches. Some of the Horn's most restricted endemics live here: the Somali thrush (Turdus ludoviciae), the Warsangli linnet (Carduelis johannis) —which practically doesn't exist anywhere else— and the beira antelope, as well as hyraxes, hyenas and increasingly rare leopards. For birdwatchers, Cal Madow is one of Africa's great untapped destinations.
These mountains and the slopes of Bari are also where the frankincense comes from. Trees of the genus Boswellia —above all Boswellia carterii and Boswellia frereana, the latter almost exclusive to northern Somalia— are tapped with a knife so they ooze resin, and families with hereditary rights over particular trees climb up to harvest it in season. It is the same trade that once sold to the pharaohs. Field studies carried out in Sanaag between 2010 and 2017 documented serious overexploitation: international demand and prices soared between 2010 and 2017 just as tree populations were already declining, the traditional management system weakened, and cuts became deeper and more frequent than the trees can withstand. Add to that logging for charcoal. Community initiatives such as Save Cal Madow have been working for years to reverse it, with mixed results.
The northern coastal strip is called Guban, "the burnt one", and the name is literal: it is a plain of sand and gravel where summer temperatures easily top 45 degrees and where it hardly ever rains. The region's herders come down to the coast in winter and go up to the Ogo plateau in the hot season, a pattern of transhumance that has held for centuries.
The real economy of this coast is livestock. Every year Somaliland exports millions of sheep, goats, camels and cattle through Berbera to Saudi Arabia —with a huge peak during the pilgrimage season to Mecca— and, together with remittances from the diaspora, that trade accounts for most of its foreign currency. That is why the Saudi health bans of 1998 and 2000-2009 were national crises.
Fishing, on the other hand, is underexploited by Somalis and overexploited by foreign fleets. The waters of the Gulf of Aden and the Somali Indian Ocean are among the richest in the ocean, and for decades there was no state able to control them: it was one of the grievances that gave rise to piracy further east.
And there is a constant underground economy: smuggling between Djibouti, Somaliland, Ethiopia and Yemen, and the movement of people. Thousands of Ethiopian and Somali migrants cross the Gulf of Aden to Yemen from these beaches every year, on one of the busiest and most dangerous maritime migration routes in the world according to the International Organization for Migration. It is a calm coast for the traveller, with one of the best safety-to-beauty ratios in the Horn, and at the same time the edge of a corridor almost nobody looks at.
Almost all of Somalia is semi-desert grazing land. The exception is here: the strip between the Shabelle and Juba rivers, the country's only two permanent rivers, both rising in the Ethiopian highlands. In that wedge (the doonka, in Somali) people grow sorghum, maize, sesame, beans and, since the Italian era, bananas and sugar cane.
Farming here has ancient roots. The Ajuran Sultanate, which dominated the south from the 13th century, built dams and irrigation canals (the kelliyo) on both rivers, and limestone wells along the grazing routes of the interior. Part of that infrastructure kept working into the 20th century. The Bay region, around Baidoa, is Somalia's historic breadbasket.
That relative wealth also explains the tragedy. When the state collapsed in 1991, the militias fought over precisely the fertile land and the harvests. The small farmers of the south, who unlike the big nomadic clans had no militias of their own, were left in the worst possible position. The famines of 1992 and 2011 hit hardest in exactly the areas where the food is grown.
Off the coast of Jubaland, between Kismayo and the Kenyan border, lies the Bajuni archipelago. It is a chain of low islands of sand, scrub and reef (Chula, Chovaye, Koyama, Ngumi and others) that marks the northern limit of the Swahili world.
The islanders, the Bajuni, are a Bantu people of fishermen and boatbuilders with mixed ancestry: coastal Swahili, mainland Somali, plus Arab, Persian and Indonesian roots. They speak Kibajuni, a dialect of Swahili, follow the Shafi'i school of Islam and keep a very rich oral tradition of poetry, songs and proverbs that preserves memories from before the 16th century. They lived from fishing, gathering turtles and shells, coastal trade by dhow and small coconut groves.
Theirs is a history of retreat. The Oromo invasion of the 16th century pushed many Bajuni south, into what is now Kenya. From the 1960s, pressure on the mainland gradually pushed them out to the outer islands. The civil war of the 1990s was devastating: as a minority community without clan protection, they suffered looting and expulsions, and tens of thousands ended up in refugee camps in Kenya. Current estimates put the total at about 112.000 Bajuni, the vast majority now in Kenya and some 20.500 in Somalia.
