BOSASO, SOMALIA – Drones of the United Arab Emirates struck al-Shabaab fighters laying roadside mines in the Galgala mountain pass on Tuesday 20 October, two local officials said the following day, in the first Emirati strike reported anywhere in northern Somalia since November 2025. The aircraft flew from the Emirati base at Bosaso airport, nine months after the cabinet of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud revoked every security and defence agreement Somalia held with Abu Dhabi and told the Emiratis their military activity in the country was suspended. The United States struck the same Cal Madow range a day earlier, Puntland’s forces moved on the wounded militants once the drones had hit them, and the federal government in Mogadishu had made no public comment on either operation by Thursday 22 October.
Drones Over the Galgala Pass and Puntland’s Patrols on the Road
Two local officials said Emirati drones flew reconnaissance over Galgala on Monday 19 October and Tuesday 20 October, after an explosive device planted by al-Shabaab was aimed at Puntland’s forces in the mountains. On the Tuesday the drones hit four militants who were planting roadside bombs on a route through the pass, wounding two of them. Local paramilitary forces then reached the site and killed the two wounded men. The same officials said Puntland was expected to announce a new offensive against al-Shabaab within days, and they described the operation as the first the Emirates had been reported to carry out in the north in almost a year.
Puntland’s own security institutions said on Tuesday 20 October that the Puntland Defence Forces had killed two al-Shabaab members the previous day as the pair tried to lay a second mine on the road into Galgala, after an earlier device on the same road wounded five people, most of them soldiers. The two men were shot with the explosives still in their hands, according to that account, and the forces released video of the operation. Security sources quoted in the same report said Puntland had also carried out heavy strikes on al-Shabaab positions across the Cal Madow range, the third such strike within a few weeks.
Both accounts have fighters caught laying mines on the Galgala road and two of them killed by Puntland’s forces, and they differ on the day and on whether an aircraft was involved. Galgala sits in the Bari region on the approach to the Cal Madow mountains, the stretch of the Golis range where al-Shabaab has kept a northern base for more than fifteen years, far smaller than its strongholds in the south and centre of the country. Puntland’s land operation in Cal Madow began in September, and on Thursday 17 September its government said the United States had struck an al-Shabaab weapons store at Markad under direct coordination with Puntland’s security institutions.
Mogadishu Revoked the Agreements and the Aircraft Stayed in Bosaso
The Council of Ministers met in emergency session on Monday 12 January 2026 and nullified every agreement Somalia held with the Emirates. Its statement named the operational arrangements at the ports of Berbera, Bosaso and Kismayo and all bilateral security and defence cooperation. Foreign Minister Ali Omar called the decision a sovereign and constitutional act. A senior official said the Emiratis had been told that all their military activity in Somalia was suspended, including the use of Somali airspace and the landing of military cargo aircraft at Bosaso, Berbera and Mogadishu. Flight-tracking data in the days that followed, nine months before the strike in Galgala, showed an average of six Ilyushin Il-76 freighters a day moving in and out of Bosaso, and federal officials described the traffic as an evacuation of Emirati personnel and heavy equipment to Ethiopia.
Puntland, which administers Bosaso and the Galgala hills behind it, answered that the decision would have no effect on its relations with Abu Dhabi, including at Bosaso, where a subsidiary of DP World holds a thirty-year concession to run the port, and it called the federal description of a Bosaso agreement with the Emirates completely untrue. Jubaland declared the annulment null and void and said its own security and development agreements would continue, while Somaliland’s presidency said the Emirates was there to stay. Puntland’s position rested on the constitutional argument it has made throughout its dispute with Villa Somalia, that the federal government cannot unilaterally cancel arrangements affecting a member state without consulting the state concerned.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said in an interview reported on Monday 5 October that relations with the Emirates had never been cut, that both countries kept their embassies open, and that the Emirates was a very important country with which his government would keep working, while repeating in the same interview that every agreement between the two governments remained suspended. Fifteen days later Emirati aircraft took off from a Puntland airfield to strike Galgala, inside the territory his cabinet had closed to them. By Thursday 22 October the federal government had made no public comment on the operation. Puntland’s forces had been fighting al-Shabaab’s mine-layers on the Galgala road since at least Monday 19 October, and two local officials said a wider Puntland offensive was being prepared.
