Somalia's Federal Member States Aren't Defending Sovereignty — They're Defending Their Patrons - No One in This Fight Is Neutral

Puntland is furious at Türkiye. Jubaland is furious at Türkiye. Both have spent the past five weeks accusing Ankara of killing their own people. Neither is in a position to make that accusation as a matter of principle. Puntland's ports are run by the UAE. Jubaland's survival for over a decade has depended on Kenya. The one Somali federal member state that tried to stand apart from any foreign patron — South West State — was crushed by federal troops within 48 hours in March. This is not a story about Somali federal member states defending sovereignty against a foreign power. It is a story about which foreign power each side has chosen. Puntland's own patron Puntland's Bosaso port has been run by Dubai's DP World since 2017, under a 30-year concession. In 2022, DP World and the Puntland government signed a roughly $366 million expansion plan for the port, according to regional trade reporting. When Mogadishu cancelled all of its agreements with the UAE in January 2026, Puntland refused to go along. President Said Abdullahi Deni flew to Abu Dhabi for talks the following week. Puntland's government argued the federal cancellation had no legal authority over a regional matter. DP World kept operating Bosaso regardless. In March, Puntland went further. It formally reaffirmed its security cooperation with the UAE, stating plainly that Mogadishu "has no authority over Puntland's security responsibilities." The UAE, for its part, confirmed it would keep funding and training Puntland's Maritime Police Force, cancellation or no cancellation. As recently as September 12, Middle East Eye reported Puntland was still openly defying Mogadishu's break with Abu Dhabi, months after the fact. None of this makes Puntland's accusations against Türkiye false. Thirteen people are dead off its coast, and the two governments involved can't even agree on what they know. Türkiye told the BBC it had no information about the strikes. Somalia's own State Minister for Defense, Omar Ali Abdi, told reporters in Mogadishu that the federal government had prior knowledge of the strike near Garmaal — directly contradicting Türkiye's denial. Neither government has explained the gap. In Eyl, protesters — joined by Nugaal's own governor, deputy governor, and a Puntland army general — burned Türkiye's flag over the killings. Puntland's outrage sits inside a relationship of its own — one where a foreign power funds its security forces, runs its port, and gets defended against the same federal government that's supposed to speak for the whole country. The UAE is not Puntland's only foreign backer, either. In August, Puntland President Deni signed a security agreement directly with a U.S. delegation from Africa Command, expanding the American military base at Bosaso — announced through Puntland's own State House, bypassing Mogadishu entirely. The expanded base is aimed at ISIS-Somalia fighters in the Cal Miskaad mountains and Al-Shabaab, and is widely understood to double as a staging point for potential operations against Yemen's Houthi rebels. A follow-up meeting to accelerate the plans took place September 1. Puntland, in other words, doesn't lean on one foreign military. It leans on two. Jubaland's patrons run deeper — there are two of them Jubaland's relationship with Kenya predates the current dispute by fifteen years. Ahmed Madobe's own security force — then called the Ras Kamboni Brigade — fought alongside Kenyan troops during Kenya's 2011 invasion of southern Somalia. Kenyan forces helped him take Kismayo from Al-Shabaab in 2012. He has run Jubaland, and its port revenue, independently of Mogadishu ever since. That alliance has only deepened. In December 2024, Jubaland forces clashed with federal troops at Ras Kamboni. According to reporting from the time, several hundred retreating Somali soldiers crossed into Kenya and were disarmed at a Kenyan military base before Jubaland retained the territory and Madobe kept power. When Mogadishu imposed an air blockade on Jubaland last year, Madobe flew out anyway — to Kenya, for talks with Kenyan officials, defying the embargo outright. Kenya has mediated Jubaland-Mogadishu disputes for years. A Horn Review analysis published in June put Kenya's calculation plainly: Nairobi is "highly unlikely to sacrifice a reliable and battle-tested partner in Kismayo for an uncertain Somalia-centric arrangement." Kenya is not the only foreign military backing Jubaland. Ethiopia is the other. Somali Guardian reported that Ethiopian troops allegedly