GAROWE, SOMALIA – For a year the politicians Mogadishu keeps inside Puntland have campaigned for something they call New Puntland, a redrawn state that would surrender Sool and Sanaag to the North Eastern State the federal government built at Las Anod as an instrument against Garowe and Hargeisa alike. What the campaign has produced instead is a New Puntland of the opposite design, a state that broke the militias raised inside it, absorbed their fighters into its own ranks, and still holds eastern Sanaag and parts of eastern Sool. The map behind the demand was never drawn from what anybody holds on the ground, and redrawing it required force, which is why the federal government spent the year arming men inside Puntland behind the politicians who wanted it. The last of those militias is standing in the hills at Xumbays.
What New Puntland Was Meant to Be
The demand does not come from any popular movement, and its centre is the Aran Jaan group, the network Mogadishu has leaned on inside Puntland since it blocked the Nugaal region elections in 2023 and its sponsored militia fought state security forces in the streets of Garowe. Around it sit federally aligned politicians drawn largely from the Ali Saleban of the Bari country, among them the figure known as Mashruuc who has spent the past year raising armed groups on Puntland territory. What they have been arguing for is a Puntland shorn of the regions that give it its western and northern reach.
New Puntland would keep Bari, Nugaal, Mudug and Karkaar and let everything west of them pass to the administration seated at Las Anod. Its promoters present this as tidying up an anomaly, since a federal member state whose claimed boundaries overlap two other administrations is a permanent source of dispute, and a Puntland confined to the north east would be simpler to govern and simpler for Mogadishu to deal with. Puntland’s own answer has been consistent since the founding conference of 1998, that it is a voluntary union of the regions that built it and that no boundary inside it can be redrawn by a decree issued in another city.
The federal government has never used the phrase in an official document, which is the arrangement that suits it. Villa Somalia recognised the new state, funded the process that created it and armed the men who would benefit from a redrawn Puntland, while leaving the words to intermediaries who can be disowned. New Puntland has therefore lived entirely in the mouths of politicians with federal salaries and no constituency in Garowe, which is a weak position from which to redraw anybody’s borders. Nobody has produced a Puntland institution, a clan conference or a regional assembly willing to endorse the surrender of two regions, and the campaign has never been put to any body that could carry it.
The Map Mogadishu Drew at Las Anod
The North Eastern State was assembled in stages and aimed at two capitals from the start. Mogadishu recognised SSC-Khaatumo as an administrative entity in October 2023 and upgraded it to a federal member state in April 2025, and in July 2025 a conference at Las Anod adopted a constitution, a flag and a seat allocation for what became the country’s sixth member state. An eighty-three member parliament followed under the supervision of the federal interior ministry, electing Abdikadir Ahmed Aw-Ali, known as Firdhiye, as president. New Puntland is the second half of that project, because a member state that controls none of what it claims needs Garowe to concede the ground before the map will close.
What that state claims on paper is the whole of Sool, the whole of Sanaag and Cayn, and its officers have promised to take it. Within days of his election in August 2025, the new parliament’s speaker, Adan Abdullahi, declared that the state recognised neither neighbour’s control of those regions and that its goal was to secure the full extent of its borders soon. The chamber had been seated for barely a week before promising a collision with both of the administrations that actually hold the ground it claims.
Both of those administrations had rejected the claim within days of the state’s founding. Somaliland’s cabinet called the new entity illegal on 3 August 2025 and restated that Sool, Sanaag and Togdheer were inherited at independence in 1960, while Puntland’s parliamentary speaker described the project as politically divisive. By October the two had agreed to coordinate against the new administration and to reopen movement and trade across their frontier, and Mogadishu had produced the one thing capable of aligning two governments that have fought over the same ground for a quarter of a century.
The parliament at Las Anod has meanwhile begun to shed members while its claims wait. Four of its lawmakers crossed to Somaliland at the end of July, declaring themselves citizens of the republic their state was created to confront, and the chamber stripped their seats by a two-thirds vote while a fifth resigned without naming a destination. A body losing legislators to Hargeisa is a fragile sponsor for the New Puntland map Mogadishu needs Garowe to accept.
What the New Puntland Map Ignores
Control tells a different story from the claim. The North Eastern State governs the Dhulbahante districts of Sool that Somaliland administered until its army was driven out of Las Anod in 2023, and its western front line sits far out towards Oog and Guumays, where it faces Somaliland. Everything that Puntland held before the uprising it holds still, and its writ in eastern Sool runs west out of Garowe as far as Boo’ame, some sixty kilometres away, where the district administration answers to Garowe as it has for years. The fighting that made the new state possible was fought against Somaliland over ground Somaliland had taken, and none of it was fought against Puntland or produced a single district transferred from Garowe.
