NEW ALAMEIN, EGYPT – President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said in an interview released on Saturday 3 October that Somalia is ready to let Ethiopia use two or three Somali ports for its imports and exports, four days after he met Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa on a visit a Somali official says Abiy requested. The interview came out while he was in Egypt, where he met President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi the same day and was due on Sunday at a four-way summit with Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan, the three governments Addis Ababa accuses of backing the armed alliance now fighting Abiy Ahmed’s army. He named none of the ports, and in the same interview he said Israel plans a naval base and an airfield at Berbera, where Somaliland offered Ethiopia twenty kilometres of coast in January 2024.
Two or Three Ports for Abiy Ahmed, None of Them Named
“We are ready to allow Ethiopia to use two or three Somali ports to bring in and send out goods,” President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said, according to the Somali text of his remarks, adding that economic agreements could settle the taxes, fees and other charges that use of the ports would carry. He said Ethiopia had told Mogadishu that it needs access to the sea, but that Abiy Ahmed’s government had not yet submitted a formal request setting out the kind of access or agreement it wants. He gave no duration for any arrangement, named no road or corridor linking the Ethiopian highlands to the coast, and said nothing about who would manage the ports or collect what they earn.
Ethiopian state media carried the same interview, quoting the president as saying that Mogadishu does not object to Ethiopia reaching the sea, that landlocked African countries have access to it by accepted standards, and that relations with Addis Ababa are “very good”. Both governments have worked from the Ankara Declaration since December 2024, when Turkiye brokered a text under which Ethiopia could obtain secure, reliable commercial access to the sea through agreements with Somalia, under Somali sovereignty. Technical talks to put it into practice opened in Ankara in February 2025, and no agreement on a port has been announced since.
On 2 September the state minister for foreign affairs, Ali Mohamed Omar, said the declaration was now the framework governing relations with Ethiopia. Meanwhile Ethiopian officials have spoken through the summer of “sovereign access” to the sea, a phrase broader than a commercial lease, and in September they repeated that a route Ethiopia controls itself is vital to its economic and security future. Abiy Ahmed’s government has not said publicly whether two or three Somali ports under Somali authority would meet that demand.
Addis Ababa on Tuesday and Egypt by Saturday
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud flew to Addis Ababa on Tuesday 29 September, and a senior Somali official said the trip came at Abiy Ahmed’s request, made before the UN General Assembly and accepted on condition that it follow it. The next day people familiar with Ethiopian plans said more than 3,000 Ethiopian soldiers would be pulled out of Somalia to fight in Tigray, and on Thursday a Somali defence ministry official said Addis Ababa had told Mogadishu nothing. From Addis Ababa the president went to Djibouti on Wednesday and then to Egypt.
On Saturday President al-Sisi received him on the sidelines of the Alamein Africa Business Forum, and the Egyptian presidency said the two men discussed the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Bab al-Mandeb. President al-Sisi also stressed the importance of Somali national consensus to navigate the country’s internal security challenges, and he pledged continued political, security and development support. The same afternoon he met President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, and Egypt announced a consultative summit for Sunday 4 October at which the two would be joined by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Sudan’s Sovereign Council chairman, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Ethiopia’s fighting with the alliance led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front intensified on 23 September, and Addis Ababa accuses Eritrea, Egypt and Sudan of backing that alliance, a charge all three deny. On 1 October Ethiopia said it would close its embassy in Asmara and expel ten Eritrean diplomats, and on 2 October Egypt expelled an Ethiopian diplomat, the latest in an exchange of expulsions between Cairo and Addis Ababa. Eritrea has watched Ethiopia’s talk of the sea with an eye on its own port of Assab, and Cairo and Addis Ababa have quarrelled for more than a decade over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s offer to Abiy Ahmed was released on the day he sat with the Egyptian president, and he was due at Alamein the next morning beside the leaders of the three governments Abiy Ahmed’s administration accuses.
Ports That Answer to Somaliland, Puntland and Jubaland
On Monday 12 January President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s cabinet cancelled every agreement Somalia held with the United Arab Emirates, including port operations, security and defence. Somaliland, Puntland and Jubaland dismissed the decision within days. DP World, which runs Berbera under a Somaliland concession, said it would carry on operating the port, Bosaso hosts an Emirati military base under Puntland’s administration, and Jubaland, which runs Kismayo, rejected the cancellation as well. “The UAE is a trusted friend of Somaliland. They invested in Berbera when others doubted us,” Somaliland’s presidency minister, Khadar Hussein Abdi, said at the time, adding that “the UAE is here to stay, no matter what a weak administration in Mogadishu says.”
Berbera, Bosaso and Kismayo, the three ports named in January’s dispute, all sit under administrations that dispute Villa Somalia’s authority. On 13 September President Said Abdullahi Deni asked the UN Security Council to deal directly with the federal member states on security and piracy, and Puntland has acted on its own since it withdrew recognition of the federal government in March 2024. Jubaland suspended its cooperation with Mogadishu in November 2024, after President Ahmed Madobe’s re-election, which Mogadishu rejected. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s four-year term ran out in May, and no national electoral model has been agreed with either administration or with the opposition since.
In January 2024, three weeks after Ethiopia signed its memorandum with Somaliland, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud set out the line he still holds. “We want Ethiopia to have access to the sea, there is no question about that. But grabbing a piece of land, we are not ready for that,” he said then. More than two and a half years later he offers Abiy Ahmed commercial use of ports he does not name. Berbera, the port the 2024 memorandum was built around, is under Somaliland, and Bosaso is under Puntland, and both administrations refused in January to apply Mogadishu’s cancellation of the Emirati port agreements.
Berbera, Israel and the Port Abiy Ahmed Was Promised
In the same interview President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said Israel plans to build a naval base at Berbera and to use the city’s airport, to bring itself closer to the Gulf states and Iran. “We will not accept, under any circumstances, an Israeli presence in Somalia of the kind it is now approaching through Somaliland,” he said, adding that the people of Somaliland oppose an Israeli presence and that Somalia does not want the conflicts of the Middle East carried into the Horn of Africa.
He made the same charge in February, when he said Somalia would never allow an Israeli base in Somaliland and would confront any Israeli forces that came. A Somaliland foreign affairs official said the same month that a base was on the table and under discussion. President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi said in February that no agreement on an Israeli base had been reached, without ruling out military cooperation later, and Somaliland’s defence minister, Mohamed Yusuf Ali, said in June that there was no Israeli base and no talks on one. He confirmed that Israel trains Somaliland’s army and police. An investigation published the same month reported an Israeli intelligence presence in Somaliland and discussion of a wider one at Berbera’s airport.
Israel recognised Somaliland in December 2025, and Mogadishu has argued since that the recognition threatens to drag Somalia into foreign wars. On 1 January 2024 Ethiopia signed a memorandum with Somaliland that offered Abiy Ahmed’s government twenty kilometres of coast at Berbera on a fifty-year lease for military and commercial use, and Hargeisa said the deal was tied to Ethiopian recognition. Mogadishu called it an attack on its sovereignty, and the Ankara Declaration closed the quarrel eleven months later without settling where Ethiopia’s access would be.
Accordingly, Berbera is the port Hargeisa offered Abiy Ahmed in 2024, the port the president in Mogadishu now names as the site of a planned Israeli naval base, and the port DP World kept running after Villa Somalia cancelled its Emirati agreements. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s own offer is two or three Somali ports he declined to name, put on the record in Egypt on the eve of a summit with Eritrea and Sudan, while Abiy Ahmed’s army fights the alliance his government says those three capitals are arming.
