Dhusamareb, SOMALIA – President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud landed in Dhusamareb on Friday for a visit built around a troop commissioning ceremony, a ribbon-cutting list of development projects and a round of consultations with Galmudug society, and by the time his delegation had been welcomed at the airstrip by President Ahmed Abdi Kariye and the state’s traditional leaders, the real subject of the trip was already the city he has not yet reached. Officials familiar with the itinerary say Galkayo follows Dhusamareb, and Puntland has placed its security and defence forces on full alert over that prospect, accusing the federal president of organising discord in a city whose two halves answer to two different administrations.
The Army Ceremony That Brought Him to Dhusamareb
The official programme is a study in what Villa Somalia still has the capacity to stage. Newly trained units of the Somali National Army are due to be commissioned in Dhusamareb, presented as evidence that the federal government is equipping and expanding the force at exactly the moment the African Union mission thins out beneath it. Alongside the parade come the development projects, the service-delivery announcements and the sectoral meetings on governance, security and state-building. All of them are the standard furniture of a presidency that has spent the year demonstrating movement to audiences at home and to the donors who fund the transition.
Galmudug is the natural venue for that demonstration because Galmudug no longer argues. The state that once put armed civilians on the streets of Cabudwaaq to refuse a federally imposed vote has since delivered an electoral result that produced no friction at all, and its leadership now supplies Mogadishu with the one thing every other member state has withheld this year, which is agreement. A president who cannot travel to Garowe without a quarrel, and who reaches Kismayo only through a negotiated thaw, can arrive in Dhusamareb to a receiving line.
That is why the commissioning ceremony carries more political weight than military weight. The units being paraded in Dhusamareb are not the units that hold the roads in Lower Shabelle or the districts of eastern Hiiraan, and nothing about their graduation changes the arithmetic of a force that loses garrisons faster than it fills them. What the ceremony does is place the president in front of soldiers, in a state capital that will applaud, in the week his own security services are fighting a very different war several hundred kilometres to the south. The photographs will circulate; the roads will stay where they are.
Puntland Reads the Dhusamareb Itinerary
Puntland’s response arrived before the plane did. In a statement issued on Thursday night, the administration said it was monitoring reports that the federal president intended to travel on to southern Galkayo, warned that he would carry responsibility for any consequences of what it called an attempt to create discord and conflict, and thanked residents of the southern half of the city, along with the Galmudug authorities, for holding the line during an earlier attempt. The language went further than a security notice, since the statement declined to call Hassan Sheikh Mohamud the sitting president of the federal government at all.
That refusal is the constitutional argument Puntland has been making since the mandate question hardened, and it now travels with every federal movement into the Mudug region. Garowe severed its recognition of Villa Somalia’s authority in 2024, restated the position through a cabinet decree in August, and has spent the past fortnight converting that legal claim into physical control of the camps and bases that federal-aligned forces held inside its territory. A presidential visit to the far side of a divided city reads, from Garowe, as the reopening of a file it believes it has closed.
The alert order also has a local history that makes Dhusamareb the wrong place to read it from. Northern Galkayo is Puntland’s second city and the seat of its most sensitive command, and the weapons convoy intercepted on the road to the encircled federal camp there in July established, for Puntland’s purposes, that Mogadishu was willing to arm a rival force inside Mudug. Every federal official who now approaches the city is measured against that precedent, and the administration has said plainly that it treats the arithmetic of the visit as a security matter first. Nothing in the Dhusamareb programme addresses that reading, because the programme was never written for Garowe.
Galmudug Answers From the Southern Half of the City
Galmudug’s reply came within hours and rested on the plainest possible constitutional ground. Mohamed Farah Talyani, the state minister in the office of the presidency, said on Friday that a visit by the federal president to one of Galmudug’s own cities is not a matter between regional administrations, adding that Galmudug is no island outside the country and that the president holds the right to enter its territory, meet its people and consult its leaders on national questions.
He also disputed the premise. There is no serious unrest in Galkayo, Talyani said, no meaningful public anxiety about the trip, and no appetite in his administration for politicising the security of a city where the two neighbouring states have in fact cooperated on policing and on the containment of clan disputes. He urged Garowe and Mogadishu to settle their differences through dialogue and to stop issuing statements capable of raising the temperature on a boundary that has held, more or less, since the two administrations divided the city between them. His argument places the burden of the Dhusamareb trip on the two capitals arguing about it, and not on the city that would host its final leg.
The exchange leaves Galkayo carrying a dispute it did not generate. A city already split down a line that separates two federal member states now hosts a proxy argument about whether the man arriving in Dhusamareb holds the office his own itinerary assumes. Each administration has an incentive to answer that question in the way that suits its wider position. Galmudug gains from treating the visit as routine, because routine is the currency it trades with Villa Somalia, while Puntland gains from treating it as an incursion, because the incursion frame is the one that has been winning it camps. The residents of both halves of Galkayo, who trade across the line daily and who have absorbed every previous round of this quarrel, are the only constituency in the argument with nothing to gain from either answer.
The Front Line Waits While Dhusamareb Fills With Officials
Set against the week’s actual fighting, the choreography in Dhusamareb becomes harder to justify. Intelligence forces reported killing nine al-Shabaab fighters in an operation in Middle Shabelle on Friday, which is the kind of result that reads well in a press release and changes nothing on the ground, while in Lower Shabelle the group continues to own the road between two garrisons the army holds on paper. The African Union mission’s funding runs out at the end of December, and no replacement arrangement has been agreed.
Inside Puntland the same week produced a warning from the state’s own political council, which called for disarmament to proceed through consultation with elders, scholars and business leaders. The council urged the administration to seek a negotiated settlement at Kodmo in Bari region, where federal-aligned fighters have refused to surrender their weapons to Puntland authorities. The council framed its appeal around the risk that armed groups hostile to the state would exploit any wider confrontation, which is the argument Puntland itself has been making to Mogadishu for two years while running operations against both al-Shabaab and the Islamic State in the Calmiskaad range.
Two administrations are therefore mobilising against each other over the movements of a federal president whose army is losing roads in the south, whose international mission is running out of money, and whose redrawing of the north east produced the confrontation now shaping his travel plans. The commissioning ceremony in Dhusamareb will produce photographs of new soldiers. The alert order in Garowe will keep several thousand experienced ones facing south, away from the mountains where the actual insurgents are, for as long as the itinerary stays unresolved. Whatever is inaugurated in Dhusamareb this weekend, the cost of the trip is being paid in the two places the president is not going.
