American bombs, borders and Somalia's sick federal system

Issue #2: The gang rape of two young girls, Fahima & Farah, sparks outrage as authorities in SSC-Khaatumo arrest more than twenty suspects.

Faisal Ali

and

Mahbub M Abdillahi

Jun 21, 2025

We’re *Geeska*, and this is Acacia — our newsletter.

Good morning, Acacia readers!

An ISIS suspect captured by Puntland forces made the most unexpected statement earlier this week: “I don’t feel like a prisoner. I feel like a rapper.” Hard to blame him: he was surrounded by grinning Puntland officers filming selfies like he’d just dropped a mixtape, not been nabbed in a counter-terror raid. Speaking of music: a clip of Somali airforce recruits in Turkey went viral this week after they broke into the national anthem—on a piano. And with Iran and Israel fighting, classic Qaraami anti-Israel songs are getting a second life online.

Somali footballer Sak Hassan has signed for Wealdstone FC. And Somalia’s ambassador to China, Hodan Osman Abdi, made local news—speaking impressive Mandarin at a trade expo. AI is still impacting Somali social media. Since that airborne ayeeyo clip we flagged in our first issue, new AI-generated videos have been deployed in the Somalia–Somaliland Twitter feud. (They’re kinda funny).

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Somalia is establishing its own stock exchange, which will help Somali companies across a range of sectors to raise capital, grow, and allow people to buy government bonds. Young Somali innovators are coming up with low-cost housing designs for displaced populations demonstrating their creative problem-solving skills. Meanwhile, Puntland’s president Said Deni is asking why young people are migrating en masse as foreigners are landing jobs in his state: he should probably ask those young people leaving in droves, 60 more of whom drowned in the Mediterranean this week.

Welcome, if you haven’t heard—this is Acacia, Geeska’s weekly dispatch from the Horn and beyond. We bring you the news that matters to Somalis: from Mogadishu to Minneapolis, Hargeisa to Hounslow. East Africa is our backyard, but we’ll flag what’s driving conversations across the continent too. Think of it as your one-stop shop for all things us. (You’re welcome.)

That’s the entrée. Now for a deep dive into the stories we’re featuring this week.

Society: Rape suspects arrested in Las Anod

A horrifying incident has rocked the city of Las Anod, where two young sisters, Fahima & Farah, were reportedly gang raped by 24 men. Liban Barre, spokesperson for the SSC police confirmed the incident: “It’s true that this case happened, and all 24 suspects are in police custody.” He described the crime as one that “goes against human decency”. Massive protests kicked off afterwards in Las Anod, as word got out. In response, the Dhulbahante clan chief, Garaad Jaamac Garaad Ali, put out a statement offering condolences—“especially to the women of the city”—and called for a fair trial. “We await the investigative authorities to clarify who committed the crime so that the judiciary can deliver a just verdict,” he said.

When the president of SSC-Khaatumo, Abdikadir Ahmed Ali (Firdhiye), spoke to the media, he confirmed reports that security officials had allowed the accused suspects to participate in the national exams, calling the decision a “disgrace”. Firdhiye, who has now been president of the new federal state for almost two years, said he views the case as a “test” for his administration and a choice between “dignity and honor, or humiliation and disgrace”. “We will not allow such an atrocity to ever happen again in our community”, he added.

The incident sparked huge outrage in Somalia and online, kicking off a heated debate about women’s place in Somali society. Samira Gaid, a prominent security analyst, posted: “How we respond to such brutality against women reveals our values as a society.” Somalia’s former foreign minister, Abdisaid Muse Ali, said: “This is not just a crime, it is an assault on our shared culture, religion & humanity”. The issue was quickly picked up on Somali Reddit where @ThrowRA_Salary_5129 posted: “Somalia will actually never prosper until we stop the despicable and inhumane treatment of our women.” Another commenter, expressing very real fury at the incident, added: “Now we are all waiting for the largest public execution in Somalia’s history.”

