Somaliland’s road to independence: becoming a player or a piece of the game?

Few places in the world illustrate the gap between political reality and legal recognition quite like Somaliland. Situated in the northwestern corner of the Horn of Africa, this territory of five million people has spent over three decades building a functioning state that, on paper, does not exist.

The story begins earlier. A former British protectorate, distinct from the Italian-administered south that would become Somalia, Somaliland gained independence in June 1960 and was recognised by more than thirty states. Five days later, it voluntarily merged with the former Italian colony to form the Somali Republic. That decision would prove fateful. Decades of marginalisation under the southern-dominated government culminated in systematic violence under Siad Barre's regime in the late 1980s, including the near-total destruction of the capital Hargeysa. When Barre fell in 1991 and Somalia fractured into civil war, Somaliland declared independence and never reversed course.

While international missions UNITAF and UNOSOM II failed to restore order to the south, Somaliland engaged in a gradual and self-directed process of institution building. It developed a multiparty electoral system, a national currency, its own security apparatus, and a functioning civil administration. Economic growth has hovered around 3-4% in recent years, a figure that stands in stark contrast to conditions elsewhere in Somalia, where state authority remains severely limited, humanitarian crises are chronic, and the terrorist group Al-Shabaab exercises effective control over large portions of the southern territories. Somaliland's 740-kilometre coastline along the Gulf of Aden has vast strategic relevance, and it has attracted foreign investment and the attention of external powers with considerable interests in the region's maritime corridors.

More than three decades after declaring independence, Somaliland remained unrecognised by any United Nations member state. That changed on 26 December 2025, when Israel became the first UN member to formally recognise Somaliland as a sovereign state. The announcement broke a taboo that had held for over thirty years and produced sharply divergent reactions. In Hargeisa, thousands took to the streets in celebration. In Mogadishu, the response was outrage. The contrast illustrated, once again, how fragile the Horn of Africa remains, and how readily external powers move to shape its trajectory when strategic opportunity presents itself.

Israel's motivations are not difficult to read. According to Israeli strategic documents, the Red Sea has been reframed as part of a so-called Enlarged Mediterranean, making a reliable partner in the region a priority. Somaliland offers a potential counterweight to radical Islamic influence in the Horn and a point of strategic support near some of the world's most sensitive shipping lanes, which is constantly threatened by Iran-proxies Yemeni Houthis. Somaliland could represent a great partner in the fight against them. It also serves a more specific purpose, acting as a means of limiting the expanding regional footprint of Türkiye, which has emerged as one of Israel's principal rivals for influence in the area.

This development followed another significant one: in 2024, Hargeysa signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Ethiopia, granting the latter a 50-year lease over a 20-kilometre section of its coastline to establish a naval base. Although never explicitly stated, many speculated that Ethiopia would recognise Somaliland's sovereignty in return, though this was never officially confirmed. The deal proved deeply controversial. Somalia interpreted it as a first step toward recognition of Somaliland by its powerful neighbour, while many analysts questioned whether it was in Ethiopia's interest at all. As a founding member and vocal supporter of the African Union, Ethiopia had long championed the principle of territorial integrity as a cornerstone of continental stability. Its own experience was equally awkward: having fought a prolonged and brutal conflict in Tigray, Addis Ababa had little appetite for the precedent that a newly recognised breakaway state might set.

And yet, for Ethiopia, the world's most populous landlocked country, access to the sea has become a strategic fixation. The country depends on Djibouti for 95% of its exports, paying heavily for the privilege, a dependency that caps its regional ambitions and has brought it to the brink of conflict with its neighbours on more than one occasion. Sea access, in Ethiopian strategic thinking, is not merely an economic asset but a precondition for the country's emergence as a genuine regional power.

Another actor that has grown close to Hargeysa is the UAE, a country whose foreign policy increasingly revolves around projecting geopolitical strength and securing influence over global supply chains through the control of strategic ports. When Djibouti nationalised the Doraleh port in 2017, previously operated by DP World, the UAE's state-owned logistics giant, Abu Dhabi pivoted swiftly and invested $442 million in Berbera, effectively establishing it as its principal Red Sea hub. The mediating role the UAE played in both the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict in 2018 and the Tigray war in 2022 confirmed what Berbera had already suggested: that Abu Dhabi sees the Horn of Africa as a theatre in which it intends to be a consequential actor. Without formally breaking with Mogadishu, the UAE has nonetheless become Somaliland's most substantial external sponsor, providing humanitarian aid, refuelling infrastructure, development financing, and a security presence along the coast.

What runs through all of these engagements is a consistent logic. The external actors involved have each defined their interest in Somaliland independently, on the basis of their own strategic priorities, and Hargeysa finds itself navigating a space it did not design and does not control. On the other hand, Somaliland’s recognition has been received very negatively by Somalia’s main allies. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have traditionally been close to Mogadishu, but lately it’s mostly Türkiye and Egypt that are becoming its closest  and most relevant allies.

