HARGEISA, SOMALIA – President Irro has told an interviewer that Somaliland is ready to put up to two thousand soldiers into the American led stabilisation force planned for Gaza, on the single condition that Washington or Israel formally asks for them. The offer commits nothing and costs nothing until it is accepted, and it is addressed to two capitals. President Irro is due in Washington next week to meet members of Congress, among them Senator Ted Cruz, who has spent years arguing that the United States should recognise Somaliland. Mogadishu spent the same week asking the world to keep funding the African Union force that holds its own capital, and ordering fresh troops toward a regional capital it took by force in March.
The Offer President Irro Made and the Condition Attached to It
Somaliland is prepared to contribute up to two thousand soldiers to the International Stabilization Force planned for Gaza, President Irro said in an interview on the sidelines of the MEAD conference, while making clear that his government was volunteering nothing and waiting to be asked. His formulation was as short as it could be made, “If they ask, we can provide,” and then the same thing in the first person, “If they ask me, I am ready.”
The force he is offering to join is intended to reach roughly twenty thousand personnel under American direction, with responsibilities running from maintaining security to training Palestinian police, moving humanitarian aid and preventing Hamas from rebuilding its military control. Uganda has approved a contingent of about twelve hundred and Morocco has committed up to five hundred, with Albania, Kazakhstan and Kosovo also pledging personnel. Two thousand from Somaliland would be the largest single African commitment on that list, offered by a territory that has never sent a soldier to an African Union mission in its thirty five years of existence.
Ugandan troops have been in Mogadishu since March 2007, when they became the first African Union soldiers to deploy into Somalia, and Kampala is now committing a second contingent to Gaza while still garrisoning the Somali capital. President Irro put his own order of battle on the record in the same conversation, an army of roughly twenty five thousand and a coast guard of about fifteen hundred, so two thousand abroad would be one soldier in every twelve he has. He is proposing that while telling the same interviewer that his territory needs foreign weapons and technology to defend itself. President Irro took office in December 2024 after an election his predecessor lost and conceded, which is the fact his officials place first in every Washington conversation, and a contribution to an American led force would be the first time Somaliland has deployed soldiers outside its own claimed borders.
What Recognition Has and Has Not Delivered
Israel recognised Somaliland in December, the first state to do so in the thirty five years since the territory declared independence from Somalia in 1991, and no second country has followed it in the nine months since, while Mogadishu continues to regard the territory as part of Somalia and says so at every multilateral meeting it attends. There has been much more attention paid to Somaliland since the recognition, President Irro said, and the word now appears in every language in the world, in Indian, Arabic and Chinese. Thirty five years were spent asking the world to see the place, he said. Israel has also undertaken to open a mission in Hargeisa, and no third state has opened an embassy there.
The declaration signed with the Israeli prime minister last year provides for cooperation on security, trade, investment and economic development, with water technology named as the first priority for a semi arid territory. President Irro met representatives of more than a hundred Israeli companies in Tel Aviv, including firms interested in offshore oil and gas, and confirmed that no concrete Israeli investment has yet been made, his word for what happens next being that he expects them. The Jerusalem embassy opened during that visit, his first official trip to Israel.
In June the territory opened an embassy in Jerusalem, its first formally designated mission anywhere in the world, having managed only a representative office in Taiwan, opened in 2020, across the previous three decades. Senator Cruz has argued that the territory could serve as an American security and diplomatic partner in the Horn of Africa, and President Irro expects to meet him next week. No American promise of recognition exists, President Irro said, though his government has discussed both recognition and security cooperation with officials in Washington, and they are optimistic about where those conversations lead.
The Bill Ankara Has Already Sent
Turkiye responded to the recognition by calling it illegitimate and unacceptable, accusing Israel of working to destabilise the Horn of Africa, and deepening a military position in Mogadishu that already included a base, a training programme for Somali troops, supplied armed drones and offshore hydrocarbon exploration. Turkish F-16s were deployed to Aden Adde in the months after the recognition, putting Ankara’s aircraft within range of the whole of southern Somalia and the approaches to the Gulf of Aden. There is no free lunch, President Irro said of the bargain, and everything has some negative and some positive.
“We created new enemies,” he said of the recognition and its aftermath, noting that governments which had never before supplied Mogadishu with sophisticated weaponry were now doing so. Asked whether Somaliland faced invasion, he pointed to public remarks by Somalia’s president and defence minister, and said his territory has the manpower to defend itself and lacks the weapons and technology to do it well. “We need protection,” he said, naming Israel, the United States and other allies as the sources he is asking, and describing the aim as balancing the situation against the weaponry now reaching Mogadishu.
There is no Israeli or American security presence in Somaliland at present, President Irro said, drawing two careful lines in the same conversation, though he expects a foreign presence “maybe in the near future” and thinks it would supply both balance and deterrence. He also denied outright that Somaliland has discussed hosting Israeli operations against the Houthis in Yemen, saying his territory has no conflict with them at the moment, and denied reports that it had agreed to accept Palestinians from Gaza, saying his government had discussed that with nobody at all. Ankara’s fifteen year investment in Somalia now faces a competitor with a shorter history and a clearer offer.
The Soldiers Mogadishu Cannot Spare
President Irro is offering two thousand soldiers for a foreign deployment in the same fortnight that the federal government ordered fresh units toward Baidoa to fight the forces of the state president it removed in March, and asked the international community to keep paying for the African Union mission after the United Nations logistics platform expires on 31 December. Washington withheld its support for that office on 1 July. Somalia’s defence minister has declared the country ready to run its own security while European assessors put the army at thirty two thousand on paper, about nineteen thousand of them deployable, with an air force that does not function. The United Nations office being wound down supplies roughly half a billion dollars a year to about twelve thousand African Union personnel and twenty thousand Somali troops.
Puntland and Jubaland boycotted the security conference at which that readiness was announced. One administration is proposing to export a contingent to an American led operation; the other cannot secure the road out of a regional capital and is negotiating for the money to keep its existing force fed until the new year. Every Somali crisis of the past seven years has strengthened the recognition case, and the strongest argument Hargeisa has ever had is the one Villa Somalia keeps supplying free of charge.
Both governments sent delegations to Washington in early September, and Mogadishu answered Hargeisa’s pitch by copying its structure, offering the same ports and the same strategic geography from a state whose writ does not reach the towns around Baidoa, days behind the Somaliland trip it was answering. President Irro has now changed the currency from real estate to soldiers, a commodity Washington is actively short of and Mogadishu cannot spare a single company of. Somalia has no counter offer available at that price.
