This article is a supplement to PolGeoNow’s series of professional reports on territorial control in Somalia’s decades-long civil war. Reading it should require minimal prior knowledge, but for much more background, see our August 2023 and June 2024 Somalia reports.
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| Close-up of PolGeoNow's 2024 Somalia control map, showing areas of control and influence by SSC-Khatumo as the smaller area of blue on the left, and areas solidly controlled by Somaliland in green. Click on the image to see the full map, complete with detailed legend (free for all readers). Areas of known Al Shabaab presence are shown in the north, outside SSC-Khatumo's are of influence. |
In 2023, militias in the northern area of Somalia’s claimed territory rose up in rebellion against the self-declared independent Republic of Somaliland, which has claimed since 1991 to be a separate country from Somalia. These militias and their supporters are trying to instead join Somalia as one of its federal states, which they call “SSC-Khatumo” (SSC-Khaatumo in Somali). The “SSC” stands for the three regions they claim governance over: Sool, Sanaag, and “Ayn” (spelled Cayn in Somali, though to most English speakers the C sounds silent).
As part of Somaliland’s opposition to SSC-Khatumo, various allegations have been made that the insurrectionists are linked to Al Shabaab, the Al Qaeda affiliated organization that governs much of rural southern Somalia. These allegations have been largely ignored outside of Somaliland, but we’re still sometimes asked why our maps don’t appear to take them into account. To address this, we’ve written up this article to explain in detail what’s going on, what we know about it, and what the reasoning is behind our mapping of the situation.
Somaliland’s allegations against Abdi Madobe: Credible claims or cynical propaganda?
The government of Somaliland, particularly during the former presidency of Musa Bihi Abdi, has repeatedly asserted a connection between the SSC-Khatumo movement and Al Shabaab. This narrative also dovetails with Somaliland’s claim that the string of assassinations in Lasanod town that set off the current SSC-Khatumo rebellion were perpetrated by Al Shabaab, whereas supporters of SSC-Khatumo generally believe that they were perpetrated by the Somaliland government. (Lasanod is also spelled “Las Anod” in English, or Laas Caanood or Laascaanood in Somali.)
A central part of Somaliland’s narrative has revolved around the existence of a particular militia, based in the town of Buhodle (Buuhoodle), led by Abdi Madobe (Cabdi Madoobe)* and other men said to have previously lived in southern Somalia. By most accounts, Madobe’s force played an important role in SSC-Khatumo’s 2023 defeat of the Somaliland army in Sool region, and maintains a prominent presence in Lasanod town, while existing in some tension with the political core of the SSC-Khatumo movement. The traditional elders forming the government of SSC-Khatumo, also based in Lasanod, have denied that Abdi Madobe has ties to Al Shabaab, and he has publicly claimed that Somaliland itself made overtures to him in 2023.
Somaliland’s claims have been mostly dismissed or ignored by media and political actors unaligned with the Somaliland independence movement. Perhaps the only prominent outside defense of them has come from independent consultancy Sahan Research, which has a history of opinions friendly (though not deferent) to Somaliland, and of promoting conspiratorial interpretations of Somali politics. An editorial in Sahan’s subscriber-only Somali Wire newsletter (Issue 691) asserted that Abdi Madobe and his associates are indeed Al Shabaab members, saying they had “collectively spent several months in and around Jilib”, Al Shabaab’s capital city in the Middle Juba region of Somalia, and that their force of “several hundred heavily armed Al Shabaab fighters” was “the strongest single military component” of the SSC-Khatumo movement – a claim that it repeated in April 2025 (Issue 813). The editorial also expressed certainty that the Lasanod assassinations had indeed been conducted by Al Shabaab rather than Somaliland. It’s not clear to PolGeoNow what Sahan’s sources were for any of these claims.
On the other hand, regional expert Markus V. Hoehne from the University of Leipzig had reported in early 2023 that European Union and US diplomats, as well as World Bank officials, did not believe that Al Shabaab was involved in the SSC-Khatumo uprising. He also asserted that Abdi Madobe had already been residing in the Buhodle area, far from Al Shabaab’s control zone, for more than a decade before the current conflict broke out. Furthermore, Hoehne reported that Abdi Madobe in fact claimed to have been fleeing Al Shabaab violence against his family when leaving southern Somalia’s Barawe (Baraawe) town in 2009 (at which time it was under Al Shabaab control).
