Two Words from Washington

I watched the Hudson Institute host President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, Irro, on September 14, in a keynote followed by a fireside chat with Senior Fellow Joshua Meservey. The full session is online, and I would rather you watched it than took my word for any of this. It was a polished hour. Somaliland was presented as a stable democracy and a natural partner for the United States. Its leaders are entitled to make their case in Washington, as we make ours.

Two words in that room need answering.

The first was the suggestion that the North Eastern State exists more or less on paper. The second was the word conflict, used for what happened in Las Anod in 2023.

Here is what a state that exists on paper does not have.

It does not have an eighty-three member parliament seated in August 2025, speakers elected a week later, and a president chosen by that chamber at the end of the same month. It does not have a cabinet that meets, a police force paid out of its own revenue, or a front line held by its own men for three years. It does not have a Ministry of Energy and Water Resources arguing at seven in the morning about borehole tariffs and which contractor gets the Sool boreholes, which is a meeting I have sat in. It does not receive the United Nations' senior humanitarian official for Somalia, or a visit from the federal Prime Minister, or the quiet, tedious, entirely real business of a budget cycle.

I can speak to this from inside it. I served in that government as Minister of Planning and International Cooperation, and as Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Disaster Management. The work was not symbolic. It was displacement caseloads, water trucking contracts, donor conditions we could not always meet, and the constant problem of institutions younger than the crises they are asked to manage. We are underbuilt. Any honest official of a three year old administration would tell you the same. Underbuilt is not the same as fictional.

And if a material has to be named for what this administration is made of, paper is the wrong one. On 30 July, for the first anniversary, a column moved through Las Anod in front of a crowd standing several deep along both sides of the road. Uniformed brigades. Armoured vehicles and tanks, hundreds of them, in numbers this region has not seen assembled under its own flag in living memory. Towed guns. Crews who have held a front line for three years. Days later the federal Prime Minister of Somalia stood in the same city to mark the same anniversary.

Some of that armour was not bought for us by a donor, and no foreign partner gifted it. It was taken at Goojacade in August 2023, from the army that had spent six months shelling this city. An administration that parades equipment captured from the force which besieged it may be called many things. Paper is not one of them.

A parade is the loudest evidence and not the best. The better evidence is ordinary. In December, one of the largest gatherings this city has seen assembled in the open to say plainly what its people want their place in Somalia to be. In January a federal delegation walked those same streets after dark, in a city that shelling had emptied two years before. By August the downtown had been rebuilt and was busy enough that people were filming it for the pleasure of showing it off. None of that is administered from a press release.

The federal recognition is also a matter of record, not aspiration. Somalia recognised SSC-Khatumo as an interim administration in October 2023. On 31 July 2025, after a delegates' conference in Las Anod, it was reconstituted and recognised as the North Eastern State, Somalia's sixth federal member state, alongside Puntland, Jubaland, South West, Hirshabelle and Galmudug. You can argue about how that recognition was arrived at. You cannot call it paper while describing Somaliland's own thirty five years of unrecognised statehood as substance. Those two standards cannot sit in the same sentence.

And if the test is administration rather than declaration, apply it evenly. Somaliland's maps have included Sool and Sanaag since 1991. It governed Las Anod from 2007 until February 2023. Since August 2023 its forces have sat roughly a hundred kilometres to the west. For three years it has claimed a territory it does not enter, tax, police or serve. In Sool and Sanaag, the administration that exists on paper is Somaliland's.

The second word is the one that matters more, because words like that one decide what a listener thinks happened.

Conflict suggests two parties meeting in the middle of something. Here is the sequence. In late December 2022 a local politician was assassinated in Las Anod. Residents protested. Somaliland police fired live rounds into those protests and killed more than twenty people. On 6 February 2023, the same morning that Dhulbahante elders declared they would seek their place inside the Somali federation rather than under Hargeisa, Somaliland forces began shelling the town at six in the morning. Thirty four people were killed and one hundred and sixty four wounded that first day.

What followed was documented by people with no stake in our politics. Amnesty International reported in April 2023 that Somaliland forces had indiscriminately shelled a densely populated town, damaging hospitals, schools and mosques. Water supplies to the city were cut. The general hospital was hit four times. By May, five hospitals had recorded three hundred and seventy three dead and two thousand three hundred and eleven wounded among residents. Around one hundred and eighty five thousand people were displaced and sixty thousand crossed into Ethiopia. Ninety per cent of a city emptied.

In June 2023 the United Nations Security Council called for the immediate withdrawal of Somaliland forces. That is not the language the Council uses about a conflict between two comparable parties. It is the language it uses when one army is where it should not be.

I will not pretend our side was composed only of saints, or that no Somaliland family buried a son. Young men from Hargeisa died in a war their government chose, hundreds were taken prisoner, and their mothers grieve exactly as ours do. But the question of who shelled a town and who was in it is not a matter of perspective. Calling that a conflict is not neutrality. It is a decision about whose account survives the hour.

Here is the part I find hardest to let pass. Hudson does not need a former minister from Las Anod to tell it what happened there. It sent someone.

In August 2023, Hudson published a dispatch by its own research fellow James Barnett, written from inside the city. He described a town of nearly three hundred thousand cut in two, an eastern half devastated and largely emptied, roads littered with so many torched cars that he wondered whether arson was deliberate policy, and Somaliland positions in the surrounding mountains shelling the city on a regular basis. He counted more than one hundred and twenty political assassinations attributed to Hargeisa since 2007. His conclusion was blunt. Somalia's civil war never ended, and Las Anod is its latest form.

That is Hudson's own published record of the place. Three years later, in Hudson's own auditorium, the same events were compressed into a word and the administration that grew out of them was waved off as a formality. I do not think that was malice. I think it is what happens when a region becomes a line item in a strategic argument and nobody in the room has to look at it.

A think tank audience in Washington is trying to answer a practical question: is recognition cheap, and is this a partner that will hold. The eastern regions are the test case for both. The strongest argument Somaliland makes is that it has kept order for thirty five years. The eastern third of the territory it claims is where that argument was tested, and the result was a shelled city, a quarter of a million people displaced, and a military position given up in a week. A partner's conduct in the part of its claim that resists it tells you how it intends to govern the rest.

We are not asking Washington to choose us. The North Eastern State is not a rival bidder for recognition. We are inside Somalia, by our own decision, taken at a fig tree and in a hall in Las Anod, and our quarrel is not with Somaliland's ambition to be heard. It is with a description of the map that erases the people living on it.

So I will make the same offer we have made to every visiting official. Come to Las Anod. Meet the parliament, the police commander, the water engineers, the families who came back to rebuild a house that had been hit. Then write down whether we exist on paper.