The islands are still almost untouched in their beauty, with white sand, reefs and seabirds. They are also among the hardest-to-reach areas in the whole country, because of insecurity, a total lack of infrastructure and the illegal foreign fishing that has stripped the fishing grounds.
Kismayo began as a small fishing village and grew into a port under the Ajuran Sultanate. In the 19th century it came under the Sultanate of Zanzibar, and in 1886 it passed into the British sphere along with the whole lower Juba region, which London ran as part of British East Africa under the name Jubaland.
After the First World War, Britain decided to repay Italy for its wartime support with land that wasn't Britain's to give. In 1924-25 it handed over Kismayo and the northern half of Jubaland, which the Italians called Oltre Giuba. They ran it briefly as a separate colony before formally merging it into Italian Somaliland on 30 June 1926. The southern half stayed in Kenya and is now Garissa County and the area around it. That is why there are so many Somalis on the other side of the border, and why one of the five points of the star on the Somali flag stands for northern Kenya.
During the civil war, Kismayo was one of the most fought-over places in the country because of its port and the charcoal trade. Huge quantities of charcoal were exported to the Gulf, at a brutal environmental cost to the acacia forests of the interior. Al Shabaab controlled the city between 2008 and 2012 and used it as its main source of funding.
In September and October 2012, a joint offensive by the Somali army, the Ras Kamboni militia and the Kenya Defence Forces, under the African Union flag, took it back. In 2013 the Interim Juba Administration was set up, and in 2015 it became Jubaland State, with Ahmed Mohamed Islam "Madobe" as president and Kismayo as its capital. Jubaland's relationship with the federal government in Mogadishu has been tense almost the whole time, with open crises in 2019-2020 and 2024-2025.
Baidoa, some 250 kilometres northwest of Mogadishu, is the capital of the Bay region and the heart of a country within the country. This is home to the Rahanweyn (also called Digil and Mirifle), one of the five great Somali clan families. They have one important difference: most of them are settled farmers and agropastoralists, not camel nomads.
They also speak a language variety of their own, Maay. It is so different from standard Somali (Maxaa tiri, the form taught in schools and written since 1972) that many linguists consider it a separate language rather than a dialect. The Barre regime's language standardisation was a huge national advance, but it also had this cost: it left Maay out of schools and government.
That double difference, economic and linguistic, turned into political marginalisation. The Rahanweyn were historically underrepresented in the sharing of power. When the federal state's "4.5" formula was made official in 2012, they were given one of the four main slots, partly to correct that history.
The city was founded in medieval times, prospered as a trading hub under the Geledi Sultanate and was occupied by the Italians in July 1913. Today it is the country's second most populous city: 2025 estimates put it at around 1,2 million people including the internally displaced, against the 370.000 recorded by UNDP in 2005. That gap is, in itself, evidence of what happened in the Somali interior.
For years Baidoa carried a terrible nickname that foreign journalists gave it in 1992: "the city of death". That year's famine was caused less by drought than by militias systematically looting harvests and blocking aid. Its epicentre was the Baidoa-Bardhere-Hoddur triangle. The most cited estimates for southern Somalia as a whole put the toll at between 200.000 and 300.000 dead in 1991-1992. It was the images from Baidoa that pushed the United Nations and the United States to intervene.
Nineteen years later it happened again. On 20 July 2011, the United Nations officially declared famine in two southern regions, Lower Shabelle and Bakool. It was the first time in almost thirty years that the word had been used in its technical sense. Estimates of the final toll ranged from 50.000 to 260.000 dead. The most cited study, commissioned by FAO and FEWS NET and published in 2013, put the figure at around 258.000 deaths between October 2010 and April 2012, roughly half of them children under five.
The blame was shared, and it is worth being precise about it. Al Shabaab, which then controlled much of the south, had expelled several humanitarian agencies and severely restricted access for aid. On the other side, US counter-terrorism law and aid groups' fear of sanctions for working in Al Shabaab areas sharply cut the flow of assistance: US aid spending in Somalia fell from 150 to 13 million dollars. Later humanitarian evaluations found that the international system reacted late despite early warnings.
The extreme drought of 2021-2023, the worst in four decades, once again put Bay among the hardest-hit regions and filled Baidoa with displacement camps. This time no formal famine was declared, but humanitarian agencies estimated tens of thousands of excess deaths.
