GAROWE, SOMALIA – General Jimale Jama Takar, the militia commander whose forces fought pitched battles against the Puntland government as recently as 2023, has brought his men into the Puntland Defence Forces and renounced any alignment with Mogadishu, in a ceremony that closed one of the state’s longest-running internal ruptures. Elders and officials witnessed the agreement alongside uniformed Puntland Defence Forces officers, and the settlement folds the roughly six to seven hundred fighters of Jimale’s brigade into the single command Puntland has spent August enforcing. The man who once put his guns at the service of President Said Abdullahi Deni’s opponents has chosen the state over the federal government at the exact moment Mogadishu is recruiting for the opposite outcome, and that choice tells the story of where armed leverage in Puntland now sits.
The Commander Jimale Was
Jimale Jama Takar’s career runs through every armed structure Puntland has produced. A junior officer of the 21st battalion of the old Somali national army, he joined the Somali Salvation Democratic Front during the civil war and folded his men into the Puntland Darawish when the state was founded in 1998. Former President Abdirahman Farole made him a general, and his brigade, six to seven hundred men with heavy machine guns and artillery, fought al-Shabaab in the Galgala mountains and held the Nugal coast against incursions at Garmaal and Suuj in 2016. The force later rebranded itself Danab, meaning lightning, a name it shares with nothing in the federal order of battle, and it answered to Jimale alone through every change of government in Garowe.
The quarrel between Jimale and the current administration was long and violent. His fighters joined the Dhulbahante side of the Las Anod war in February 2023, and two months later he deployed them to Garowe in support of the politicians resisting President Said Abdullahi Deni’s push for direct elections. The confrontation that followed killed at least ten people in the capital, and the militia declared the ceasefire collapsed while the state pressed ahead with its democratisation timetable. Unpaid salaries and clan grievance kept the brigade outside the tent for three more years.
A commander with that record does not surrender autonomy lightly, which is what gives the ceremony its weight. Every previous attempt to bring the brigade in foundered on the same suspicion, that integration meant dissolution and that the state’s assurances would outlast neither the budget nor the politics. The agreement Jimale accepted in front of the elders answers that suspicion with the machinery of the current campaign, meaning registration, training and absorption into the Puntland Defence Forces on the same terms the state has applied across Mudug since the camps fell.
What Jimale Renounced
The renunciation matters as much as the absorption does. Mogadishu has spent two years assembling armed clients inside Puntland, recruiting fighters out of Galkayo and the coastal districts, arming the force that styled itself the PSF, and appointing a commander to a 54th Division the state never recognised. A disaffected general with seven hundred armed men and a live grievance was the most valuable recruitment target left in the state. Approaches to commanders of exactly that profile are the reason Puntland wrote a single-command requirement into a cabinet decree, and Jimale has now put his refusal on the record, in front of the elders, beside officers of the force he once fought.
The timing runs against the federal tide everywhere else too. In the same week, the former NISA commander for Gedo announced he had joined Jubaland after his own years as Mogadishu’s armed client, and the fighters absorbed at Galkayo, Bosaso and Carmo confirmed the charge Deni has pressed for years about who assembles armed groups inside his territory. The men Mogadishu recruited are returning to the states it recruited them against, and they are doing so while the federal government’s own mandate sits expired and its patronage payments run behind. Jimale watched both halves of that ledger before he chose.
His calculation reads plainly from the August sequence. The camp at Galkayo fell in a morning, Bosaso changed hands without a shot, and Carmo completed the sweep inside a week. A brigade that stayed outside the single command was next on a list that had run out of larger entries, and the state offering integration today was demonstrably capable of compelling it tomorrow. Accepting the ceremony forestalled the siege, and it preserved his men, his rank and his standing with the elders who brokered the terms he signed.
One Army in Fact
Jimale’s brigade was one of two brought inside on the same day, as the Kur Ilaalo militias were also integrated into the Puntland Defence Forces, extending the same settlement to a second armed constituency at a single stroke. For Puntland the twin agreements convert a slogan into an accomplished condition. The state’s position through the August operations was that no armed force may exist on its territory outside the lawful command of its institutions, a principle the cabinet wrote into a decree after the first camps fell. Enforcing that principle against federal proxies was one test. Absorbing a home-grown brigade with a genuine domestic grievance was a harder one, because it required the state to offer terms a proud commander could accept, with his honour and his men intact, and Jimale is the proof the terms were real.
The military arithmetic moves together with the politics. Seven hundred trained fighters with heavy weapons join a force that is simultaneously holding the Galkayo line, garrisoning Bosaso and Carmo, and keeping two years of pressure on the Islamic State remnant in the Calmiskaad range. Puntland has been fighting that campaign with formations raised for the purpose while its regulars watched the federal frontier, and every brigade that comes inside the command is a brigade the state no longer needs to watch. Jimale’s men know the northern ground as well as any unit the state fields, which makes the addition operational from the day the ink dried.
Set beside the federal project, the contrast completes itself. Mogadishu graduates recruits in Galgaduud for deployment against a state that has just absorbed the last serious armed dissident inside its borders, while Puntland stands on alert at Galkayo with an army that now includes the men who once shelled its capital. A government that cannot pay, legitimise or protect its clients loses them to the governments that can, and the ceremony in front of the elders recorded exactly that transfer. The state whose case is that it governs better has persuaded the hardest audience it had, and Jimale signed the finding.
