BOSASO, SOMALIA – The Puntland Defence Forces took over the PSF headquarters in Bosaso on Thursday morning without a shot fired, ending more than two decades of the compound’s occupation by a force that now answers to Mogadishu. The handover of the Bosaso camp followed hours of talks with the men inside and their officers, held to keep the battle that consumed Galkayo a day earlier out of Puntland’s commercial capital.
How the Bosaso camp changed hands
Puntland’s police announced the takeover of the Bosaso camp in a statement issued during the morning. The Defence Forces had “formally taken over the command and the headquarters that had been occupied by armed militias who unlawfully passed themselves off as security forces, formerly known as the PSF,” the statement said, adding that the site was now fully in government hands with its security and administration secured.
By calling the occupants armed militias who unlawfully passed themselves off as a security force, the statement casts the transfer as the recovery of a state facility from men with no lawful standing. Puntland has used the same terms at every step of this confrontation, as it detained, disarmed and then accepted the surrender of men who until recently drew federal salaries, and it has used them consistently enough that its foreign partners have never had to choose a side in public.
Witnesses in the city said the fighters walked out of the base they had held for more than twenty years in an orderly departure, and Puntland troops moved in behind them. Residents reported no gunfire and no cordon of the surrounding districts, in a city where the same compound produced days of shelling five years ago. Traffic through the port road ran normally while the transfer took place.
Neither the statement nor the reporting from Bosaso put numbers on any of it. How many men left, what weapons and vehicles stayed behind, whether anyone was detained, and what was promised to those who walked out are all unstated. Puntland published a detailed inventory within hours of taking the Galkayo camp, down to the boots and the handcuffs. Neither side has described the terms on which the men in the Bosaso camp agreed to leave, and no one from the federal government has spoken for them.
The talks that replaced a battle
The withdrawal came after negotiations that ran through the preceding hours, aimed squarely at averting a fight inside Bosaso. The unit, formally under the Federal Government of Somalia, had spent months under pressure from the Puntland administration before those talks began. An officer named Cabdullaahi Cismaan Diyaano is reported to have agreed on Wednesday to give the Bosaso camp up, a day before his men filed out. The Diyaano family sits at the origin of this dispute, which opened with the 2019 state election, and the Bosaso camp was the last major PSF position in the north.
President Said Abdullahi Deni had set the clock the day before. Hours after his forces stormed the Galkayo camp, he gave federal-aligned fighters still inside Puntland territory a 48-hour window to present themselves to the state, pairing the threat of further operations with an open door for anyone who came in voluntarily. The officers in Bosaso took that offer after watching the alternative play out in Mudug, and they moved well inside the 48 hours. Local reporting described their withdrawal as a tactical one, forced by the heavy fighting in Galkayo the previous day.
Puntland’s dawn assault on the Galkayo camp ended with 101 detainees, 60 wounded fighters in custody and a boy killed by a mortar round in a residential district. Bosaso reached the same outcome through talks, with no casualties reported. Garowe used force in Galkayo and negotiation in Bosaso within 24 hours, and President Said Abdullahi Deni’s ultimatum is still running against the units left in Garowe and elsewhere.
The Bosaso camp sits beside the port that carries Puntland’s trade and the World Food Programme facility next to it, so a firefight there would have closed the northeast’s commercial artery and its aid pipeline in the same morning. The talks that averted that fight left the command dispute behind the camp exactly where it stood.
Twenty years inside one compound
The PSF was raised with American backing and trained for intelligence-led operations against the Islamic State faction in the Cal Miskaad mountains, work that gave Puntland its standing with Washington and gave the unit capabilities no other formation in the northeast possesses. For most of two decades the Bosaso camp was the base from which that campaign was run, and its officers were the men Washington dealt with in the northeast.
President Said Abdullahi Deni defeated General Asad Osman Abdullahi, known as Asad Diyano, in the 2019 state contest, then dismissed the PSF commander Mahamud Osman Diyano, the general’s brother, who refused to go. By December 2021 the disagreement had become a battle inside Bosaso, with shells landing in residential districts of the city the force existed to protect. Puntland dissolved the PSF on paper afterwards and stood up a new intelligence and security agency in its place, though the men in the Bosaso camp stayed where they were.
Mogadishu adopted the losing side when it made Asad Diyano chief of the federal police, and on 22 June this year President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed decrees creating a Bosaso-based 17th unit of the Somali National Army under Lieutenant Colonel Abdullahi Osman Abdullahi, known as Diyano. Federal leaders then said the PSF had been absorbed into it, a claim Garowe rejected as constitutionally void. From that point the compound in Bosaso housed a force with Puntland’s name, Mogadishu’s payroll and no agreed chain of command, which is the condition that produced the confrontation at Laag in July, where Puntland stopped a PSF column and took 30 fighters and 13 vehicles.
The dispute survived a dissolution, the federal absorption and two armed confrontations, and on Thursday the standoff inside the compound ended with officers walking their men out through the gate, five years after the shelling of 2021.
What Mogadishu has left in Puntland
A PSF element with about nine vehicles, which had spent the previous days on the outskirts of Qardho, moved overnight toward the North East State administration, according to reports from the area. Others who fled Galkayo, the force’s senior officers among them, crossed into Galmudug and are reported at the Danab base in the south of the city, sheltering with the American-trained commando brigade that was ordered into Wednesday’s battle too late to affect it. Units claiming federal affiliation remain in Garowe and a few other locations, and President Said Abdullahi Deni’s ultimatum is aimed at them.
Villa Somalia has said nothing about Bosaso, as it said nothing about Galkayo. The federal government spent the summer moving weapons, uniforms and recruits toward Puntland, and Garowe intercepted the most recent shipment in south Galkayo on Tuesday before taking the camp it was meant to supply. Two days later the instrument that investment was meant to serve has given up the Bosaso camp, its last northern stronghold, without a fight.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government ended the week with no foothold in Puntland, no answer to the accusation that it armed a rebellion inside a federal member state, and a war against al-Shabaab that lost a garrison at Teedaan in the same seven days. The administration that spent those days fighting federal-aligned units in Mudug and Bari is also the one carrying the campaign against the Islamic State faction in the mountains above Bosaso.
Garowe now holds the compounds in Galkayo and Bosaso and a queue of men deciding whether to come in before the deadline, while Puntland’s own forces are stretched across Mudug, Bari and the Cal Miskaad front. The Bosaso camp changed hands through a conversation, and the dispute over who pays and commands the men who held it is still open between Garowe and Villa Somalia.