supported Jubaland forces directly in clashes with the Somali National Army at Dolow in December 2024. Jubaland's own vice president, Mohamud Sayid Adan, has held repeated meetings with Ethiopian military commanders and is described by Garowe Online as "widely regarded by many Somalis as Addis Ababa's chief proxy." Ethiopian National Defense Force troops are stationed inside Jubaland's own Gedo region. In October 2025, senior Ethiopian military and intelligence officials traveled to Dolow to warn Somali clan elders directly against forming any rival administration to Madobe's, calling the prospect "a direct threat to Ethiopia's national security." Somali Guardian summarized the arrangement plainly: Madobe "has ruled Jubaland for more than 15 years with the backing of both neighboring countries." It's worth noting neither Kenya's position nor Ethiopia's is simple. Kenya also contributes 1,410 troops to the African Union's stabilization mission that props up the same federal government it has, at other moments, undercut by hosting Jubaland's forces and its exiled rivals of Mogadishu. Ethiopia, too, keeps troops inside the federal stabilization mission while separately backing the regional government that mission's own federal government is trying to bring to heel. Both of Jubaland's patrons are playing both sides of Somalia's federal divide at once, not picking one outright. Anti-Türkiye protests have swept Jubaland's own towns, too — Doolow, Garbahaarrey, Kismayo, Afmadow — with demonstrators burning Türkiye's flag, and in some towns, Egypt's as well. Placards read, in Somali, "We don't want Erdoğan, we don't want Turkey." Jubaland has also mirrored, almost exactly, the move it condemns in Mogadishu. It amended its own constitution to extend Madobe's term from four years to five, overriding federal term limits, in the same way President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's government did nationally in March. Both governments accuse each other of illegitimacy. Both did the same thing to get there. Even the opposition coalition Puntland and Jubaland lead together — the Somali Future Council, founded in October 2025 — is headquartered in Nairobi. A third Kenya problem, and it has a body count There is a separate, more serious Kenya question, and it isn't about Jubaland's government at all. It's about a man Kenya has refused to hand over. Abdiaziz Laftagareen, the ousted president of South West State, fled to Nairobi on March 30, the day federal forces took Baidoa. He has been based there ever since — and from Nairobi, he has directed a running campaign against the city that once was his. Clashes in May left at least six dead. A July mobilization saw his ally, General Mahad Abdirahman — Laftagareen's father-in-law and a former commander of Somalia's prison service — moving forces toward Baidoa's outskirts. In August, his forces struck again: the federal government said it repelled the assault and killed at least 30 attackers, while Laftagareen's side claimed, in an account that could not be independently verified, that his forces had briefly taken the city center before withdrawing. A second attack on September 3 seized two federal bases before withdrawing, killing the commander of South West President Adan Madobe's own personal guard and wounding a senior army officer. Médecins Sans Frontières treated 71 people wounded that day at Bay Regional Hospital, including 15 women and 12 children. A 23-year-old journalist, Bashir Mohamed Abdullahi, was shot twice in the back that day while trying to reach safety. He died four days later — the second Somali journalist killed this year, according to the Somali Journalists Syndicate. South West State's own Security Minister has publicly called on Kenya to arrest Laftagareen and extradite him, holding him "responsible for recent attacks and bombings in the city" and saying he "must face accountability for the violence." South West's Council of Ministers has gone further still, formally designating Laftagareen and his militia a terrorist organization allied with Al-Shabaab. Kenya has done neither. Laftagareen remains in Nairobi. He continues, from there, to insist he is still the legitimate president of a state he no longer controls, and to speak openly of plans to "liberate" it. Whether Kenya's government is actively protecting Laftagareen or simply has not been pressed hard enough to act, the outcome is the same: a man formally accused by a Somali regional government of directing deadly attacks operates freely from Kenyan soil. The one state that had no patron South West State's Laftagareen tried something