Hoehne also argued that the pro-Somaliland narrative of Abdi Madobe’s Al Shabaab affiliation was implausible given Buhodle’s location on the border with Ethiopia, a bitter enemy of the rebel group, and that the claims were in contradiction with other propaganda asserting that the Somalia’s neighboring Puntland state and federal government, rivals of each other and both enemies of Al Shabaab, were themselves behind the SSC-Khatumo uprising. Hoehne repeated his dismissal of Somaliland’s claims about Al Shabaab in a July 2023 opinion essay.
Meanwhile, Mogadishu thinktank the Hiraal Institute also asserted in May 2023 that Somaliland was using falsified reports to persuade outside actors of Al Shabaab involvement, noting that the ideology of SSC-Khatumo appeared to be at odds with that of Al Shabaab, and concluding that “there is no evidence that [Al Shabaab] has taken any official or unofficial side in the conflict.” Around the same time, Western thinktank the International Crisis Group said that “Evidence is scant that [Al Shabaab] has been involved…to date”. A US war correspondent visiting Lasanod in June 2023 reported an apparent lack of support for Al Shabaab (including some outright hostility toward it), and said he’d seen intelligence reports from the Somali federal government concluding that the group had tried to infiltrate the area without SSC-Khatumo’s help earlier in the conflict, but had failed.
Much has happened since the first half of 2023 – and indeed, Sahan’s assertions came a year later - but if anything, claims of Al Shabaab involvement with the SSC-Khatumo movement seem to have lost steam. There’s been little sign of outside experts changing their minds, and even Sahan’s editorials have made a bit less of Al Shabaab involvement in subsequent newsletters. Issue 813, published on April 23, 2025, insisted that Al Shabaab “infantry units” had fought alongside SSC-Khatumo forces in 2023, but granted that the Somaliland government had “clumsily attempted to discredit SSC-Khaatumo by painting the entire administration with the extremist label”.
Somaliland’s Bihi administration itself was still asserting both Al Shabaab and federal involvement in late 2024. But those claims seem to have stopped since the self-proclaimed republic’s new president, Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi “Irro”, took office in December (a member of Irro’s political party had openly rejected the claims as early as February 2023). And while some Somaliland independence voices, including Sahan, continued to imply that SSC-Khatumo has Al Shabaab links, others said in early 2025 that the religious hardline group hadn’t so far made inroads in the area.
But is there a covert Al Shabaab presence in Lasanod?
Whether or not Abdi Madobe’s militia has ties to Al Shabaab, there’s a potentially separate issue of whether Al Shabaab maintains an undercover presence in the area controlled by SSC-Khatumo. Much was made by some pro-Somaliland writers in April 2025 of statements by SSC-Khatumo officials that Al Shabaab agents were suspected in the murder of an Ethiopian diplomat in the Lasanod area. One of these was, again, the editorial staff at Sahan Research, which in Issue 813 of the Somali Wire newsletter described this as a reversal to previous SSC-Khatumo policy of entirely denying an Al Shabaab presence in the area, also claiming that the SSC-Khatumo police chief had long had concerns about ongoing Al Shabaab “infiltration of SSC-Khatumo” but been silenced by the self-proclaimed government’s leader.
The details of this latest assassination case don’t appear to directly implicate the involvement of any faction of SSC-Khatumo movement – on the contrary, at least on the surface they seem to imply that the killing was carried out despite the wishes of both the SSC-Khatumo government and Abdi Madobe himself, who was acknowledged to have apparently had friendly relations with the victim of the assassination. This of course doesn’t refute the claim that Abdi Madobe might separately have ties to Al Shabaab, but neither has it been accompanied by strong evidence to support that claim.
In any case, the presence of undercover Al Shabaab spies and assassins in SSC-Khatumo, even if they have indeed “infiltrated” the area’s de facto government, doesn’t in itself imply a pro-Shabaab alignment for SSC-Khatumo, especially since Somaliland already claimed a similar Al Shabaab operational presence in the area long before SSC-Khatumo took over, and sources such as Sahan’s Somali Wire also continue to claim that Al Shabaab was active in Lasanod during the city’s many years of Somaliland control.