The deep south is where Al Shabaab grew strong, and where it is still strong. Baidoa was the seat of the transitional federal parliament between 2005 and 2006, because the government could not establish itself in Mogadishu. Then the Islamic Courts Union took the city, and in December 2006 the Ethiopian army retook it, starting the campaign that drove the courts out of the whole south.
That invasion, backed by the United States, is what turned Al Shabaab from a marginal youth militia into a resistance movement with popular support. The group controlled Baidoa from 2007-2008 until 2012, and held Kismayo until 2012 and Barawa until 2014. Ethiopian troops retook Baidoa in February 2012.
Today's federal system was built on that map. In 2014 South West State was created, grouping the regions of Bay, Bakool and Lower Shabelle. Its official capital is Barawa, but the administration actually runs from Baidoa. Jubaland organised itself separately from Kismayo. Both are federal member states with their own armies, their own budgets and strained relations with Mogadishu.
Today control on the ground is fragmented. The cities and main corridors are held by the government and African Union forces. Much of the countryside, the roads between cities and the collection of informal taxes are still in Al Shabaab's hands. That is why travelling overland between Mogadishu, Baidoa and Kismayo is, in practice, impossible for a foreigner: you fly, or you don't go.
The tip of the Horn is one of the most dangerous corners of world shipping. The Greeks called this cape Aromata promontorium, "the promontory of aromas", because the resins that supplied the temples of the Mediterranean, frankincense and myrrh, were shipped from here. The 1st-century "Periplus of the Erythraean Sea" already describes it as a trading hub. According to the most common explanation, the modern name, Guardafui, comes from the Italian guarda e fuggi, "look and flee", because of its currents and winds.
Shipwrecks were so frequent that they became a business in their own right. Local sultans charged for salvaging cargo. From the 19th century, Britain negotiated agreements with them so that shipwrecked crews would be protected instead of enslaved.
Italy eventually built a lighthouse. The first one, opened in April 1924 and named after Francesco Crispi, was a simple metal structure. In 1930 it was rebuilt in stone in the shape of a fascio littorio, the bundle of rods that served as the fascist regime's emblem. It is one of the strangest colonial monuments left in Africa, and it still stands, now out of service.
A geographical detail that people often get wrong: Cape Guardafui (Ras Asir in Somali) is the tip of the Horn and the symbol of the end of the continent, but the easternmost point of mainland Africa is technically Ras Hafun, a little further south. Opposite, to the north, lie the Guardafui Channel and the island of Socotra, which belongs to Yemen.
For centuries the northeast had its own state. The Majeerteen Sultanate belonged to the Majeerteen subclan of the Darod family. It controlled the tip of the Horn and a huge stretch of coast along the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. It lived off frankincense and gums, livestock, fishing and salvage rights from shipwrecks.
Its golden age was the long reign of Boqor (King) Osman Mahamuud, from 1860 to 1927. Under his rule the sultanate had a civil service, a titled nobility, its own flag and a standing army, and it signed treaties with foreign powers like any other state. Further south, in 1878, a relative and rival, Yusuf Ali Kenadid, founded the Sultanate of Hobyo, and relations between the two stayed tense for decades.
On 7 April 1889, Osman Mahamuud signed a protectorate treaty with Italy. On paper, it let him keep running internal affairs in exchange for Italian protection against other powers. Hobyo had signed a similar treaty shortly before. For thirty-five years, Italy's northern Somali territory was in practice a protectorate in name only over two sultanates that went on governing themselves.
That legacy matters for understanding the present. When Puntland State was created in 1998, the name pointed to the ancient Land of Punt. The real political reference, though, was this one: the memory of a northeast that always had its own state inside a larger whole.
The protectorate in name only ended with fascism. In 1923 Cesare Maria De Vecchi arrived as governor of Italian Somaliland. He was one of the quadrumvirs who led the March on Rome, and he came with explicit orders to turn the treaties into real control. His first move was to demand that the northern sultanates disarm.
Hobyo fell first, in 1925, although its deposed governor Omar Samatar launched a rebellion that retook El Buur and kept the Italians in trouble for months. The Majeerteen held out longer. Osman Mahamuud rejected the ultimatum and the campaign dragged on for almost three years, with naval bombardments of the coastal ports, including Bosaso and Hafun.