Puntland and Jubaland never did. He broke with Mogadishu without a foreign security guarantee behind him. When federal troops moved on Baidoa in March, the Somali National Army took the city in 48 hours. Opposition figures at the time accused Turkish forces of providing aerial support to that federal offensive — a claim neither confirmed nor independently verified, but one that fits the pattern: the side with Türkiye's backing won, decisively, against the side that had none. Residents of villages around Baidoa had burned Türkiye's flag once before, in August — the earliest of the three protests referenced above, predating both the Puntland and Jubaland demonstrations — saying airstrikes had killed their livestock and damaged the farmland they depend on to survive. Anger at Türkiye in South West State, in other words, predates Laftagareen's own campaign against it. Ten weeks later, Adan Madobe was elected president of South West State in the same city, with full federal backing and no comparable resistance. Mogadishu treated the matter as settled. It was not. Laftagareen has spent the five months since proving it, from exile, in a country that has not moved to stop him. What this actually shows Mogadishu, for its part, does not describe its relationship with Türkiye in these terms. Barre's own farewell remarks made that plain. Federal officials describe the Türkiye relationship as a partnership rooted in shared history, not a patron arrangement — the same language Puntland uses about the UAE, and Jubaland avoids using about either Kenya or Ethiopia at all. Each side has a foreign backer. Only some sides admit it. Mogadishu also isn't relying on Türkiye alone. After the UAE cancellation, Qatar stepped into the gap, signing a security agreement with the federal government and funding a new force loyal to it. Regional analysts describe the goal plainly: building "a centrally loyal force capable of reasserting authority over defiant regions." Puntland, Jubaland, and Somaliland's own security establishments reportedly view that Qatari-trained force as a private army for Villa Somalia, the seat of federal power in Mogadishu — the same accusation, almost word for word, that could be made about Türkiye's own Gorgor commandos, the Turkish-trained Somali unit already at the center of the fighting in Baidoa. Saudi Arabia signed its own military cooperation agreement with Mogadishu in February, and Egypt has deployed roughly 10,000 troops in support of the federal government, tied to its own dispute with Ethiopia. One regional analysis names the bloc outright: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Qatar, aligned together against the UAE and Israel. Puntland and Jubaland are not defending Somali sovereignty against foreign interference. They are defending their own foreign arrangements against a federal government that has assembled a bigger, better-armed coalition of its own. The UAE and the United States back Puntland. Kenya and Ethiopia both back Jubaland, and Kenya has taken no action against the man trying to violently retake South West State besides, while both Nairobi and Addis Ababa also fund the federal mission meant to stabilize the country their other hand is helping destabilize. Türkiye, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt back Mogadishu, and by extension, the campaign that removed the one regional leader who had no comparable patron of his own. The dead in Puntland's waters and the dead in Baidoa's hospitals are not victims of a fight between a foreign power and Somali sovereignty. They are casualties of a fight between foreign powers, conducted with Somali forces, on Somali soil, with Somali civilians and one Somali journalist paying the price so far. Nobody in this fight is neutral. Increasingly, nobody in Somalia can afford to be. --------------------------------   ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ismail Abukar is Co-Founder and Chairperson of the Organization for Prisoners' Rights (OPR), an independent civil society organization based in Mogadishu, Somalia. He has conducted primary field research in Somalia for seven years, covering prisoners' rights, enforced disappearances, press freedom, and electoral corruption. His investigations have been published by African Arguments and Horn Observer, including "Somalia's New Speaker Got His Seat Through a Military Operation,""The Disappeared," and "A Government With One Foot Out the Door: Somalia's Foreign Passport Crisis." He holds an MA in International Law and Human Rights from the University for Peace (UPEACE) and maintains an active ORCID record: 0009-0003-1435-3691.