The Country That Stopped Being One: Somalia and the History of a Broken State

By 1992 there's a famine killing hundreds of thousands of people.

That's what brings the U.S.

in.

The images on television, the bodies, the children.

George H.W.

Bush sends troops.

It starts as a humanitarian mission.

Y en 1993, hay un problema muy grande.

And in 1993, there is a very big problem.

Los soldados americanos mueren.

American soldiers die.

The Battle of Mogadishu.

October 3rd and 4th, 1993.

Eighteen American soldiers killed, eighty-four wounded.

A warlord named Mohamed Farrah Aidid had turned the population against the U.S.

presence, and what started as a raid to capture his lieutenants became a seventeen-hour firefight in the streets.

Most Americans know it as Black Hawk Down, from the book and the film.

What they often don't know is that the Somali death toll that day was somewhere between five hundred and a thousand people.

Después de eso, Estados Unidos sale de Somalia.

After that, the United States leaves Somalia.

Y el mundo también sale.

And the world leaves too.

That's the thing that haunts the whole subsequent history.

The U.S.

pulls out.

The UN mission collapses.

And the lesson that every administration in Washington takes away from Mogadishu is: don't get stuck in Somalia.

Which creates this awful cycle where the world looks away, the situation deteriorates, something forces attention back, and the whole thing repeats.

En 1998, Puntlandia dice: nosotros somos diferentes.

In 1998, Puntland says: we are different.

Nosotros tenemos nuestro propio gobierno.

We have our own government.

And here's the interesting thing about that declaration.

Puntland specifically said it was not seeking full independence.

It called itself an autonomous state within a federal Somalia, whenever Somalia got itself back together.

It was basically saying, we can't wait for Mogadishu to figure things out, we have people to govern, so we're doing it ourselves.

That's a very different move from Somaliland in the northwest, which declared full independence and has never looked back.

Somalilandia es estable.

Somaliland is stable.

Tiene elecciones.

It has elections.

Pero el mundo no la reconoce.

But the world does not recognize it.

That's one of the most quietly absurd situations in international relations.

Somaliland has had peaceful transfers of power, functioning courts, its own currency.

By almost any measure, it works better than a lot of recognized states.

And yet precisely zero countries officially recognize it, because the African Union and the UN don't want to set a precedent for other breakaway regions.

So it exists in this legal limbo, doing everything a country does but officially not a country.

Puntlandia es diferente.

Puntland is different.

Puntlandia tiene problemas con los piratas y con los terroristas.

Puntland has problems with pirates and with terrorists.

The piracy era is something I want to spend a minute on, because people forget how dramatic it was.

Between roughly 2005 and 2013, Somali pirates operating out of ports along the Puntland coast were seizing massive commercial vessels, holding crews hostage for ransoms that sometimes ran into the tens of millions of dollars.

At the peak, around 2011, there were over seven hundred sailors held hostage simultaneously.

Container ships, oil tankers, even a Ukrainian vessel carrying tanks.

Mucha gente piensa que los piratas son criminales.

Many people think the pirates are criminals.

Pero algunos piratas dicen: protegemos el mar.

But some pirates say: we protect the sea.

That's a genuinely complicated argument, and I remember writing about this.

The original Somali fishermen who turned to piracy pointed to the fact that, after the state collapsed, foreign fishing fleets moved in and stripped the coastal waters clean.

Illegal dumping of toxic waste too.

They had a real grievance.

And the early crews called themselves the Somali Marines, the Volunteer Coast Guard.

Now, that doesn't excuse holding sailors hostage for months, but it explains how it started.

Entonces la piratería termina, más o menos.

Then the piracy ends, more or less.

Pero ahora hay otro problema: el ISIS.

But now there is another problem: ISIS.

And this is the part that's easy to misread.

When people hear ISIS in Somalia, they assume it's the same as Al-Shabaab, the jihadist group that's been fighting for years in the south.

But they're not the same, and the relationship between them is actually hostile.

Al-Shabaab is affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

ISIS established a separate branch in Somalia, specifically in Puntland, around 2015, and Al-Shabaab considers them rivals.

So Puntland is fighting ISIS while Al-Shabaab fights the federal government in the south.

It's competing insurgencies.

Dos grupos terroristas.

Two terrorist groups.

Uno en el sur.

One in the south.

Uno en el norte.

One in the north.

Y no son amigos.

And they are not friends.

They actively fight each other, which creates this grotesque situation where the Somali federal army, Puntland forces, and Al-Shabaab have occasionally ended up on the same side against ISIS in Puntland, even though nobody is formally allied and everybody would happily shoot each other otherwise.

Welcome to the actual complexity of the Horn of Africa.

Miraale está en las montañas.

Miraale is in the mountains.

Es un área muy difícil.

It is a very difficult area.

El ISIS usa las montañas para esconderse.

ISIS uses the mountains to hide.

The Golis Mountains, specifically.

And there's something almost ancient about that tactical situation: armed groups using mountain terrain to resist central authority.

It's the same dynamic you see in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in parts of the Sahel.

The mountains protect you from conventional military force.

You can retreat, regroup, launch raids.

Puntland forces have taken Miraale before and lost it again.

Whether this recapture holds is genuinely unclear.

El problema de Somalia no es solo los terroristas.

The problem of Somalia is not only the terrorists.

El problema es la historia.

The problem is the history.

That's the line right there.

And it's not abstract, it's very concrete.

The colonial borders drawn by Italy and Britain cut across clan territories.

The Cold War poured weapons in and then abandoned the country.

The U.S.

intervention of 1993 left without solving anything structural.

Every outside actor has taken what they needed and left the mess behind.

And now you have a generation of young men who have grown up knowing nothing but a fractured state, and the jihadist recruiters are very good at explaining who's to blame.

