Somalia

Here are the key facts of this story, as agreed upon by ¹Al Jazeera, ²Reuters, ³VOA, ⁴The National and ⁵Firstpost. The al-Qaeda-linked armed group al-Shabaab attacked an African Union (AU) Transition Mission in Somalia base in southern Somalia on Friday. The base houses Ugandan troops who are part of the…

Deni wasn’t your ideal leader for the role in Puntland, but as a philanthropist and a former minister in the central government, it soon became clear that he was the man for the job. The early stages of his presidency were consumed by rebuilding the central government’s relationship with Puntland…

By Patrick Mwangi Jeexdin camp has been Mohamed’s home for the past two years. Conflict forced him and his family to flee their home and make the 200-kilometre journey to seek safety in this camp for internally displaced people in Galkayo district in central Somalia. Conflict is not the only…

I was thrilled to finally graduate from the DS4Jobs program, which was life-changing and taught life skills program. Additionally, it was a privilege to be one of the selected top-talented graduates of the DS4Jobs program that the ITC, the Government of Japan, and SIMAD University implemented together. As a young…

Is Somalia a safe place to live for a white fellow from Cornwall? That’s the elephant in the room isn’t it? So let’s launch this new blog with that very question. Welcome to the Sam of Somalia Blog, entry 1 — Is Somalia Safe? I am writing this in Mogadishu…

Here’s some really, really good news if you’re learning Somali: It’s not just you who miss hears things or doesn’t understand things sometimes — Native speakers have this problem too. Unfortunately, language students often solve this in awful, “I’m a foreign bafoon” ways. Such as by frantically asking a family…

The Somali region president tweeted that his cabinet had endorsed the reforms implementation. — This Facebook post claiming that the Somali region cabinet rejected the federal government’s security reforms is FALSE. The post’s Amharic text translates to; “Breaking information. The Somali region has declared that it will not hand over even a single weapon to the central government. The region said that they do…

The world’s news cameras are back in Mogadishu to report on war-torn Somalia. They’ve got problems all right. The rents are so high, nobody can afford to live there. The entire city reverberates to the sound of jackhammers as new apartment block follows new apartment block, hotels crowd hotels. The…

One of the pictures has been online since 2017, while the other two date back to February 2022. — These pictures on Twitter and Telegram purportedly on the effects of drought in the Somali region of Ethiopia in 2023 are FALSE. The text accompanying the picture on Twitter reads: “#liiban_zone #Dawa. This is a very difficult situation, children and women are at high risk of malnutrition. …