The final resistance was led by Hersi Boqor, the sultan's son, until he was defeated and went into exile in Ethiopia at the end of 1927. Only then, almost forty years after the first treaty, did Italy really control the northeast. That is also when the regime began the building projects that left a physical mark on the region: the Guardafui lighthouse, the Hafun salt works (which grew into some of the largest in the Indian Ocean) and the coastal roads.
It is a story rarely told outside Somalia. It explains why real Italian colonial rule in the north lasted barely fifteen years, until the Second World War.
When the Somali state collapsed in 1991, the northeast stayed largely out of the militia war in the south. For seven years it ran on local administrations and the Somali Salvation Democratic Front. In 1998 the region's Darod clans called a constitutional conference in Garowe.
That conference created Puntland State in August 1998, with Garowe as its administrative capital. Its first president was Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, who in 2004 would become president of the transitional federal government of all Somalia. Puntland covers about a third of Somalia's territory, some 212.000 square kilometres, with an estimated population of more than four million people.
The key difference from Somaliland is the goal, not the degree of autonomy. Somaliland declared itself an independent state and seeks international recognition. Puntland explicitly declared itself part of a federal Somalia and has never sought recognition as a country. In fact, Puntland was the original driving force behind Somali federalism, and in 2012 it joined as a federal member state.
That does not mean relations with Mogadishu are good. In March 2024, Puntland withdrew its recognition of the federal government in protest at constitutional changes passed without consensus. It declared that it would exercise "the powers of an independent state" until a new constitution was agreed by referendum. It also has an open territorial dispute with Somaliland over the regions of Sool, Sanaag and Ayn, which both claim. Since 2023 much of that area has been run by the SSC-Khatumo administration, which Mogadishu recognised in October that year and Puntland rejects.
Between 2005 and 2012, the coast of Puntland and central Somalia was the centre of the most profitable maritime piracy in the world. It started in the late 1990s among coastal fishermen who organised themselves against foreign factory ships. They called themselves "the people's coastguard". The factory ships were stripping their fishing grounds, since there was no state or navy to stop them. Very quickly, though, it turned into a hijack-and-ransom business funded by investors in the cities.
The numbers were huge. According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), in 2008 there were 111 attacks and 42 successful hijackings, and pirates are estimated to have collected around 80 million dollars in ransoms that year. Attempts peaked in 2011, with 237 attacks and 28 successful hijackings. The ports of Eyl, in Puntland, and Hobyo, further south, became famous as pirate bases, with whole local economies built on the business.
The international response was one of the largest multinational naval operations in recent history. It included the European Union's Operation Atalanta from 2008, Combined Task Force 151, and deployments by the United States, China, India, Russia and Japan, plus private armed guards on board and protected transit corridors. Attacks fell from 237 in 2011 to 75 in 2012, and in 2013 there were nine attacks and no successful hijackings.
Piracy did not disappear completely. In 2023 and 2024 there was a resurgence, including the hijackings of the bulk carrier Ruen and the MV Abdullah, linked to international fleets being pulled away by the Red Sea crisis. And the underlying problem, illegal foreign fishing in Somali waters, was never solved.
Bosaso (formerly Bandar Qasim, after a 14th-century merchant) is the port that keeps the whole region going. It exports livestock on the hoof (camels, goats, sheep, cattle) to Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Yemen, along with fish, frankincense and gums, and almost everything consumed in the northeast comes in through it. Population figures vary widely: around 235,000 urban residents according to 2015 estimates, up to around 700,000 according to 2020 calculations that include displaced people.
Bosaso's explosive growth since 1991 has two drivers. One is the mass arrival of people displaced from the south of the country. The other, more uncomfortable, is its role as the starting point of the migration route to Yemen and the Gulf: tens of thousands of people (Somalis, Ethiopians, Eritreans) have crossed the Gulf of Aden from these beaches in smugglers' boats, with a death toll that UN agencies have been documenting for years. In 2017 the Emirati operator P&O Ports signed a concession to modernise the port.
Garowe, by contrast, is a city built specifically to govern from. It was chosen as Puntland's administrative capital in 1998 for its central position and because it was relatively neutral ground between sub-clans, and it grew around the administration, the regional parliament, the university and the international agencies. It is quiet, flat and functional, and works as a base for heading to the coast.
Security in Puntland is notably better than in the south, but it is not uniform: a Somali faction of the Islamic State has operated in the Bari mountains since 2015, and Al Shabaab maintains a presence in the Galgala area. The Puntland authorities launched offensives against both groups, with gains claimed in 2024 and 2025.
Hardly anything that happened to Somalia happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
