Disagreements over peacekeepers and an arms delivery to breakaway Puntland have increased.
A third round of Turkish-mediated talks between Somalia and Ethiopia has been postponed indefinitely. The talks had been due to take place last Tuesday in Ankara, but instead, Turkey is pushing ahead with indirect negotiations and meeting separately with each party. The delay comes as Mogadishu accused Addis Ababa of supplying weapons to the breakaway Puntland region in northeastern Somalia.
“Somalia strongly condemns the unauthorized shipment of arms and ammunition transported via Ethiopian territory to Somalia’s Puntland region,” the country’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Friday.
“Documented evidence confirms the arrival of two lorries transporting weapons from Ethiopia to Puntland … executed without any diplomatic engagement or clearance,” the statement continued. Ethiopia has not responded to the accusations.
In late March, Puntland authorities announced that the region would operate as an independent state—three months after Ethiopia announced a port deal with Somaliland, another breakaway region in Somalia that claims independence. Landlocked Ethiopia agreed to lease 20 kilometers (about 12 miles) of coastline from Somaliland in exchange for recognition of the region’s independence.
Since that announcement, Mogadishu has signed defense deals with Turkey and Egypt. The agreement with Ankara allows for the deployment of Turkish troops to Somalia, including its territorial waters, for two years. On Monday, Somalia received its second shipment of weapons and ammunition from Cairo as part of a new defense pact. “Somalia is an Arab state in the Arab League with rights, according to the Charter of the League, to collective defense against any threat it faces,” Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said at a press conference with his Somali counterpart in Cairo in January.
Somalia’s government has asked the African Union that existing Ethiopian peacekeepers in the country be replaced with 5,000 Egyptian soldiers serving within an updated AU peacekeeping mission targeting al-Shabab.
According to statements by Somali government officials, the mission set to begin in January 2025 will no longer include Ethiopian forces.
The prospect of Egyptian troops near its borders is something Ethiopia opposes because of a separate dispute over a mega-dam on the Nile. Cairo has since warned its citizens to leave Somaliland: “The current security situation in Somaliland limits the ability to provide any consular assistance to Egyptians there,” said a statement circulated by Egyptian local media.
Each party seems focused on inflaming tensions. The standoff also weakens Somalia’s federalist form of government as regional leaders disagree on which peacekeeping forces they want in their respective areas. South West State President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, known as Laftagareen, has publicly opposed an Egyptian deployment and instead supports the Ethiopian troops who currently secure the area.
Laftagareen fears his region would become the site of a proxy war between Egypt and Ethiopia, but the standoff is also clan-based. Worryingly, tensions in the Horn of Africa have been allowed to simmer without any regional effort from bodies such as the AU to defuse possible escalation.
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