Online: How [not?] to do a Somalia map …

Borders are no joke, especially for Somalis, who’ve seen (all of) them disputed for most of the 20th and 21st centuries. The issue’s so big that the country’s most celebrated writer, Nuruddin Farah, titled one of his novels Maps. TRT World may have missed that context this week when it aired a map showing Somalia and Somaliland as separate countries—divided neatly along the old British-Italian colonial border—during coverage of a Turkish seismic survey ship leaving Somali waters. It didn’t go down well when spotted and speaks to just how deeply contested this still is.

Twitter user @Deee_luul blasted the broadcaster accusing Turkey of “looting Somalia’s oil” (referring to the Turkey-Somalia hydrocarbon deal) and “now mocking our sovereignty and unity?” Somalilanders were obviously delighted with what they saw in the quote tweets. Abdi Ibrahim, a Somaliland advocate, @’d the Somali foreign ministry, wondering why TRT World got a pass when the BBC, which published the same map that week, got publicly dressed down by the government in its coverage of the Trump ban. The Somali government called on the BBC to “promptly remove” the map and shortly after it did.

Politics: Pants too tight, republic too dead

Somalia’s prime minister, Hamza Abdi Barre, has finally said the quiet part out loud: he’s not sold on Somali federalism. Speaking to political figures at the Decale Hotel, he compared the current setup to a pair of badly cut trousers—no matter how much you tailor them, they’ll never fit right. Translation: the system doesn’t need tweaks, it needs a full redesign, he believes. His comment hints at a deeper problem: Somalia’s stalled state-building isn’t just down to conflict with al-Shabaab or the consequences of the civil war—it’s also about competing visions of what the Somali state should be.

Al-Shabaab of course doesn’t think the government should exist per se, so we can leave them out of this discussion. But the federal model was adopted by Somali elites in 2004, and aimed to scale the clan-based local polities that sprang up after the state collapsed to reconstruct it from the ground up. In reality, it was less a grand plan than an improv job but it shared power and kept the Somali state, which had traumatised the public in the 1990s, far away. The big questions, however—whether federalism was the right call, where most power should sit, and who actually counts as part of the federation—were never really settled and the current president’s perceived failings have brought those questions into focus again. A range of views persist on what should be done.

Somaliland still wants out of Somalia. Khaatumo-SSC wants out of Somaliland. Puntland’s interior minister, Abdi Farah Juxa, has proclaimed the “third republic” (the federal state) dead. Puntland’s unofficial spokesperson, Mohamed Mubarak, believes a confederation with broader autonomy would allow “successful places to continue succeeding without being held back by those that don't want to change”. Mahdi Guleid, a former deputy PM and current MP, says we need more federal states, to give greater ownership to more communities. And former minister Abdi Hosow says calling for a confederation now—before fixing the current mess—is “like abandoning a house because the roof leaks.” What do you guys think?

Puntland and the Pentagon’s shadow war

This week, the US launched two more airstrikes—including one on IS-Somalia in Puntland—bringing Africom’s total this year to a staggering 41 airstrikes (which is around 1 strike every four days). Puntland’s security forces have been relying on American and Emirati air support for their months-long campaign against IS-Somalia, which plays an increasingly key role in the organisation globally. But in any case, Trump apparently really likes bombing Somalia. He carried out around 200 strikes in his first term—more than all his predecessors going back to Bush; leading Somali writer Jamila Osman to say the US is engaged in a “covert war” in the country. In February, the US said that it had carried out the largest-ever airstrike in history in Somalia from an aircraft carrier, dropping 125,000 pounds of ordnance.

The problem with these strikes, is that Africom statements after the fact almost always claim that “no civilians were harmed” in their operations. Medical officials in Puntland—where most US strikes have hit this year—have contradicted that, telling Acacia they’ve treated airstrike victims in Bosaso hospitals. But even as far back as 2019, Abdirizak Mohamed, a former Somali security minister said: “There is no way the Somali government can verify Africom’s claims that terrorists have been killed, it’s very difficult to go into al-Shabaab areas”. As a result he concluded, “we can’t always take Africom for what it says”. Past reports have frequently found civilian casualties, including recent local media accounts this year where a family said a relative was killed in an Emirati strike. Khalil Dewan, a PhD Nomos scholar at SOAS specialising in drones, says that the campaign outside a declared war zone “raises serious concerns about transparency, accountability, and potential extrajudicial killings.” He adds that the “true scale or full human cost of these covert campaigns” may never been known without better information about who is targeted, why and on what basis.