Washington Strikes the Same Range
United States Africa Command announced on Wednesday 21 October that it had struck al-Shabaab on Monday 19 October in the Cal Madow mountains, about 35 kilometres south of Bosaso. It gave no further detail, since the command has stopped publishing casualty estimates and assessments of civilian harm. By its own count the strike was at least the 88th American airstrike in Somalia in 2026, already more than in any year before 2025. Only the 2025 total of 124 is higher, and the previous record, 63 strikes, was set in 2019. Two days before the Cal Madow strike, on Saturday 17 October, the command had hit al-Shabaab near Dhooble airport in Lower Juba, the first strike it announced this month.
American operations from Bosaso rest on an agreement signed on Sunday 2 August, when President Said Abdullahi Deni met Major General Claude Tudor, who commands American special operations in Africa, and the two sides agreed to widen their cooperation and expand the American footprint at the city’s airport. The stated purpose was to step up operations against armed groups and to secure the sea lanes off the northern coast. Since then Puntland has announced the Markad strike, launched its ground operation in Cal Madow and pressed al-Shabaab’s mine-layers on the Galgala road. By 20 October the Emirates was flying strikes from an airfield the federal cabinet had ordered it to stop using, while the United States was widening its presence at the same airport.
Emirati drones supported Puntland’s campaign against the Islamic State in the Cal Miskaad range through 2025, and Puntland security officials have said those strikes in the north stopped after November 2025, when the United States took the lead against the Islamic State there. Four of those officials, speaking anonymously in an investigation published on 11 October, said an Emirati drone strike on 26 January 2025 at Togga-Xarago in Cal Miskaad killed four members of one family, among them boys of seven and thirteen. The claim has not been independently verified and Abu Dhabi has not responded to it. The strike in Galgala on 20 October was the first Emirati strike reported in Puntland since that pause began eleven months ago. It hit al-Shabaab, and it came a day after an American strike in the same range.
Galgala Has Been Claimed From Mogadishu Before
Puntland fought the militia of Mohamed Said Atom for control of Galgala from 2010, and on 7 June 2014 the federal information ministry announced that Atom had agreed to leave al-Shabaab. A decade later the same ministry claimed, on 26 May 2024, that federal forces and unnamed partners had killed twenty al-Shabaab fighters including three leaders in an operation in Galgala, and Puntland officials answered that no federal force was present anywhere on their territory. None of Somalia’s international partners corroborated the federal account of the operation. In October 2026 the fighting in Galgala is done by Puntland’s forces on the ground and by Emirati drones flown from Bosaso, and the strikes in the range are announced by Puntland officials and by Washington.
In the south, within forty-eight hours on Thursday 8 and Friday 9 October, the federal government lost Hees in Hiiraan to al-Shabaab, Beled Hawo in Gedo to Jubaland and Qansaxdheere in Bay to forces loyal to former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen. By 19 October those forces had taken five strategic towns in a week, several of them garrisoned for more than a decade by Ethiopian troops whose commanders told Mogadishu their mandate did not cover a political conflict between Somali parties. Ethiopia also refused to admit Egyptian forces into South West State, and Speaker Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur called on the federal government to hold Ethiopia’s troops to account.
Villa Somalia has accused Ethiopia, the Emirates and al-Shabaab of working together to help Laftagareen’s forces topple the administration it installed in Baidoa in March. In the same month, Emirati drones flying from Bosaso hit al-Shabaab’s mine-layers in Galgala, and Puntland’s forces killed the wounded on the ground. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s cabinet suspended Abu Dhabi’s military activity across Somalia in January, Puntland refused the suspension, and on 20 October the Emirati aircraft took off from Bosaso, struck in Galgala and left the ground to Puntland’s forces.