Undisputed Al Shabaab presence: Sanaag's Almadow Mountains
It's worth noting that Al Shabaab is by no account absent from the entire so-called “Sool, Sanaag, and Cayn” (SSC) area: The group is well-documented to be present in remote areas of the Almadow (Cal Madow) Mountains in the north of Sanaag region. However, despite the implications of the “SSC” name, this area is considered to be outside SSC-Khatumo’s area of influence. The northern part of Sanaag region is mostly occupied by the Warsangeli sub-branch of the Somali people, rather than the Dhulbahante sub-branch represented by SSC-Khatumo, though the latter group does contest parts of southern and central Sanaag.
In September 2023, the Somaliland government claimed that a group of Al Shabaab fighters had arrived in Lasanod under the leadership of well-known commander “Fuad Shangole”, seeming to imply an origin in the Almadow range: Fuad had previously been said to be active in Somalia’s neighboring Puntland state, and Al Shabaab’s Puntland operations seem to have largely been consolidated into the Almadow range (claimed by both Somaliland and Puntland) after its early 2024 defeat by the so-called “Islamic State” (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) in Puntland’s Almiskat (Cal Miskaad) Mountains. Somaliland also claimed that Al Shabaab was setting up new training camps in “the mountains of Erigavo”, a clear reference to the Almadow range, which extends to the doorstep of that town (also spelled Erigabo, or Ceerigaabo in Somali). Though the latter claim is plausible enough, Somaliland’s implication that Fuad’s forces joined SSC-Khatumo in Lasanod is less so, and seems to have been taken even less seriously by external observers than the allegations against Abdi Madobe.
Should PolGeoNow map an Al Shabaab presence in Buhodle or Lasanod?
At PolGeoNow, we’re not able to say with confidence that Abdi Madobe doesn’t have ties to Al Shabaab. So someone might argue that, as our policy of liberally marking “mixed/unclear” control, we might show Buhodle or even Lasanod as dots split between SSC-Khatumo and (possible) Al Shabaab control. However, we haven’t done this.
The reason is this: Whether or not Abdi Madobe and his followers are connected to Al Shabaab, or even Al Shabaab members working covertly towards the group’s goals, that’s not something that would be reflected on our maps. PolGeoNow maps territorial control and administration in terms of outward allegiances, not hidden agendas or personal memberships. Many members of Puntland’s state military have also reportedly come to the aid of SSC-Khatumo (with mixed evidence on whether they were acting in an official or off-duty capacity).
Likewise, many of SSC-Khatumo’s fighters are deserters from the Somaliland military. But it would raise a lot of eyebrows if we took these fighters’ presence under the umbrella of the SSC-Khatumo leadership to mean that Lasanod is partly controlled by Puntland or Somaliland. By the same coin, if Al Shabaab members have indeed joined SSC-Khatumo, with or without renouncing their loyalties to Al Shabaab, that’s not quite enough to justify marking Al Shabaab control there on our map. (Al Shabaab, for its part, has denied involvement.)
Neither does a network of covert Al Shabaab operatives in the area equate to the kind of overt military control that PolGeoNow illustrates on its maps. If it did, most other cities of Somalia, from Bosaso to Mogadishu, would also have to be marked as controlled by Al Shabaab, which if anything seems to have an even stronger underground presence in those cities than in Lasanod.
On the other hand, if a major faction of the SSC-Khatumo movement were to – hypothetically – declare open allegiance to Al Shabaab, PolGeoNow would indeed mark this on the map without hesitation. Illustrating overnight changes to the battlefield alignment of armed groups is a routine part of our work. But unless and until that happens – or until Al Shabaab establishes an open presence there in opposition or rivalry to SSC-Khatumo – our methodology requires that we continue marking the area as solely under SSC-Khatumo control.
Counter-claims: Is Somaliland the one supporting Al Shabaab?
If Somaliland’s claims of Al Shabaab involvement with SSC-Khatumo are indeed a game of propaganda, its opponents seem to finally be trying their own hands at it. In early 2025, Puntland’s state government claimed to have found evidence that Somaliland was itself providing aid to Al Shabaab, and SSC-Khatumo leadership has also joined in the allegations. However, these claims – which seem likely to be taken as even less credible than Somaliland’s – haven’t appeared to gain much traction either.
For the latest illustration of territorial control across all lands claimed by Somalia, as well as timelines of key events involving Somaliland, SSC-Khatumo, and Al Shabaab, view all Somalia control map reports on PolGeoNow.
*Abdi Madoobe’s official name is reportedly Abdi Hussein Ali Kamin (Cabdi Xuseen Cali Kamiin).