GAROWE, SOMALIA – Turkiye’s defence ministry gave its first formal answer on Thursday to the strikes that have killed at least thirteen people along Puntland’s Nugaal coast, saying the Somalia-Turkiye Joint Forces Command “continues to support the development of Somalia’s capability in the fight against terrorism and piracy, in accordance with the agreements signed between the two countries.” The statement landed hours after Puntland’s deputy security minister said his administration believes Ankara carried out both deadly strikes and has told the international community so in writing. The ministry’s text confirms no strike, denies no strike and names no aircraft. Ankara’s first answer to ten days of unclaimed killing at Garmaal and Jiifle cites the command it shares with Mogadishu, and Puntland now holds both governments in that arrangement responsible for the fishermen it buried.
Ankara Builds Its Reply on the Agreements
The statement, carried in Somali coverage on Friday morning, is brief and rests on treaty language from its first clause to its last. Beyond the sentence on the joint command, the ministry said “necessary support” is being provided to Somali institutions, and that the file is being handled together with Turkiye’s foreign ministry, particularly what it called the incident in Somali waters. That phrase is the closest any institution in Ankara has come to acknowledging that events off Puntland now require its attention, and it arrived attached to a description of an ongoing military partnership in those same waters.
Furthermore, the formulation matters because of the answer that preceded it. Asked about the Garmaal strike in its immediate aftermath, the foreign ministry said it had no information indicating Turkish forces were involved, a sentence describing the ministry’s state of knowledge and leaving the conduct of the armed forces unaddressed. Thursday’s text runs the other way, describing continuous joint activity against piracy under signed instruments while saying nothing about any specific operation. One reading treats it as routine reassurance; another, already circulating in Somali commentary, treats it as Ankara’s first acknowledgment of an operational role, and the ministry chose wording that sustains both.
Moreover, the architecture the statement cites is real and extensive. Ankara signed a ten-year defence and economic cooperation framework with Mogadishu in 2024, its parliament renewed the naval mandate covering Somali territorial waters this February, and its largest overseas training establishment operates in the capital, all of it serving a federal government that carries no electoral mandate of its own. Consequently, when the ministry says the joint command works “in accordance with the agreements,” it is invoking instruments that place Turkish force at the centre of Somali security policy, and instruments to which Puntland was never a party. The agreements now stand as the offered explanation for whatever has been happening off a coastline their text never mentions.
Puntland Puts a Name on the Aircraft
Deputy Security Minister Abdirahman Yusuf Dujaana said in interviews on Thursday that Puntland believes Turkish forces carried out the strikes of 18 and 23 August, and that the federal government has a part in what is unfolding on the coast. He said the administration holds evidence concerning Turkish movements around the hijacked vessel and the shoreline near it, and that Garowe has already sent documents on the strikes to the international community. “We fight piracy, but a person has rights, and no one can simply be killed,” he said. Neither his claims nor the identification of the dead has been independently verified, and no government or armed force has claimed responsibility for either strike.
Notably, the minister set the accusation inside a record his administration considers proof of good faith. Puntland describes itself as committed to eliminating piracy along its coastline, and it insists the campaign proceed through lawful procedure against men who remain suspects until a court says otherwise. Its forces have arrested suspects including foreign nationals it links to the piracy networks, and have recovered GPS receivers and computers it says were used to track commercial shipping hundreds of miles offshore. Dujaana added that Puntland has found no connection between the current hijackings and either al-Shabaab or Islamic State, and he asked Ankara’s embassy in Mogadishu, Turkish military officials and the federal ministries to state who conducted the strikes and who authorised them.
The accusation completes an escalation Garowe has walked step by step across ten days. Puntland demanded an account from the warships off its coast within days of the first strike, when it blamed only international naval forces it declined to name. It watched Garmaal bury men the first reports had called pirates, and a former federal foreign minister called the strike a massacre. Naming Ankara converts a coastal grievance into a diplomatic case with documents attached, and tying the federal government to it folds that case into the constitutional quarrel running through everything else between Garowe and Mogadishu.
The Authority in Mogadishu and the Dead on the Shore
The record both governments now answer for spans three strikes in six days. The first, near Garmaal on 18 August, killed four men and wounded two others after a skiff turned back toward shore from the direction of the seized ship. A second strike followed in the same waters on 20 August without reported deaths. At Jiifle, in Godob-Jiraan district, a third strike on 23 August killed nine people by the district mayor’s count, and a resident who reached the site described eight badly burned bodies, among them young men the settlement knew as fishermen who worked those waters.
Meanwhile, Mogadishu’s position has stood still for a week. State Minister for Defence Omar Ali Abdi said on 22 August that the federal government knew of the operations in advance and holds the sole legal authority to license them, and he promised a comprehensive report on what had been done in Somali waters. Six days later, no report has been published and no executor has been named. Federal officials have defended the strikes as operations against pirates, while the relatives of the dead and Puntland’s government keep identifying fishermen among the bodies, and the distance between those two accounts has only widened.
Offshore, the MV Lutuf sits where its hijackers anchored it, seized on 17 August some three and a half nautical miles off Marraya in Eyl district with ten crew aboard, six of them Indian nationals alongside a Turkish national, a Georgian and two Serbian guards. A federal official has described the cargo as Turkish weapons, communications gear and satellite equipment bound for Ankara’s training facility in Mogadishu, the hijackers have demanded a ransom near two million dollars, and Turkish vessels, helicopters and drones have shadowed the ship since the seizure. A man presenting himself as one of the hijackers disputed the official cargo account in an interview this week, none of it verifiable. Between the treaty language in Ankara and the authority claimed in Mogadishu, the strikes now have two governments prepared to answer for the coast in principle, and none prepared to say who fired on the boats.
