A very belated Eid Mubarak to you all from the team at Geeska. We trust you spent it enjoying the company of loved ones, sambusas, and slightly-too-long WhatsApp voice notes. Unless, of course, you were on a dinghy somewhere in the Mediterranean, like the young woman whose video—filmed mid-crossing, no less—went viral last week. No, not Greta Thunberg but a Somali woman. The footage really drove home what a huge and dangerous decision tahriib is.
Speaking of viral: shoutout to @vvsima, who observed that AI has hit the Somali community “like crack in the 80s.” Bad analogy? Possibly. But hard to argue when this week’s social feeds gave us a Somali ayeeyo airborne—with a selfie stick—trolling President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud. If you haven’t seen it: do. Over on nationalist Somali Twitter, where Hassan Sheikh has few friends these days, @Deee_luul summed up the collective response with: “Allah caloosha 😂😂😂😂😂.” Rendered in English: “Oh God, my stomach”.
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.)
It’s been a big week. Good news is Iran and Israel’s shadow war is over. Bad news: they’re fighting in the open. Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad, a Somali analyst, has offered some fairly stark advice to Iran’s new president, Pezeshkian: follow the path of either Gaddafi or Kim Jong-un (the latter survived). Closer to home (and far less apocalyptic), Somali-British UFC fighter Muhidin Abubakar picked up a win in an interim bantamweight bout. Trump has also banned Somali passport holders again. Democrat Rep Ilhan Omar called it a “racist policy.” We’re not adding more. But here are the five stories we’re actually focusing on this week:
Online: “like crack” – Somali social media & AI
Somali social media is always at least 60% nonsense on a good day (this is a Geeska-estimate and doesn’t have an empirical basis). Lately, though, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube have been swallowed whole by what the tech crowd calls “AI slop”: low-quality, bizarre, deceptive and unusual content. The first big hit was a video of an old Somali lady piercing through the air with a selfie-stick, trolling a policy by Somali president Hassan Sheikh Mohamud as she said: “Rather than Hassan Sheikh digging me out of the grave, I have decided to bury myself in the air”. The old lady was referring to a decision last June, when the Somali government announced plans to exhume graves on the grounds of a former police academy—claiming the land was public and needed to be repurposed. The clip was posted by @kingofSomaliaa, a prominent Somali X user who opposes Hassan Sheikh, who helpfully captioned it: “Artificial intelligence can save you from corrupt ‘politicians’ 😂!”
Another AI fever dream: a Somali woman pulling up to a tuulo in a Ferrari. The clip—courtesy of TikTok’s @isra_873, who is a serial AI video offender—racked up nearly a million views before inevitably migrating to Twitter, where it continued doing numbers. We even have a Somali superhero boy (we liked this). And those are just a few examples. There’s a whole cottage industry now: people clearly prompting OpenAI for tweets, academic papers and images. The strangest case might be Somali Nexsus, a [well intentioned] YouTube channel churning out AI-generated podcasts and an entirely fictional Somali history series. Why shouldn’t you do this? Well, because the high court of Somali Reddit has reached an unambiguous verdict: “You cant trust ChatGPT when it comes to Somali History”. kriskringle8 another account posting there explained: since “everything online about Somalis and Somali history is incorrect,” and ChatGPT is trained on that, “of course it’ll get it wrong.”
No judgment here for users—and we aren’t luddites. Besides, some of this AI stuff is genuinely entertaining, like this AI-generated Somali nomad settlement… on Mars.
But there are serious implications: AI lets us supercharge our collective talent for twisting public debate, spreading propaganda, and—Somali social media being what it is—inciting against each other. There are almost no safeguards, even in “advanced” democracies. Tusaalahayaga: last year, Elon Musk shared a video of Kamala Harris—only it was partly fake. The European Union has even pushed Facebook and Google to start labelling AI-generated content. The Somali government, of course, and as usual, cannot do much, but Mohamed Ibrahim, a former Somali telecommunications minister attending UN Virtual Worlds Day 2025, told Acacia: “Somalis don’t muck around—they’re always early adopters, we dive right in.” But he added a caution: people need to understand “a lot of what they see may not be real, so public awareness needs to be improved.”
