XUMBAYS, SOMALIA – Armed militias that call themselves the Calmiskaad Defence Forces drove out of Carmo on Friday night, crossed into the Karkaar hinterland and announced that they take orders from Mogadishu alone. Their new position at Kur-ilaalo, below the district of Xumbays, sits in the belt of broken country where Puntland and its American partners took the finance chief of the Islamic State a year ago. Roughly forty Puntland technicals came up behind them to Rako-Raaxo on Sunday morning, elders from both districts are working to talk the two sides apart, and the quarrel between them is about weapons rather than ground. Fighters who borrowed the name of the Calmiskaad mountains, where the Puntland Defence Forces have been battling the Islamic State since December 2024, have now parked their guns in that same country.
Who Is Behind the Calmiskaad Defence Forces Name
The name is a claim rather than an order of battle, and it reached the public on 17 March this year, when fighters using it stood before cameras in Carmo and said that President Said Abdullahi Deni had turned Puntland into something resembling a private business from which the state needed saving. Carmo, on the highway between Garowe and Bosaso, served as their garrison from that declaration until last week, and Puntland describes the men as armed militias whose activities were damaging the security and stability of communities across its regions, with no federal decree, budget line or order of battle anywhere establishing a Calmiskaad Defence Forces.
What the militias assert is allegiance to the Somali National Army, and one of their officers told reporters that his men had gone to Xumbays without surrendering to or joining the Puntland forces, that they remain part of the federal army, and that they recognise no administration beyond the central government. Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre announced from a public stage in early July that Mogadishu would enlist thousands of soldiers in the state whatever Garowe thought of the idea, and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud defended the drive afterwards by describing the recruits as members of the Somali National Army.
Mogadishu has never issued the paperwork and it has never issued a denial either, sending aligned politicians north instead to raise and organise these militias, among them a figure known as Mashruuc, drawn from the Ali Saleban of the Bari country. Non-disavowal on that scale works as adoption in everything except the gazette, and it hands Villa Somalia a force it can use and disown in the same breath.
Those organisers are allied to 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. Aran Jaan is now assembling the political opposition to the Garowe administration, which makes the gunmen at Xumbays the armed end of a chain that runs back through the same politicians to the same capital.
What Lies Beneath the Calmiskaad Mountains
The Calmiskaad range the militias named themselves after has been the headquarters of the Islamic State in Somalia since 2017, its caves and valleys running east from the country behind Bosaso towards the tip of the Horn. The faction that shelters there also houses the Al Karrar office, the regional hub that moves money, fighters and instructions to Islamic State branches in Congo, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania and further afield. Abdulqadir Mumin, who founded the Somali faction, is believed to run that office, and he remains at large after slipping out of the mountains during last year’s fighting.
Puntland has been grinding through the Calmiskaad since December 2024 under the campaign it calls Operation Hilaac, its largest offensive in a decade, with American aircraft flying at least thirty-two strikes in support of it during 2025 and Emirati aircraft nineteen more while Puntland’s own units cleared valley after valley on foot. The state pays for that war largely out of its own revenue, without the logistics package the African Union mission provides to federal forces in the south, and it has buried a steady line of soldiers doing it. Garowe treats that campaign as the proof of what a Somali administration can achieve with its own troops and a foreign partner it chose itself.
Xumbays belongs to that landscape rather than to the settled coast, and Puntland forces working with American partners seized Abdiweli Mohamed Aw Yusuf at Laag in the Xumbays country on 25 July last year, taking two others with him. Washington had designated him a global terrorist two years earlier as the man who ran the faction’s money, brought in foreign fighters and moved supplies and ammunition, and his networks were assessed to have raised around two and a half million dollars in a single year through extortion and mobile money. The nearest thing to a state presence in that district over the past decade has been a soldier hunting somebody.
The Questions the Calmiskaad Defence Forces Raise
Clan arithmetic is where the question sharpens, because the politicians who raise these militias come from the Ali Saleban, which is the clan of Abdulqadir Mumin and of most of his senior lieutenants, and the pattern has a decade behind it. When the Islamic State took Qandala in 2016, the largest armed clan militia in the Bari region was led by a former governor from Mumin’s own clan family, operating outside Puntland’s control and hostile to Garowe. Shared descent makes nobody a jihadist and a Somali clan is vastly larger than any faction inside it, yet the recruiting pool, the political sponsors and the insurgent leadership all draw on the same communities in the same districts.
No evidence has been published tying the Calmiskaad Defence Forces to the jihadists whose ground they now occupy, and geography rather than proof is what makes the move alarming, since it puts several hundred armed men, outside any command either government will formally claim, into the one part of Somalia where the Islamic State still keeps its logistics, its couriers and its senior leadership. Every previous armed group to base itself in that country has ended up either fighting the faction or trading with it, because there is no third way to survive out there.
The extortion economy is the specific worry, because the faction in the mountains funds itself by taxing businesses in Bosaso and the roads that feed the port, and the checkpoints along the Carmo to Xumbays axis sit astride that traffic on the western approaches to the Calmiskaad. Militias with no payroll behind them and no supply line from Mogadishu have to eat from the country they stand on, and the country they now stand on is already being taxed by somebody else, so two sets of gunmen levying the same trucks will end up either fighting each other or coming to an arrangement.
Garowe has drawn that conclusion in blunter language, its cabinet having ordered the prosecution of politicians and officers it accuses of undermining state security earlier this month, its officials having treated the Islamic State faction and the federally aligned units as branches of a single problem since July, and its accusation that the presidency manufactures armed groups predating this week by two years.
What the Elders of Karkaar Are Asking For
Traditional authority is doing the negotiating while the two columns sit within sight of each other, with elders from Xumbays and Rako-Raaxo opening mediation between them and Boqor Cabdirashiid Boqor Cumar, one of the senior titled leaders of the Bari country, asking the administration to weigh every step that could worsen the situation. Pursuing these forces into the districts they came from, he warned, where communities already carry grievances and government services have never fully arrived, could create a hard situation whose consequences would not be good, and he asked instead that the men be brought back from the frontier.
Garowe’s terms are the ones it has applied everywhere else this month, holding that no force may operate on its territory outside its command, that the units formerly registered with the federal government are being restructured and retrained rather than punished, and that the takeover of their camps strengthens security, the rule of law and the capacity of state institutions. Those terms have already recovered three garrisons, and the fighters who accepted them at Galkayo and Bosaso are being registered into the Puntland Defence Forces through their own community elders. The same offer is open to the Calmiskaad Defence Forces, and the forty or so vehicles that moved up to Rako-Raaxo are the pressure sitting behind it.
Mogadishu’s silence is doing work of its own, since no federal statement has ever claimed the Calmiskaad Defence Forces, ordered them to stand down or sent anybody north to collect them, while the politicians Villa Somalia backs go on raising and directing them, which leaves an armed body the federal government can employ without ever answering for. Weapons the federal budget paid for are already in Garowe’s stores after the fall of the other camps, some of them Chinese equipment donated to the Somali Police Force, and the same equation now applies at Xumbays. Whatever the elders settle, the Islamic State keeps the mountains for another season while two Somali forces face each other at the foot of them.
