Somalia's history: five points on the star, two in the union

What the rock shelters and the coastal towns record

About twenty rock shelters on a granite outcrop beside the road from Hargeisa to Berbera are painted with cattle. A French mission found the site, Laas Geel, "the camel's well" in Somali, in December 2002. Its cows are humpless, with lyre-shaped horns and wide rectangular necks filled with red and white stripes, and small human figures with outstretched arms stand beneath them. Fragments of painted wall recovered in excavation date the paintings to between the middle of the 4th and the middle of the 3rd millennium BCE.

Britannica's history of Somalia, by the anthropologist Ioan M. Lewis, places the northern and eastern shores probably within Punt, "the land of aromatics and incense" of ancient Egyptian writings, and in the classical period ports such as Opone and Malao traded with Ptolemaic Egypt, Greece, Persia and Rome. Muslim Arabs and Persians built trading posts along the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean coasts between the 7th and the 10th century, and by the 10th Islam was established at Zeila and Berbera in the north and at Marca, Barawa and Mogadishu in the south.

Wikipedia's history dates the oldest writing found in Somalia to 1106 or 1107, an Arabic funerary inscription at Barawa. Another, from 1365, calls its year a Saturday year, after the Somali calendar that names each year for the weekday on which it begins. The word Somali first appears early in the 15th century, in an Ethiopian song of victory.

How the Somali clans spread south and west

By the 10th century Somali nomads held the country inland from the Gulf of Aden, pastoral Oromo groups lived to their south and west, and settled Bantu groups of the Nyika confederacy occupied the land between the Shabeelle and Jubba rivers. Britannica dates the arrival from Arabia of Sheikh Ismāʿīl Jabartī, ancestor of the Daarood, to the 11th century, and of Sheikh Isaq, founder of the Isaaq, to perhaps two centuries later; Wikipedia calls such stories of sheikhs arriving from Arabia legendary.

Somali clansmen fought in the armies of the Muslim sultanates ranged against Christian Ethiopia. In the 16th century Adal, whose port was Zeila, led those wars under Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, called Gurey, "left-handed", in Somali, whose Somali armies brought Ethiopia close to collapse. Ethiopia's victory over him in 1542, won with Portuguese help, closed the west to Somali expansion and sent the Oromo north as far as Harar, and Somali settlers moved into the south behind them. In the 17th century the Ajuran sultanate tied to Mogadishu was overthrown and the city split into two rival quarters. Administrative posts set up in about 1912 finally halted the southward push at the Tana River, in what is now Kenya.

The northern ports went on trading. During the season of 1833 Berbera swelled to more than 70,000 people, and upwards of 6,000 laden camels arrived from the interior in a single day, according to the Wikipedia history.

How European powers and Ethiopia divided Somali lands

Britain took Aden in 1839 as a coaling station on the route to India, and its garrison ate meat shipped from the Somali coast opposite. France took Obock in 1862 and later developed the Somali port of Djibouti. When Egypt evacuated Harar and its Somali possessions in 1885, Britain filled the gap: treaties of protection signed with the main northern clans between 1884 and 1886 guaranteed them, in Lewis's words, their "independence", and the interior was left alone. Italy acquired two protectorates in the north-east in 1889 and a sublease of the southern coast, held directly from the sultan of Zanzibar from 1892 for an annual rent of 160,000 rupees, and the Italian government took over the colony itself in 1905. Jubaland, south of the Jubba River, became part of Britain's East Africa protectorate in 1895.

Ethiopia was expanding at the same time. After its armies crushed the Italians at Adwa in 1896, Italy, France and Britain each signed treaties with Menilek II in 1896 and 1897 that cut back their Somali possessions, and Italy gave up the Somali Ogaden while Britain cut much of the western Hawd out of its protectorate. The clans who lived there were not consulted, Lewis notes. The partition left five territories, the five that a news account of the flag's specifications in June 2026 gives as the points of the star.

Why the dervishes and the sultanates fought colonial rule

How the dervish state held out against Britain

Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, Maxamed Cabdulle Xasan in Somali and "the Mad Mullah" to the British, was a sheikh of the Ogaadeen clan and a preacher of the Ṣaliḥiyyah order. In 1899 he came into conflict with a newly opened Christian mission at Berbera, which had converted and adopted a group of Somali children, and with the protectorate over a petty dispute. His dervishes came through four major British, Italian and Ethiopian campaigns between 1900 and 1904, and in 1910 Britain gave up its costly operations and withdrew to the coast. A camel constabulary held them off after that. In 1920 a combined air, sea and land operation bombed their stronghold at Taleex and routed them, and the sayyid escaped, only to die of influenza a few months later.

What Italian rule and the Second World War changed

Italy's first fascist governor, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, arrived on 15 December 1923 to disarm the two north-eastern sultanates that Italy held only by treaties of protection. In the Campaign of the Sultanates Italy invaded Hobyo in October 1925 and, in the Wikipedia account, held the Majeerteen as well by the end of 1927; Britain had ceded Jubaland and the port of Kismaayo in 1925. A clash at the Welwel oasis in the Ogaden in late 1934 was followed by the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1935 and 1936, which put the Ethiopian and Italian Somali lands inside one empire.