Pero Puntlandia tiene algo diferente.

But Puntland has something different.

La gente de Puntlandia quiere orden.

The people of Puntland want order.

Quiere vivir con paz.

They want to live with peace.

That's genuinely true, and I think it's easy to miss when you're reading about fighting in the Golis Mountains.

Puntland has been running its own civil administration for almost thirty years.

They have a police force, courts, civil servants who show up to work.

By the standards of what surrounds them, that is a remarkable achievement.

And the fact that Puntland forces are the ones retaking Miraale, rather than waiting for Mogadishu to do it, tells you something about where real governance actually lives in that part of the world.

Somalia tiene un gobierno federal ahora.

Somalia has a federal government now.

Pero el gobierno es débil.

But the government is weak.

No controla todo el país.

It does not control the whole country.

The federal government in Mogadishu controls parts of the capital and not much else, depending on which week you ask.

Al-Shabaab still controls large rural areas in the south and center.

And there have been real tensions between Mogadishu and Puntland, including a complete breakdown in relations in 2023 over a constitutional dispute.

Two governments that are nominally on the same side, spending energy fighting each other while ISIS is literally in the mountains.

Es muy difícil tener un país cuando los clanes no hablan entre ellos.

It is very hard to have a country when the clans do not talk to each other.

The clan system in Somalia gets simplified in Western coverage into something primitive, but it isn't.

It's an incredibly sophisticated social organization that provided everything a state normally provides, for centuries, before colonialism arrived and tried to replace it with something else.

The problem isn't that clans exist.

The problem is that Siad Barre deliberately corrupted the clan system by turning it into an instrument of domination, and that damage is still reverberating.

Y ahora Somalia también tiene un problema con el clima.

And now Somalia also has a problem with the climate.

Hay sequías y hay inundaciones.

There are droughts and there are floods.

Somalia is one of the countries most exposed to climate instability on earth.

The Horn of Africa has experienced five consecutive failed rainy seasons in recent years.

When the rains fail, livestock die, farmers lose everything, and people move.

And that displacement creates exactly the conditions that armed groups need: desperate young men with nowhere to go and nothing to lose.

Climate change isn't causing the insurgency in Puntland, but it's absolutely providing the fuel.

Somalia necesita paz.

Somalia needs peace.

Pero la paz es muy difícil con tantos problemas al mismo tiempo.

But peace is very hard with so many problems at the same time.

There's a phrase that development economists use sometimes: a poverty trap.

The idea that if you're poor enough, the obstacles to getting out of poverty are themselves created by being poor.

Somalia is in something like a governance trap.

The state is too weak to provide security.

Without security you can't build institutions.

Without institutions the state stays weak.

And every external actor who tries to shortcut that process, whether it's the U.S.

in 1993 or the African Union today, tends to address the symptom rather than the underlying structure.

Pero hay esperanza también.

But there is hope too.

Los jóvenes somalíes estudian.

Young Somalis study.

Trabajan.

They work.

Muchos viven en otros países y ayudan a Somalia.

Many live in other countries and help Somalia.

The diaspora is genuinely one of Somalia's most important assets.

There are large Somali communities in Minneapolis, in London, in Toronto, in Oslo.

They send remittances that in some years have exceeded the entire foreign aid budget for the country.

And there's a generation coming up, educated abroad, with technical skills and political ambitions, who are going back.

Not every story from Somalia is a story of failure.

It's just that the news cycle only pays attention when there's a battle or a famine.

Entonces, Puntlandia reconquista Miraale.

So, Puntland retakes Miraale.

Es una cosa pequeña.

It is a small thing.

Pero es importante.

But it is important.

I think that's exactly the right way to read it.

Two sentences in the news feed.

But behind those two sentences there's a century of colonial division, Cold War manipulation, a catastrophic state collapse, a piracy crisis, two rival jihadist insurgencies, a constitutional standoff, and a semi-autonomous administration that has been quietly doing the unglamorous work of governing for thirty years.

When Puntland forces retake a mountain area from ISIS, that's all of that history showing up at once.

La historia es siempre más grande que la noticia.

History is always bigger than the news.

I'm going to borrow that line, Octavio.

Actually, hold on.

Earlier you said something that caught me.

You said 'Puntlandia reconquista Miraale.' That verb, reconquista.

I know it in the context of the Spanish Reconquista, the medieval period.

But in Spanish, reconquista and conquistar, are those the same root?

Because in English 'reconquer' sounds almost archaic.

Sí, es la misma raíz.

Yes, it is the same root.

Conquistar es tomar un lugar.

Conquistar is to take a place.

Re-conquistar es tomarlo otra vez.

Re-conquistar is to take it again.

So the 're' prefix works the same as in English.

And in Spanish you can add 're' to most verbs to mean 'again'?

Sí.

Yes.

Releer, reabrir, reiniciar.

To reread, to reopen, to restart.

Es muy fácil.

It is very easy.

El español usa mucho el prefijo re.

Spanish uses the prefix re a lot.

So the same prefix that gives English its history of conquest also does quiet work in everyday Spanish.

Reconquistar, reconquista.

And every time a Puntland commander writes a report saying his forces reconquistaron Miraale, he's using the same word that describes eight hundred years of medieval Iberian history without thinking about it for a second.

Sí.

Yes.

El idioma es muy viejo.

Language is very old.

Las palabras viajan mucho.

Words travel a lot.

That feels like the right note to end on.

Words travel.

History travels.

And a two-sentence news item about a mountain area in Puntland turns out to contain a century of both.

Thanks for this one, Octavio.

Gracias a ti, Fletcher.

Thank you, Fletcher.

Hasta la próxima.

Until next time.