LAS ANOD, SOMALIA – The federal government paid more than 2,500 soldiers of the North East State their first federal salaries on the night of Saturday 26 September, and some of the men on the new payroll were recruited in Sanaag, a region Puntland counts as its own and Somaliland also claims. On the same Saturday Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre accused President Said Abdullahi Deni of deciding to take Puntland out of Somalia. Since 2023 Villa Somalia has courted the Aran Jaan network inside Puntland, adopted the Diyano brothers’ breakaway security force, contested Garowe’s account of the piracy on its coast and built an administration at Las Anod aimed at Garowe and Hargeisa together, and the Las Anod payroll is the first of those moves to put federal salaries in the hands of soldiers recruited in Sanaag.
The Payroll That Reached Las Anod and Sanaag
The salaries followed negotiations between the administration in Las Anod and Villa Somalia, under which more than 2,500 soldiers stationed in the region were granted federal military status and paid by the Federal Government of Somalia. These forces had run on their own since Somaliland lost Las Anod to the Dhulbahante-led uprising of August 2023, and the North East State asked Mogadishu in August this year to take over their pay. The same accounts say local young men are to be recruited into new units and that the soldiers now drawing federal pay include men from Sanaag. Both accounts rest on officials in the region, and neither gives the pay rates or says where the federal government found the money.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud travelled to Las Anod for the inauguration of the North East State on 18 January, installed President Abdikadir Ahmed Aw-Ali and called Las Anod “the city of Somali unity”, promising support “particularly in the areas of security, economic infrastructure, and social services.” The state’s speaker, Adan Abdullahi Aw-Hassan, had said days after his election in August 2025 that the state recognised neither neighbour’s control over its lands and would secure its full borders, which it says run through Sanaag as far as Erigavo. Colonel Ali Ashkato, a Warsangeli officer serving with Somaliland’s forces at Yubbe, crossed to the North East State in August with his soldiers and a military vehicle, saying he had accepted the position of the elders who now back Las Anod in his part of the region.
Puntland was founded in 1998 by the communities of the northeast, and it counts the Warsangeli districts of Sanaag and the Dhulbahante districts of Sool among them. Garowe administers much of eastern Sanaag, including Badhan and Dhahar, while Somaliland holds Erigavo, the regional capital. When the Las Anod conference moved to take in the region in July 2025, Puntland’s interior ministry answered that any new administration inside Puntland must follow a legal, consultative process involving everyone who took part in the state’s founding, and the Warsangeli sultan and elders declared that Sanaag was historically and constitutionally part of Puntland. The federal salaries now back a third claim to a region whose other two claimants still hold the ground.
From Aran Jaan to a New Puntland Without Sanaag
In November 2023, with Puntland in the middle of its election season, sources alleged that Villa Somalia had passed money to stir unrest after a late-night meeting in Mogadishu between President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the NISA chief Mahad Salad and the Puntland politician Khadar Farole, and a militia tied to the Aran Jaan network was then seen moving into Garowe. Puntland prosecutors had already tied figures around the network to deadly clashes in Garowe in May 2023, and the group was implicated in the pre-election violence that stopped direct elections in three districts. In May 2024 members of the group were in Mogadishu seeking federal funding for their activities in Puntland, according to accounts published at the time.
For the past year the politicians around Aran Jaan have promoted a New Puntland that would surrender Sool and Sanaag to the administration at Las Anod and keep Bari, Nugaal, Mudug and Karkaar. Federally aligned politicians drawn largely from the Ali Saleban of the Bari country sit around the group, among them the figure known as Mashruuc, who spent that year raising armed groups on Puntland territory. In August militias calling themselves the Calmiskaad Defence Forces drove out of Carmo into the Karkaar hinterland and announced that they took orders from Mogadishu alone. Puntland’s answer has been consistent since 1998, that it is a voluntary union of the regions that built it and that no boundary inside it can be redrawn by a decree issued in another city.
Villa Somalia has never used the phrase New Puntland in an official document. It recognised SSC-Khaatumo as an administrative entity in October 2023, upgraded it to a federal member state in April 2025, when Hamza Abdi Barre flew to Las Anod, and supervised the selection of an eighty-three member parliament whose claim on paper covers the whole of Sool, Sanaag and Cayn. Aran Jaan’s politicians never carried their map through any Puntland institution, clan conference or regional assembly. Saturday night’s federal payroll includes men recruited in the region that map asked Garowe to give up.
The Diyano Precedent and the Sanaag Payroll
President Deni first won office in January 2019 by defeating General Asad Osman Abdullahi, known as Asad Diyano, and then dismissed the commander of the Puntland Security Force, Mahamud Osman Diyano, the general’s brother. Mahamud Osman Diyano refused to go, and in December 2021 the quarrel became heavy fighting inside Bosaso, with shells landing in residential districts of the city the force existed to protect. Puntland dissolved the force on paper afterwards and stood up a new intelligence and security agency in its place, while the men in the Bosaso camp stayed where they were.