Boo’ame is where the paper claim met the ground. When the federal and North Eastern electoral commissions opened voter registration in the district and at Falariyale in September 2025, Puntland put troops into both places and stopped the exercise, and Vice President Ilyas Osman Lugatoor, who was born in Boo’ame, declared publicly that the districts fell under Puntland’s jurisdiction. A state that cannot register a voter sixty kilometres from Garowe is not in a position to absorb the region, whatever its constitution says, and New Puntland starts by assuming an absorption that has never happened.
Sanaag closes the argument entirely. The region is divided between Somaliland, which holds Erigavo and the west, and Puntland, which holds eastern Sanaag through Badhan, Dhahar and the Warsangeli country, and the North Eastern State has no presence in any part of it. Its claim to Sanaag exists only in the text adopted at Las Anod, and the elders of the region rejected inclusion in the new state as soon as it was declared. The New Puntland map asks Garowe to hand over one region where it is being physically resisted and another where the claimant has never set foot, which is why Puntland has treated Sool and Cayn as sovereign territory throughout and refused to negotiate the point.
A Map the Constitution Cannot Draw
The legal ground under the project is no firmer than the military ground. Article 49 of the provisional constitution reserves the number and boundaries of federal member states to the House of the People, which may act only after a national commission established by law has studied the question. The commission has never produced that study and the House has never cast that vote. Recognition of the new state travelled instead through the National Consultative Council, a summit of presidents that appears nowhere in the constitutional text, and through federal declarations that its territory was no longer in dispute.
The same article requires state boundaries to follow the administrative regions as they stood before 1991, and it permits new states to form only where two or more of those regions merge by voluntary decision. The state proclaimed at Las Anod fails the baseline twice over. Cayn, a third of the SSC name, sits on no pre-1991 map, being the Buuhoodle corner of what was then Togdheer, while the districts the new state actually administers amount to part of a single region, Sool. Its founding text claims one region that never legally existed alongside two it has never governed, and the constitution contains no procedure by which such a claim hardens into a boundary.
Puntland is the one administration in the north that can meet the test. The state proclaimed at Garowe on 1 August 1998 emerged from a conference at which communities from Bari, Nugaal, northern Mudug and the eastern districts of Sool and Sanaag merged their regions by consent, and its founding charter cast the new state as a building block of a federal Somalia. New Puntland therefore demands that the administration assembled by the constitution’s own method surrender territory to an entity assembled against it, and it makes the demand in the constitution’s name. Villa Somalia’s silence in official documents suggests its lawyers grasp the difficulty even where its politicians do not.
Why the Militias Were the Instrument
An argument that cannot win a room has to be carried by soldiers, and that is the function the federal recruitment drive in Puntland was performing. The clearest demonstration came on 15 January, when Mogadishu moved former Puntland units, including men of the Danab brigade and the Puntland Security Force, from Garowe and Bosaso to the Sool front line at Gumays. Firdhiye welcomed them to Las Anod as national forces carrying out their duty to defend North Eastern territory, and noted that they included the same units that had fought Somaliland in 2023.
Those men had been recruited, paid and armed inside Puntland, and they were sent to hold the border of the state that New Puntland exists to enlarge. The traffic also ran the other way: the commander of the army’s new 54th Division spent the summer at Las Anod awaiting a Garowe deployment, and a fresh Bosaso unit was ordered to answer directly to Mogadishu outside any regional command. Every camp the federal programme built in Bari, Nugaal and Mudug added weight to the politicians who raised it, and those politicians all wanted the same redrawing.
Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre promised in early July to enlist thousands more soldiers in the state regardless of what Garowe thought, and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud defended the drive by calling the recruits members of the national army, which is the language that turns a factional militia into a federal instrument. The men who abandoned Carmo this week repeated the formula from the hills, declaring they answer to no authority except the federal government.
That instrument broke this month. Puntland took the camp north of Galkayo by force on 5 August, received the surrender of the former Puntland Security Force headquarters in Bosaso the following day and took the Carmo command on 8 August, registering the fighters into its own forces through their elders as it went. The militias that call themselves the Calmiskaad Defence Forces are what remains, sitting at Kur-ilaalo below Xumbays with Puntland technicals in front of them and elders between the two. New Puntland was always going to need those guns, and they are the last of them. The campaigners have their New Puntland in the end, stronger and more assertive, standing on the map Garowe has kept since 1998.
