GAROWE, SOMALIA – President Said Abdullahi Deni has spent the better part of a fortnight on the road in eastern Mudug, moving by vehicle from Galkayo through Balibusle and Seemade to Towfiiq district and the coastal settlement of Dhinowda, with the port town of Garacad closing the itinerary. He has been mediating between the Sheekhaal and Surre communities, inspecting a sand belt that has swallowed parts of Dhinowda, and announcing a reconciliation conference in Garowe that he says he will attend himself. Federal lawmakers and officials of the Galmudug administration have objected that Dhinowda sits inside territory Galmudug claims. The argument they have opened concerns which administration is entitled to stand on that coast, and one administration has spent two weeks standing on it.
A Fortnight of Small Meetings in Eastern Mudug
The tour has run at the pace of provincial administration. President Deni spent Monday night in Towfiiq district with the visit in its fourth day of that leg, reached Dhinowda on Tuesday, and was due in Garacad on Wednesday. Puntland officials describe the trip as community reconciliation, local development and listening directly to residents, which is a modest description and an accurate one. There has been no ceremony of the kind that usually accompanies a Somali head of government into a region, and no parade. Jariiban and the coastal villages beyond it sit on the same run, which means the president has covered several hundred kilometres of unsurfaced road in a fortnight to reach settlements that receive an official visitor once in a generation.
The reconciliation work has a specific subject, and one that has already cost lives in these districts. Recurring clashes between the Sheekhaal and Surre communities have killed people and displaced others across eastern Mudug in recent years, and the president has been holding meetings with elders, community leaders and residents aimed at preventing the next round. Grazing, water points and the movement of herds are what these quarrels are usually about, and they are settled, when they are settled at all, by exactly this kind of sitting. That is slow work with no announcement at the end of it, and it is the work that determines whether a district in eastern Mudug is governable in the months when nobody is looking.
Out of it has come the one formal commitment of the trip, a peace gathering in Garowe that Deni says he will sit in on personally. Somali reconciliation conferences have a mixed record and this one has no published agenda, no date and no list of participants. What it does have is a head of administration who has just spent two weeks in the settlements the conference would be about, which is a stronger starting position than most such gatherings begin from in this country.
The Sand Belt From Dhinowda to Garacad
Dhinowda is being buried. Large dunes have swallowed parts of the settlement and the ground around it, and residents there have watched drifting sand take houses, block routes and make land unusable for the herding and fishing that support them. The president went to look at it, and Puntland authorities have previously said they are seeking a long-term answer to the sand belt that runs the length of the coast from Dhinowda up to Garacad. No such answer exists yet, and no external agency has offered to fund one.
Garacad matters to this coastline in a way that makes the encroachment more than a local misfortune. The port is the only significant piece of maritime infrastructure between Bosaso and Mogadishu, and the corridor inland from it is the route by which livestock, fish and imports move through this part of eastern Mudug. A sand belt advancing across that corridor is an economic problem for the whole northeast, and it is being treated as one by the only administration that has sent anybody to see it. The fishing settlements strung along that shore have no alternative industry to move into once the land behind them goes.
Desertification of this kind rarely reaches a Somali news bulletin, because it arrives slowly and kills nobody in a single afternoon. It removes the grazing that sustains pastoralists, pushes families toward towns already short of water, and produces the displacement that later gets reported as a drought emergency. A president walking through dunes in a coastal village in eastern Mudug is doing something that shows up in no security assessment and in no donor communique. Puntland has been carrying that file on its own budget, as it has carried the campaign against Islamic State in the Calmiskaad mountains, and the money available for either is a fraction of what the problems require.
The Objection Runs Along an Old Boundary
The criticism arrived with the president. Federal lawmakers and Galmudug officials argued that Dhinowda falls within territory Galmudug claims, and that the visit could deepen political tensions and fuel disputes over administrative boundaries in Mudug. Galmudug has a genuine claim to press, and it has pressed versions of it for three decades. The region has been divided between the two administrations since the early 1990s, competing claims over particular settlements in eastern Mudug have strained relations repeatedly, and Galkayo itself remains a city cut in half by that arrangement, with movement between its two halves closed whenever either side takes offence.
Puntland officials answer that the visit is peacebuilding, environmental assessment and engagement with local communities, and nothing in the reported itinerary contradicts them. No security deployment accompanied the tour into the disputed settlements, no flag was raised over a district headquarters, and no administrative appointment was announced. The dispute is therefore about presence itself, and about what a presence of that kind implies for a boundary that neither administration has ever agreed. Federal lawmakers joining the objection is the newer element, since the boundary in eastern Mudug has historically been argued between the two state administrations without Mogadishu taking a public side.
Somalia has watched this argument run the other way this month. When the federal president planned a trip to south Galkayo in August, Puntland put its forces on full alert and told the neighbours he bore responsibility for what followed, and he travelled anyway. Both administrations treat a visit across the Mudug line as an assertion, and both are right to, because in a region with no agreed border the act of turning up is the only claim anybody can actually make. Neither administration has ever put the Mudug boundary to arbitration, and the federal constitution provides no mechanism that would settle it if they did.
The Seaboard Nobody Federal Has Reached
The coast Deni has been driving joins, a little to the north, the one on which unidentified aircraft spent August killing people. Strikes near Garmaal on 18 August and near Jiifle on 23 August killed men whom relatives and neighbours identified as fishermen, and Somalia’s state minister for defence said the federal government knew about the operations in advance and holds the sole authority to license them, while naming no vessel, no air force and no flag. Puntland’s information ministry said it had received no details at all, no confirmed casualty figure and no explanation, and opened an investigation of its own because nobody had given it one.
That is the practical condition of the seaboard that runs north from eastern Mudug. It carries the piracy revival, with vessels seized off Garacad and off Eyl since April and thirteen attacked in Somali waters this year against five in the whole of 2025, and it now carries an air campaign nobody will claim. No federal minister has travelled to any village on it. The last federal contribution to the argument was a request that Puntland produce documentary proof of who its own drowned villagers were, delivered from a capital several hundred kilometres away. Garowe asked in writing which government had sent the aircraft and has had no reply from anybody.
Against that background, a fortnight spent between Towfiiq and Garacad settles a question the boundary dispute cannot. The people living in these settlements have a sand belt taking their land, a clan quarrel that has already killed some of them, and aircraft over the water none of their governments will identify. One administration sent its president to sit with them about the first two. The objection raised against him is that the map is unsettled, which is true, and which will matter to the residents of eastern Mudug on the day somebody else arrives with an answer about the third.