Italian troops took British Somaliland in August 1940, and that summer Mussolini told Somali leaders he had created the "Greater Somalia". Britain retook the protectorate and conquered Italian Somalia in 1941, and every Somali territory except French Somaliland then came under British military administration. From 1948 the Ogaden and the Hawd were handed to Ethiopia in stages. Britain tried to buy those lands back in 1956 and failed.

How the north and south formed the Somali Republic

What the trusteeship prepared in the south

United Nations General Assembly Resolution 289 of 21 November 1949 returned former Italian Somaliland to Italy as a trust territory, with independence promised after ten years, and Italian administration began on 1 April 1950. It was the only trusteeship given to a power defeated in the Second World War. The Somali Youth League, the main independence movement, won the first general election in 1956, and by the end of that year Somali administrators ran every district and province. School enrolment rose from about 2,000 in 1950 to more than 30,000 in 1957.

The flag dates from the same years. The League wanted its own party flag and its rivals refused, and the scholar Mohammed Awale Liban broke the deadlock with a design that the territorial council approved on 12 October 1954: a white star on a light blue field, the blue chosen in tribute to the United Nations.

Why the north turned against the union's terms

The British protectorate moved later and faster. Its Legislative Council asked in April 1960 for independence and union with the trust territory, and on 26 June 1960 the protectorate became independent as the State of Somaliland, which thirty-five states recognised in the five days it existed. On 1 July 1960 the two territories joined as the Somali Republic, with Mogadishu as capital, Aden Abdullah Osman Daar as president and Abdirashid Ali Shermarke as prime minister.

Lewis calls it a last-minute marriage. The two halves needed better communications and had to reconcile their legal and judicial systems. A constitution put to a referendum on 20 July 1961 had little support in the north, where many boycotted the vote and more than 60% of those who voted rejected it; it passed across the country as a whole. British-trained officers from the north attempted a revolt to end the union in December 1961, and it failed.

How the republic pursued the Somali lands outside it

Somali unification dominated the republic's foreign policy, Lewis writes, through a campaign for self-determination for the Somali communities of the Ogaden, French Somaliland and northern Kenya. French Somaliland had voted in 1958 to stay with France, a result the Wikipedia history attributes to the votes of the Afar and resident Europeans, amid allegations that the French expelled thousands of Somalis before the poll. When the Kenyan Somalis' bid to join Somalia failed in the spring of 1963, after a commission of inquiry had endorsed it, Somalia broke off relations with Britain and a Somali guerrilla war paralysed northern Kenya until 1967. By the end of 1963 a Somali uprising in the Ogaden had led to a brief confrontation with Ethiopia. The West armed Ethiopia and Kenya, so Somalia took its military aid from the Soviet Union, and in June 1967 a government under Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal, who would later lead Somaliland, sought détente with both neighbours.

At home politics ran on clan allegiance. In March 1969 more than 1,000 candidates from 64 parties, most of them clan-based, contested 123 seats in the National Assembly. On 15 October 1969 a policeman shot President Shermarke dead at Las Anod, and on 21 October, the day after his funeral, the army took power without meeting armed resistance. Somalia has held no direct national election since that year, the US Congressional Research Service notes.

How Siad Barre's state rose and fell

The coup put the army commander, Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, at the head of a Supreme Revolutionary Council that renamed the country the Somali Democratic Republic, dissolved parliament and suspended the constitution. Siad adopted what he called Scientific Socialism and claimed it was compatible with Islam; at the height of Soviet influence, official Orientation Centres displayed slogans proclaiming "Comrade Marx, Comrade Lenin, and Comrade Siad". Clan loyalties were outlawed. A Latin alphabet for Somali was introduced in October 1972, and Lewis counts the mass literacy campaigns of 1973 and 1974, which made Somali a written language in Latin characters for the first time, as the regime's most successful programme. Somalia joined the Arab League in 1974.

Why Somalia went to war for the Ogaden

After Haile Selassie was overthrown in September 1974 Ethiopia began to fall apart, and guerrillas of the Western Somali Liberation Front in the Ogaden pressed Siad, whose mother was Ogaadeen, for support. When France granted Djibouti independence in June 1977 under a Somali president, the Front, backed by Somalia, launched a series of attacks on Ethiopian garrisons. By September 1977 Somalia held about 90% of the Ogaden and the war had reached the gates of Harar. The Soviet Union then took the place the United States had left in Ethiopia, and with Soviet matériel and Cuban soldiers Ethiopia retook the Ogaden in the spring of 1978. A ceasefire on 15 March ended the war. Hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees poured into Somalia, and Siad turned to the United States.

How the north rose against the regime

An attempted coup on 9 April 1978 failed, and one of its leaders, Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, fled to Ethiopia and joined an Ethiopian-backed militia that became the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, whose main support came from the Majeerteen clan. The Somali National Movement drew on the Isaaq clan of the north. Both ran guerrilla operations from Ethiopia until a peace accord between Siad and the Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1988 threatened their bases, and the SNM then attacked in its home region, taking Burao on 27 May 1988 and entering Hargeisa two days later.

