Garowe, Puntland — The Puntland Ministry of Interior, Federal Affairs, and Democratisation today issued a comprehensive response to the Las Anod Conference, exposing it as the latest maneuver in the Federal Government’s systematic campaign to fragment stable regions while Al-Shabab consolidates its southern conquests. The ministry asserted that “Any proposal for a new administration within Puntland must follow a legal, consultative process involving all stakeholders who participated in Puntland’s founding”.
The Las Anod conference, ostensibly organized by SSC-Khatumo but bearing the unmistakable fingerprints of federal orchestration and funding, seeks to expand beyond its Dhulbahante base into Sanaag’s Warsangeli territories—an ambition that has met categorical rejection from the region’s traditional leaders who recognize the gambit as an assault on Puntland’s constitutional order.
This ministerial response illuminates the sophisticated warfare being waged against Puntland through legal manipulation and territorial revisionism rather than military force. The timing proves particularly revealing: as the Federal Government reels from the loss of Moqokori and other districts to Al-Shabab, it intensifies efforts to dismember the only regional administration maintaining effective counter-terrorism operations without African Union support—a perverse priority that transforms Somalia’s federal structure from a framework for cooperation into an instrument of mutual destruction.
The ministry’s five-point clarification constitutew a legal and moral framework for understanding current federal-state tensions. By invoking Articles 7 and 138 of the Puntland Constitution while acknowledging the Dhulbahante community’s founding role since 1998, Puntland demonstrates the constitutional sophistication that distinguishes legitimate governance from the arbitrary territorial reorganizations emanating from Mogadishu. This grounding in legal precedent and historical fact contrasts sharply with the Federal Government’s approach, which treats constitutional provisions as obstacles to circumvent rather than principles to uphold.
Territorial Subversion
The Las Anod Conference embodies the Federal Government’s evolved strategy for fragmenting regional states through constitutional manipulation rather than military confrontation. Following President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s unilateral addition of SSC-Khatumo as a federal member state, the conference seeks to expand this precedent into a wholesale redrawing of Somalia’s internal boundaries based on clan configurations that serve federal divide-and-rule tactics.
The attempted inclusion of Sanaag’s Warsangeli population in this expansion reveals the strategic calculation underlying federal support. Sanaag represents one of Puntland’s most stable and strategically vital regions, controlling key portions of the Gulf of Aden coastline and maintaining effective governance structures that have resisted both extremist infiltration and external manipulation. By attempting to carve away this territory through clan-based appeals, the Federal Government seeks to achieve through constitutional subterfuge what it cannot accomplish through legitimate political processes or military force.
The traditional leaders of the Warsangeli clan have demonstrated remarkable clarity in rejecting these overtures, understanding that short-term inducements pale against the long-term benefits of remaining within Puntland’s stable constitutional framework. Their rejection reflects pragmatic assessment of governance realities: Puntland provides security, services, and political representation, while the proposed expansion offers only the uncertainty of association with an entity whose capacity to govern even its current territory remains questionable.
This pattern of federal support for territorial fragmentation in stable regions while losing ground to extremists elsewhere reveals a government more committed to preventing alternative models of success than to addressing its own catastrophic failures. Each dollar spent supporting conferences aimed at dividing Puntland, each hour of ministerial time devoted to territorial intrigue, and each diplomatic effort expended on legitimizing unconstitutional changes represents resources unavailable for the existential fight against Al-Shabab.
