BOSASO, SOMALIA – One soldier is dead near Somalia’s busiest northern port, and the fight that killed him was not with al-Shabaab. It was between two forces that both claim, on paper, to serve the same country. Gunfire erupted this week at a checkpoint in the Madar-Jiif area, on the road between the town of Laag and the port city of Bosaso. Troops from the Puntland Security Force had tried to push a convoy through a Dervish position. The clash looks local, yet the prize is anything but. At stake is command of the Puntland Security Force. It is the US-trained counter-terror unit that Mogadishu has quietly folded into the national army, over Garowe’s furious objections.
A Checkpoint Killing on the Bosaso Road
The immediate trigger was a convoy that refused to stop. Puntland’s Dervish forces blocked the vehicles, and both sides opened up with heavy weapons. At least one PSF fighter was killed before the shooting died down. Puntland then moved fast to lock the city down. Police Commissioner Muumin Cabdi Shire drove out of Garowe with a column of at least eighteen armed vehicles. Reinforcements fanned out to the Maqaska junction, which controls the road to Bosaso Airport, and along the Soddonka corridor. Residents described a day of rising military traffic as fresh troops arrived and dug in.
A day later the Puntland administration announced a broader sweep. Its forces said they had carried out a planned operation in the Laag area and dismantled an armed group blamed for months of local insecurity. They also seized military vehicles, weapons, and prisoners. Garowe did not name the group or say where it was based. That omission fits a pattern of accusing Mogadishu without ever spelling out the charge. The standoff eased only after Dervish commanders and PSF officers agreed the contested units would pull back to Bosaso. The truce settled the day. It settled nothing underneath.
Lockdowns of this kind have their own economics in Bosaso, and the Puntland Security Force convoy triggered one within hours. Every hour the Maqaska junction stays closed, trucks queue outside the port, importers pay demurrage and fuel prices in the interior move. Puntland’s administration knows the cost precisely, since customs at that port fund most of what it does, and it still judged a show of force cheaper than allowing a federalised convoy to establish that it can pass where it likes.
Mogadishu’s Claim on the Force
What turned an internal Puntland feud into a federal one was Mogadishu’s decision to adopt the losing side. After Deni pushed the Diyano faction out, the federal government made Asad Diyano chief of the Somali Police Force. Then it went further. In October 2024 it announced that the Puntland Security Force had been absorbed into the Somali National Armed Forces as a federal unit, with its personnel eligible for national salaries and logistics. Puntland rejected the move outright. It argued that the federal government holds no constitutional power to recognise or deploy armed forces on its territory without the state’s consent.
The latest escalation follows the same logic. Late in June, the federal government ordered a new army unit based in Bosaso, one designed to bypass Puntland’s chain of command and report straight to Mogadishu. The Critical Threats Project could not independently confirm the unit, yet placed the claim at the centre of its July assessment. Set against that backdrop, a convoy of the federalised Puntland Security Force forcing a checkpoint reads less like a traffic dispute and more like a test of whose writ runs on the Bosaso road. Garowe treated it as exactly that. That is why it answered a single convoy with a police commissioner and eighteen trucks.
The federal argument for absorbing the Puntland Security Force deserves a fair statement, because it is not absurd. Somalia cannot maintain a national army if member states retain veto power over which formations operate on their soil, and the constitution’s silence on the point is a genuine gap rather than an obvious answer. What weakens the case in practice is selectivity, since the principle of unified command has been asserted against Puntland and Jubaland and never against the units answering to the presidency itself.
A Wider Campaign Puntland Says It Can Read
Puntland frames the clash as one move in a longer effort to plant a federal army inside its borders. The same weeks saw Mogadishu appoint a commander for a new 54th Division to be based in Garowe itself. Federal officials also defended recruiting and paying soldiers in Puntland despite the state’s ban. A June letter detailing weapons transfers to newly recruited federal forces in the region has since surfaced. Puntland cites that letter, alongside the disputed status of the Puntland Security Force, as proof that Villa Somalia is arming men to destabilise it from within. Mogadishu’s plan to destabilise Puntland works by manufacturing precisely this kind of rival force.
The political frame around all of it is open rupture. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud declared on the first of July that ties with Puntland had broken down and that there was no room for talks. Deni answered that his government would not accept federal intervention in its security. Puntland does not stand alone in that posture. It anchors the opposition coalition that Jubaland also joined, and the two states have closed ranks against Villa Somalia over the same pattern of federal encroachment. What Mogadishu presents as building a national army, its opponents read as dismantling the federal bargain one state at a time.
That reading is now shaping how Puntland handles everything else. Garowe has stopped attending federal security meetings, it refuses to recognise appointments made for its territory, and it treats every logistics flight into Bosaso as a potential delivery to its rivals. A federal government hoping to run a national security transition next year will have to do it without the cooperation of the state holding the longest coastline in the federation.
The Cost of a Second Front at the Port
The location makes the stakes concrete. Bosaso is Puntland’s main revenue engine and a lifeline for trade, fuel, and humanitarian cargo bound for the northeast. Puntland enters this fight already carrying a budget shortfall of roughly a third for 2026, strained further by the federal move against its Emirati port arrangements. A prolonged standoff on the roads into the city threatens the very economy that funds Deni’s forces. It also pulls the Puntland Security Force away from the mission it was built for. A unit designed to hunt the Islamic State in the mountains cannot do so while its convoys trade fire with Dervish checkpoints.
Al-Shabaab and the Islamic State are the silent beneficiaries of every hour spent this way. Al-Shabaab’s offensive feeds on Mogadishu’s political chaos. A command war inside the country’s steadiest counter-terror force hands the jihadists a gift no battlefield could. Puntland has shown it can defuse a federal wedge without gunfire, having pulled its Garowe standoff back from the edge through elder mediation only days earlier. The Bosaso road produced the opposite result, a body at a checkpoint and both sides reinforcing. The Puntland Security Force was meant to be Somalia’s answer to jihadists in the Bari mountains, not a checkpoint problem for the state that raised it. Until the men in those convoys know whose orders bind them, the next collision will not wait for a mediator to arrive.
Elder mediation remains the only mechanism that has reliably worked, and it is being asked to carry more weight than it can bear. Clan elders can separate two columns on a road for a week, and they cannot settle who signs the payroll of a counter-terror force claimed by two governments. That question belongs to a political settlement that neither Mogadishu nor Garowe is currently willing to negotiate.
