Garowe, SOMALIA – The last organised body of federally registered troops inside Puntland’s own capital came back under Garowe’s command overnight, when General Jimale Jama Takar accepted terms for the Danab force based at the Ligle camp hours after Puntland moved units through parts of its territory during the afternoon. Politicians and traditional leaders from Nugaal region carried the final round of mediation, and the settlement they produced takes roughly a thousand men off a federal payroll they had drawn on for close to a year, returns the Ligle camp to Puntland’s register and chain of command, and ends General Jimale’s authority over the force he led through three years of confrontation.
The Afternoon Manoeuvre That Settled Ligle
Puntland spent the afternoon repositioning forces across several of its districts, and the agreement at Ligle followed within hours. Officials present at the talks describe a sequence in which the military movement and the mediation ran in parallel, with the elders working the room in Garowe while the columns moved outside it, and the terms were accepted that night. Whether the general read the deployment as a demonstration or as a deadline, he signed while it was still under way.
Both parties have an interest in the version that emerged the next morning, in which reasonable men from Nugaal talked a difficult file to a close. The account given by officials who watched the talks places the two things in the same afternoon without drawing the line between them, which is the discretion a negotiated outcome requires from everyone who wants it to hold.
Garowe has used the same combination through the whole of this campaign. Every camp that has changed hands since the start of August, from the base at Galkayo to the compound at Bosaso, was approached with a deadline, a deployment and a delegation of elders arriving before the shooting started. Three of those four transfers ended without a serious exchange of fire, which is the outcome the administration has said it wanted and the reason it has kept clan mediators inside the process at every stage.
The Ligle case was the hardest of them because it sat inside the capital. General Jimale’s men have been quartered in Garowe itself since the political crisis of 2023, when his forces aligned with the politicians opposing President Said Abdullahi Deni’s one-person-one-vote programme, and the presence of an armed formation drawing its orders and its money from Mogadishu a short drive from the presidency was the sharpest version of the parallel-command problem Puntland has spent two years describing. Resolving it by negotiation, with the general still standing, is a materially different result from resolving it by assault.
A Year on the Federal Payroll Ends at Ligle
The substance of the deal is administrative, and that is where its force lies. Puntland undertakes to enter the Ligle Danab on its own register, to pay their salaries and to meet their other entitlements as soldiers of the state. In exchange the men come off the federal register they joined during the past year and return to the Puntland command structure they left. Nothing in the arrangement asks them to disarm, disperse or stand down, which is why it was accepted at all.
General Jimale handed the force over whole and stepped away from it. The men now answer to the Puntland Defence Forces command, he retains no position over them, and the settlement leaves him outside the structure he built and led since the Garowe crisis of 2023. For an administration that has spent the month insisting on a single chain of command, separating the commander from the force was the substance of the deal, since a unit that kept its old leadership would have been a militia with new paymasters. Puntland also dropped a threatened prosecution of opposition politicians from Nugaal, a move the mediators had pressed for and which the administration folded into the same de-escalation.
Money was the mechanism that created the problem and money is the mechanism that has closed it. Mogadishu’s method throughout this confrontation has been to recruit, register and pay units inside territory it does not administer, which is the pattern that produced the intercepted weapons convoy in Mudug in July and the ceremony that brought the general’s fighters back into the state’s forces. Puntland has now matched the offer with its own treasury, and a soldier at Ligle who wants to be paid this month has one place to collect. Registration, training and a salary line are cheaper instruments than an assault on a camp inside the capital, and they produce a result that does not need to be garrisoned afterwards.
Kur Ilaalo and Carmo Complete the Sweep
The Ligle agreement arrived alongside two others. Armed groups at Kur Ilaalo, in the Rako-Raaxo district of Karkaar region, who had earlier attached themselves to the federal government, agreed in the same period to join the Puntland Defence Forces after mediation by traditional leaders and politicians from Bari region. The state announced that they would be brought into its formal structure through registration, training and reorganisation, so that they conform to its own system, discipline and chain of command. Bari elders had been working that file for some days, and the settlement removes a second armed nucleus from a region where the state is simultaneously running operations against the Islamic State.
Separately, fighters formerly serving with the Puntland Security Force, whose Bosaso compound passed to the state administration earlier this month under an agreement with their own officers, have been moved to the police training college at Carmo. They are expected to go through retraining and restructuring there before formal absorption into the state’s establishment. That leaves Carmo functioning as the processing point for a force that Washington built, funded and equipped over more than a decade, and whose disposition has become a Puntland administrative question about intake classes and pay grades.
Taken together the three arrangements close the file that the redrawing of the north east opened. Sources familiar with the discussions say the presence of units taking orders or salaries directly from the federal government inside Puntland has now been substantially ended. What existed in early August as four separate armed concentrations answering to Mogadishu exists in the middle of the month as a registration and training backlog for the Puntland Defence Forces. Ligle was the piece that mattered most, because it stood in Garowe and because its commander had a personal quarrel with the presidency going back three years.
One Register, One Chain of Command
The administration’s case for all of this has been consistent since the cabinet decree of early August, and it is a case about the state’s monopoly on armed force inside its own borders. A territory that fights al-Shabaab in the Golis and the Islamic State in the Calmiskaad range cannot also police several thousand men who answer somewhere else, and the argument that two payrolls inside one jurisdiction eventually produce two armies has been the spine of every Puntland statement on the subject. The Ligle settlement is the strongest evidence Garowe has produced for that case, since the unit it wanted most is the one it took without firing.
Puntland’s own political council had pressed exactly this route days earlier, calling for disarmament to proceed through consultation with elders, scholars and business leaders and urging a negotiated settlement with the holdouts at Kodmo in Bari region. The council warned that armed groups hostile to the state would exploit any wider confrontation among Puntland’s own forces. The settlements at Ligle and Kur Ilaalo followed the council’s prescription closely enough that its intervention now reads as part of the machinery.
None of it resolves the underlying argument with Mogadishu, which has moved on to other ground while these camps were changing hands. The federal president spent the same week in Galmudug, arriving in Dhusamareb for a troop ceremony with Galkayo reported as his next stop, and Puntland responded to that itinerary by putting its forces on full alert. Every instrument Mogadishu was using inside Puntland has been taken away from it in the space of a fortnight. The quarrel those instruments were built to prosecute is being carried, this weekend, to a divided city three hundred kilometres to the south. Ligle settles who commands the guns inside Puntland, and settles nothing at all about the border where the next confrontation is being arranged.