Culture: Djibouti to Beijing in film

In 2022, the Somali-language film, The Gravedigger’s Wife, made history becoming Somalia’s first-ever entry for Best International Feature at the Oscars. This week, the movie made another breakthrough at the China-Africa Film Week, where it was screened in China for the first time. Set in Djibouti and directed by Khadar Ayderus Ahmed, a Finnish-Somali filmmaker, it tells the story of Guled, a poor gravedigger in Djibouti City, desperate to save his wife Nasra, who needs urgent surgery. It explores the themes of love and sacrifice against the backdrop of crippling poverty. “I felt a sense of responsibility to tell the story of how I view my Somali community and to tell this story with dignity, tenderness and compassion – all the qualities I’ve been raised with,” Ahmed told the Guardian in 2021.

Across the gees

This week, Kenya’s Daily Nation uncovered Kenyan-branded ammunition—reportedly linked to the country’s defense ministry—in a weapons depot abandoned by Sudan’s RSF paramilitary group. That’s the same RSF that, back in February, announced a shadow government in Nairobi, prompting Sudan to accuse Kenya of violating its sovereignty. Kenya denied any “ulterior motives” in hosting the group at the time which Khartoum didn’t buy and apparently for good reason. Cameron Hudson, a former CIA hand turned Africa analyst, posted that it’s probably time the US asked its major “non-NATO ally about this…” Kenya has said it isn’t a party to Sudan’s war.
The Ethiopian government’s unofficial think tank, Horn Review, has frequently published outrageous policy proposals regarding the country’s maritime ambitions — but a recent article under its editorial banner truly took the cake. It suggested the Dahlak Archipelago, a series of islands off Eritrea’s coast in the Red Sea, could be the location of a “logistics base or joint-use facility in collaboration with Eritrea”. The two countries are closer to outright war than to cooperation right now but it speaks to the persistence of the idea that the Ethiopian navy can be resuscitated, and that someone will hand over land for it. All of Ethiopia’s coastal neighbours oppose the idea.
Prosecutors want to try former Belgian diplomat Etienne Davignon for the 1961 assassination of Patrice Émery Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first (and greatest) prime minister. A pan-Africanist and fierce advocate for African self-determination, Lumumba was executed with Belgian backing seven months after coming to power. Belgium admitted its role in 2001 and apologised a year later (and again in 2022), but real justice has been slow. Davignon is the last surviving member of the ten Belgians believed to have been involved. Lumumba’s daughter says the country is “moving in the right direction.”

Africa

Ghana’s Drunkards Association has given the government three weeks to lower liquor prices–or they’ve said they’ll shut the country down. We briefly considered letting our Africa section explore what a booze-fueled national shutdown in Accra could look like, but calmer heads prevailed here. Instead, we’re flagging an equally staggering story: an ongoing, multi-billion-dollar gold heist in Ghana, facilitated by, guess who… the UAE. According to a report by Swiss aid, a poverty-focused non-profit, some $11.4 billion worth of gold has quietly gone missing, most of it smuggled to Dubai. That’s enough to pay 22.6 million Ghanaians—two-thirds of the population—the minimum wage for a year, according to our math. Nigel Mugamu, founder of Zimbabwe’s 263Chat, asked the question plenty of Ghanaians are probably thinking right now: “LOST this money to WHO? Names?”. Ulf Laessing, a German analyst, says this is just “the tip of the iceberg”—you can fly gold into the UAE in your luggage, no questions asked. In another report last year, Swiss aid estimated that $30 billion is smuggled out of Africa annually.

Tangents

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, has some thoughts on how AI might shake up text-based religions—mainly the Abrahamic ones. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he imagined a future where AI, trained on sacred texts, could replace the clergy. In the past, “the Bible could not interpret itself,” Harari said, so we needed “human beings as an intermediary.” That won’t always be necessary, depending on how comfortable we become with our language models. And AI might even be better, he says. “For the first time in human history, there’s something that can remember every single word written by every rabbi over the last 2,000 years—and talk back to you and explain and defend its views,” he added. Would that work for you? (Go to 12:55).