Politics: C6+: ctrl+alt+deleted
Continuing a tradition from the Farmaajo years, the Somali government has PNG’d the C6+ (US, UK, EU, AU, Igad, UN + Ethiopia, Kenya, Sweden)—a donor-heavy mini-forum of western(aligned) states built to liaise with Villa Somalia on big-ticket issues. Ali Omar (Balcad), state minister for foreign affairs and author of the letter to UN envoy James Swan (read here), dismissed the group as an “obsolete structure” that made sense in the 2010s but whose “logic no longer apply.” The UN was forced subsequently to distance itself from an offensive and fake response to Balcad circulating on Somali chat groups and the internet. Setting aside the dubious claim in the letter that Somalia is a “sovereign state with functional constitutional institutions,” Villa Somalia has been quietly seething for months. Its international partners keep pushing for good-faith engagement with the opposition, better results against al-Shabaab (which is currently storming “village after village”), and some effort—any effort—toward de-polarising Somali politics. When Hassan Sheikh Mohamud convened a trimmed-down [not so] National Consultative Council in early May, which is a forum that brings together Somalia’s federal leaders—the leaders of Puntland and Jubaland were missing—the US State department’s Africa Bureau stepped in with a quote tweet that read like a diplomatic slap: “Decisions taken without broad-based support will lack legitimacy and distract from pressing security challenges.”
Instead, Somalia has suffered what security expert Samira Gaid has characterised as “panicky and autocratic” rule, as Hassan Sheikh struggles to find terms on which he can engage his prospective competitors in the upcoming (s)election (is that part of the problem?). The backlash from his political opponents has been even sharper. In true franchise fashion, they’ve assembled under the banner of the Somali Salvation Forum—an Avengers-style lineup featuring ex-PMs like Mohamed Hussein Roble and Hassan Ali Khaire, plus former president Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. The group issued a joint statement blasting the move as “reckless”. Rashid Abdi—a dependable critic of whoever’s in charge in Mogadishu—says the decision stems from “the ruling elites’ discontent with the so-called ‘liberal state-building project’ that puts them under foreign pressure, scrutiny and oversight.” MP and popular anti-corruption campaigner Abdillahi Hashi Abib also wasn’t having it. He questioned whether Balcad even had the constitutional authority to send the letter—then called the whole thing “diplomatically reckless and politically suicidal.”
Backing the president’s move were a fewer voices. Former minister Adam Aw Hirsi echoed the view that the C6+ format is outdated. Researcher Abdihakim Kalale looked further, interpreting Hassan Sheikh’s visit to the Oruç Reis seismic research vessel as a message to the West: “Just like Turks say ‘tam bağımsız Türkiye,’ [“a fully independent Türkiye”] it’s time for Somalis to say ‘Soomaaliya si buuxda u madax bannaan’ — “a fully independent Somalia,” he posted.
Military: SNA enters ATAK mode
In what looked like a geopolitical bro hug, Türkiye has reportedly delivered three T129 ATAK helicopters to Somalia—a handover confirmed by footage on social media and a X post by Somalia’s point man for Turkish affairs (& transport minister), Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur:
“Teşekkürler Türkiye 🚁
Walaalnimadu ha waarto 🇸🇴🇹🇷”
The story was first broken by Middle East Eye’s Ragip Soylu, and the Somali army will now operate the aircraft, marking a shift away from years of near-exclusive US air ops. The delivery follows reports in March of Akinci drones arriving in Somalia, part of a steadily deepening Ankara–Mogadishu defence partnership.
Somalia’s drone story, meanwhile, has moved from open secret to just open. Turkish-made drones first slipped in around late 2021, during the Farmaajo-era. That was meant to be a more discreet delivery. Critics like then-presidential candidate (now MP) Abdirahman Abdishakur warned of Anatolian mission creep, urging Türkiye to make sure they weren’t arming an administration which might use the tools for other reasons. Under Hassan Sheikh (and like Sudan right now), drones have entered all corners of Somalia’s battlefields: Bayraktars helped coordinate SNA-clan militia offensives in Hiiraan and Galmudug. Puntland’s been capturing ISIS drones (and using its own), Somaliland factions are locked in a drone blame game, and now—with helicopters in the mix—Somalia’s wars aren’t just heating up, they’re taking flight.
Politics: Scott Perry with the Somaliland bill… again
Republican Congressman Scott Perry is back at it—reviving his bill in the House calling for US recognition of Somaliland. In a post on X he said: “For more than three decades, Somaliland demonstrated the kind of governance, stability, and cooperation that America should support”. Mursal Khaliif, a Somali MP and chairman of the parliament’s US friendship group said Perry is pushing this because of “lobbyist $$”. Perry first tried this in 2022, during then-Somaliland president Muse Bihi’s visit to DC. That effort got shot down by Biden—but it raised Somaliland’s profile in the US and even earned it a mention in a key US defence bill. Since then, GOP interest has only grown, with Somaliland pitching itself as a rare African opponent of China and a potential Red Sea asset for the US.
Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi (Cirro), Somaliland’s current president, told the Guardian last week that: “Recognition is on the horizon”. Gavin Williamson—Tory MP and former defence minister whose close to Trump officials—has also chimed in, telling the Guardian: “Before President Trump’s term ends, the US will have recognised Somaliland”. He told The Independent the same thing last year but advised patience. And then there’s this curiously timed nugget from Al Majalla, the Saudi-owned, London-based outlet: apparently (anonymous diplomatic sources say), Somaliland and Israel are in talks—an Israeli military base in exchange for Somaliland recognition. There’s good reason to doubt it. Anyway, Somalia has mounted both a major lobbying and political campaign (and is even pitching oil) in Washington to hedge against the move but it appears with an erratic Trump administration the stakes are definitely higher than before. Geeska’s editor-in-chief Suhaib Mahmoud put it plainly in a recent piece: a “shift in the balance of power was inevitable in Somali affairs”—toward either Hargeisa or Mogadishu. And whichever way it tips, he argues, will decide how this three-decade political stalemate breaks.
Diaspora: Can you serve global justice with a Somali on the bench?
Bit of a sad one, and we don’t know much—but worth marking: Somali judge Abdulqawi Ahmed Yusuf has quietly stepped down from the International Court of Justice, the world’s top court. The statement the court released provided no explanation but did point out that his term was meant to end in February 2027.
What do we know about his time there? He joined the ICJ in 2009, got re-elected in 2018, served as vice president (2015–2018), then levelled up to president from 2018 to 2021. Top fella. Climbed the whole ladder at The Hague. On the bench, he didn’t pull his punches: voted to investigate Israel for genocide. Dissented when the court tried to toss Sudan’s genocide complicity case against the UAE. And pushed back on what he called the ICJ’s “judicial refashioning of geography” when the court stepped in on Kenya’s maritime dispute with Somalia. Adil Haque, a law professor at Rutgers, suspects the resignation might be linked to the Israel genocide case. If you want to get an idea of why that might be the case read this & this.
Across the gees
The “Global March to Gaza” convoy intended to break the siege has made it to Egypt—mostly. The linked Sumud Convoy is stuck in Libya. The goal? Pressure (and embarrass) Egypt’s inaction on Gaza. Their mission seems half-accomplished. Some activists have been deported. Group spokesperson Saif Abukeshek told AFP that 200 people were detained, and authorities were sweeping hotels for activists. Others who made it as far as the town of Ismailia weren’t so lucky—some were attacked, and had their passports confiscated (including Nelson Mandela’s grandson).
Sudan’s army has moved part of its air force to Eritrea, per Egyptian outlet Mada Masr. The relocation follows a major drone strike by the RSF on Port Sudan in early May, targeting both civilian and military sites. We asked Eritrean researcher Mohamed Kheir Omer what it says about Khartoum’s ties with Asmara. He told Acacia: “this means Sudan’s army and Eritrea are very close”.
The US ambassador to Ethiopia, Ervin Massinga, told state media that Washington supports Ethiopia’s sea access ambitions—just “through commercial means” and “peaceful, diplomatic contexts.” In other words: not the naval power grab Abiy seemed to be floating. Meanwhile, an old Jeune Afrique interview with Djibouti’s President Ismail Omar Guelleh resurfaced this week, in which he flatly shuts the door on Abiy’s plan: “we made clear to Addis Ababa that Djibouti was not Crimea.”
Africa
General Michael Langley—head of Africom and exactly who you’d cast if the Terminator were played by an African-American actor (just listen)—says the US has bottled it in Africa. Africom is now weighing a withdrawal of the US military. The Sahel? “Epicenter of terrorism”, he says. Somalia? No real progress. In 2002, jihadist militants killed 23 people. Last year: 18,900. Not a great record anyway.
Tangents
Najma Sharif Alawi, the Somali-American writer, reminds us: “Malcolm X’s centennial just passed, and Fanon’s is right around the corner.” A timely nudge.
And tab this thoughtful interview between Dave Chappelle and Mo Amer, where they talk comedy, their friendship over the years, and what it means to be a Palestinian artist in the US right now:
And that’s a wrap for this week. Nabad gelyo.
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