Mogadishu adopted the losing side when the federal cabinet made Asad Diyano police commissioner in September 2024, and on 22 June this year President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed decrees creating a Bosaso-based 17th unit of the Somali National Army under Lieutenant Colonel Abdullahi Osman Abdullahi, known as Diyano. Federal leaders then said the PSF had been absorbed into it, with federal salaries attached, and Garowe refused to recognise the designation. Puntland stopped a PSF column near Laag on 20 July, seizing 13 vehicles and 30 fighters, overran the force’s camp in Galkayo at the start of August and in the same week took the Bosaso camp without a shot, after an officer of the Diyano family agreed to hand it over.
The recruits the federal army had signed up inside Puntland were back on Garowe’s payroll by August, re-registered into the state forces on terms negotiated through traditional elders. On Monday 21 September Puntland forces in north Galkayo stopped two trucks carrying more than a hundred federal recruits from southern Mudug to the training centre at Xananbuure. The force at Las Anod is the second to carry both a claim on Puntland’s territory and a federal salary, and its recruits come from Sanaag, where Puntland’s forces, which have fought ISIS in the Cal Madow range, share the frontier with Somaliland’s army. In the same week the Defence Committee summoned the defence minister over cuts of up to sixty percent to the allowances of close to 6,000 retired and disabled soldiers and the families of the fallen.
From the Nugaal Coast to Sanaag
Villa Somalia presented the release of the MV Lutuf at the end of August as a military success, crediting Turkish naval forces and the Somali army with a ten-day operation. Puntland’s Ministry of Security answered that it had monitored telephone calls between senior federal officials and the men holding the ship, and accused those officials of acting as intermediaries for the ransom; Villa Somalia did not answer the accusation at the time. On 6 September the foreign ministry described piracy as a problem “particularly off the coast of Puntland”, said all maritime cooperation fell under federal leadership and promised to raise the matter at the Security Council.
In the parliamentary row over the anti-piracy bill that month, Justice Minister Hassan Moalim said Puntland could not defend the pirates, and Senator Hassan Dheere answered that the pirates had been planted in Puntland the way the federal government had earlier recruited forces inside the state. President Deni had told a gathering in Garacad on 28 August that the intention was “to claim that Puntland has failed to defend itself against piracy, then deploy forces to our coast and extract our resources.” Between 23 and 25 September Puntland’s maritime police freed the sanctioned tanker Sibu 1 between Garacad and Hobyo, killing one pirate and taking fifteen alive, with the twenty crew and the cargo safe.
On 13 September President Said Abdullahi Deni wrote to the Security Council asking for a restored arms embargo, a renewed mandate for the Panel of Experts, an extension of the UN mission beyond 31 October and an account of the unclaimed airstrikes on the Nugaal coast, and said Puntland could consider a permanent break in the future. Federal Interior Minister Ali Yusuf Ali Hosh called the letter a fabrication, and Mohamed Abdirizak, a Puntland-born former foreign minister who leads Farmaajo’s delegation in the national dialogue, said the president had no mandate to raise secession. Thirteen days after the letter was dated, the federal payroll reached soldiers recruited in Sanaag.
Hargeisa, Las Anod and Hamza Abdi Barre’s Case Against Puntland
The federal ministry of public works began contracting designs for a road and bridge in Hargeisa, with a first phase costed at roughly $20 million, in the same August week that Puntland forces took two federally aligned compounds in Mudug, and Minister Ayuub Ismaaciil Yuusuf presented it as part of a national road plan. Somaliland’s cabinet had called the North East State illegal on 3 August 2025 and restated its claim to Sool, Sanaag and Togdheer, and by October that year Hargeisa and Garowe had agreed to coordinate against the new administration and to reopen movement and trade across their frontier. The federal salaries at Las Anod now pay a third force in the region where those two governments had begun to cooperate.
“It is not the people, not all of Puntland, but the man, my friend Said Abdullahi,” Hamza Abdi Barre said on Saturday 26 September, accusing President Said Abdullahi Deni of having decided to take Puntland out of Somalia. He said Puntland had refused the national school curriculum, the national identity card and the other national symbols, the Somali passport excepted. He added that the federal government had set up a committee of ministers and agencies to send rations, medical care and other support to the forces fighting ISIS in Bari, and had offered equipment and weapons, and that the Puntland administration had turned all of it down. His remarks as reported made no mention of Sanaag or of the salaries paid in Las Anod that night.
Hamza Abdi Barre has been prime minister since June 2022, and his government recognised the Las Anod administration as a federal member state with Sool, Sanaag and Cayn inside it. On 23 September the House of the People voted 136 to two to annul his decree on the appointment of department directors, and MPs have said they are preparing a motion against him over the army allowance cuts. Puntland withdrew its recognition of the federal institutions in March 2024, after parliament rewrote the first four chapters of the provisional constitution without its consent. The offer of rations and rifles for the war on ISIS in Bari came from the government that, on the night its prime minister said President Said Abdullahi Deni was taking Puntland out of Somalia, began paying soldiers recruited in Sanaag.