The counter-insurgency that followed targeted the SNM's civilian base among the Isaaq, in the account of the Wikipedia article on Somaliland. The government bombed Hargeisa in 1988, and the razing of Hargeisa and Burao drove about 400,000 people across the border to Hart Sheik in Ethiopia and displaced another 400,000 inside the country. Estimates of the Isaaq civilians killed between 1987 and 1989 run from 50,000 to 100,000 across various sources and above 200,000 in local reports, and a United Nations investigation concluded that the crime of genocide was "conceived, planned and perpetrated by the Somali Government against the Isaaq people". In January 1991 an uprising led by the Hawiye-based United Somali Congress overthrew Siad.

Why Somaliland declared the union void

At a conference in Burao between 27 April and 15 May 1991, the Somali National Movement, which held the former British protectorate, declared the union of 1960 null and void and the north independent as the Republic of Somaliland, with Hargeisa as its capital. A grand conference at Borama chose Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal as president in 1993, and a constitution confirming the separation was approved on 31 May 2001 by 97.1% of those voting, according to the Wikipedia article on Somaliland. No government recognised that vote, the Council on Foreign Relations notes.

The Somaliland government says it meets most of the requirements of a sovereign state, with elections, its own currency and security forces and its own passports, and that its claim keeps to the norm, held by the African Union and its predecessor, that colonial-era borders be maintained. The territory it claims corresponds to the former British protectorate, about a quarter of Somalia's area in Britannica's reckoning. The federal government regards Somaliland as its own territory, and the provisional constitution of 2012 fixes the country's boundaries as those of the constitution of 1960 and declares the territory "inviolable and indivisible". The African Union has feared, CFR reports, that recognising Somaliland would encourage secessionist movements elsewhere on the continent. This catalogue records both positions and takes neither.

On 1 January 2024 Ethiopia signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland to lease coastal land for a naval base, reportedly in return for recognition; Somalia called it illegal and an act of aggression, and the two governments restored ties early in 2025 after talks mediated by Turkey. On 26 December 2025 Israel became the first UN member state to recognise Somaliland. Somalia's government called it an attack on its sovereignty, and the African Union and the Arab League rejected it; the US State Department reported to Congress in 2026 that the United States still recognises a Somalia that includes Somaliland. Inside the claimed territory, fighting around Las Anod cost Somaliland much of its east to pro-union forces of the SSC-Khatumo administration, and in early 2026 the federal government recognised a North East State on land claimed by Somaliland and Puntland, both of which rejected it.

How a federal government was rebuilt in Mogadishu

Who held Mogadishu after the regime fell

In the south the victors turned on each other. The interim government the United Somali Congress appointed set off a feud between rival Hawiye factions, led by General Mohamed Farah Aidid and by Ali Mahdi Muhammad, which tore the capital apart and carried the war into the grain-growing land between the rivers. Famine spread across the south, and militias looted the relief food. The UN Security Council approved a US-led force in Resolution 794 on 3 December 1992, and that month the United States led a multinational force of more than 35,000 troops into Somalia. In the Battle of Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993, 18 US soldiers and hundreds of Somali fighters and civilians were killed.

A conference in Djibouti in 2000 produced a Transitional National Government whose authority was never widely accepted, and talks in Kenya produced a Transitional Federal Government in 2004 that stayed in Kenya because Mogadishu was unsafe. The Islamic Courts Union took Mogadishu in June 2006. Ethiopian and government troops pushed the courts out in January 2007, and the Security Council authorised an African Union peacekeeping mission, AMISOM, the next month. The militant faction al-Shabaab survived the courts' collapse and fought on.

How Mogadishu and the federal states divided power

African Union and regional forces drove al-Shabaab out of Mogadishu in 2011 and 2012, the CRS records, and the transitional mandate ended on 20 August 2012, when a lower house chosen by clan elders under a provisional constitution was sworn in. Elections stayed indirect. For the vote of 2016 and 2017 clan elders chose 14,025 delegates, 51 for each of 275 electoral colleges, and each college elected one member of the House of the People. When the mandates of parliament and president ran out in December 2020 and February 2021 without an agreed election, an extension voted in April 2021 set off armed clashes in Mogadishu and was rescinded on 1 May. The CRS reports that parliament has since amended the constitution to extend its own term and the president's to 2027.

Puntland, autonomous since 1998 with the stated aim of a federal Somalia, announced its withdrawal from the federal system after constitutional amendments in March 2024, and Jubaland declared in December 2025 that it had left the federation. The African Union mission, renamed AUSSOM in January 2025, had 12,000 troops that year against more than 22,000 a decade earlier, and its aim is to hand security to Somali forces by the end of 2029. The National Museum in Mogadishu, closed at the start of the civil war in 1991, reopened on 1 July 2020, sixty years to the day after the union.