Türkiye's engagement with Somalia is rooted in over more than a decade of deliberate investment. When Somalia was at the height of its famine in 2011, Ankara stepped in with humanitarian aid and development assistance, establishing an early presence that laid the groundwork for a deeper bilateral relationship. In 2017, Türkiye opened its largest overseas military base in Mogadishu, known as Camp TURKSOM, covering 400 hectares and serving as the main hub for training Somali army officers and commandos. Türkiye has trained more than 16,000 Somali troops since then. The relationship deepened further in 2024, when Somalia's legislature overwhelmingly approved a ten-year defence and economic cooperation agreement with Türkiye, which will see Ankara build, train and equip the Somali navy. The timing was significant: the agreement came within weeks of Ethiopia signing its MoU with Somaliland, and while both sides insisted the deal had been in the works for some time, the intent to send a clear message to Addis Ababa, as well as to the UAE, was not lost on observers. Erdoğan, for his part, condemned Israel's recognition of Somaliland as purely destabilising and serving no constructive purpose.

Egypt's involvement follows a different but complementary logic. President al-Sisi's primary preoccupation is the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) on the Blue Nile, a project Cairo views as an existential threat to its water security and over which years of negotiation have yielded no lasting agreement. The deterioration of Somalia-Ethiopia relations over the Somaliland MoU offered Cairo an opening it moved quickly to exploit. In August 2024, Sisi and Mohamud signed a defence pact in Cairo, followed weeks later by Egyptian Air Force cargo planes landing in Mogadishu carrying weapons and approximately 300 special forces commandos, the first such deployment in over forty years. Egypt has since committed troops to the new African Union Support Mission in Somalia and is reportedly planning to deploy up to 10,000 soldiers in total. The strategic logic is transparent: Egypt is taking over a mission from which Somalia has effectively excluded Ethiopia, placing its forces in a position that functions as leverage in the GERD dispute as much as a counterterrorism contribution. Ethiopia's foreign ministry responded with alarm, and analysts have flagged the risk of Egyptian troops turning Somali territory into a theatre for a rivalry whose origins lie thousands of kilometres away on the Nile.

On top of these, it’s interesting to observe the position of the world’s biggest powers. While European powers remain vigilant and inactive, the US and China are considering taking a more active stance in the matter. China's stance is the more straightforward of the two. Beijing cooperates with Somalia under the Belt and Road Initiative and has strong structural reasons to oppose any change to the status quo. It has invested heavily in Djibouti, where it operates its only overseas military base, and would stand to lose if Ethiopia’s exports would stop passing by the country. More fundamentally, supporting a separatist movement's bid for recognition carries implications Beijing cannot afford, given the symbolic resonance with Taiwan. Chinese opposition to Somaliland's recognition is, in that sense, overdetermined.

The United States is less settled. Washington has cooperated with Mogadishu for years on counterterrorism, and the memory of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu still carries a strong image. At the same time, the Trump administration has shown little warmth toward Somalia, which the president included in his list of “shithole countries”, and the targeting of the Somali migrant community in Minneapolis has made Somalia a matter of domestic politics as much as foreign policy. Somaliland's leadership has read the moment shrewdly, offering the US access to a military base and mineral resources. A bill to recognise Somaliland was introduced by Congressman Scott Perry in 2024, and the administration's close alignment with Israel and the UAE gives it added potential momentum. A demonstration of this was registered in Davos, as Eric Trump met Somaliland president and appeared to show interest in the matter, differently from when his dad declared “Does anyone know what Somaliland is, really?” after Israel’s recognition.

Neither power has formally picked a side, yet both have structural positions that point them toward one. Somaliland risks becoming, among other things, a minor but telling theatre of the broader Sino-American rivalry.

This brief overview of how events are unfolding shows how various actors are closely and actively following a story that Western media has largely ignored, yet which carries the potential for unprecedented consequences in the region. Several powers have a stake here. Somaliland is pressing for international recognition, which would open new development opportunities, but that recognition could also deepen regional instability. States such as Israel see short-term gains in recognising Somaliland, yet appear to disregard the broader consequences such moves generate across the region.

More broadly, the situation in Somalia is lending yet another theatre to many of the rivalries and alignments shaping global geopolitics: the friction between Israel and Türkiye, the tightening bond between Israel, the UAE and the Trump administration, the tensions between Egypt and Ethiopia, the growing strategic distance between Gulf countries, and even the US-China competition. It also reflects Europe's shrinking influence in the area. At the same time, the situation echoes the trajectory of the war in Sudan, where the Sudanese army is backed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea, while the rival Rapid Support Forces draw support from the UAE. Sudan offers a parallel that is difficult to ignore: there too, external powers have chosen sides, supplied weapons, and pursued their own rivalries through someone else's crisis, leaving consequences that Sudanese civilians will live with long after the sponsors have quietly recalibrated their interests.

The question the international community has not seriously asked is what recognition, if and when it comes more broadly, will actually mean for Somaliland. If it arrives as a byproduct of great-power competition rather than a genuine reckoning with thirty years of self-governance, it may open doors without changing the underlying dynamic. Somaliland would have a seat at the table, and still find that the game is being played around it.