MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Somalia put its name to a Saudi-engineered maritime alliance in Riyadh on Thursday. It joined thirteen other states in a joint declaration backing a Red Sea coalition built to break the Houthi campaign against shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The commitment arrived in the same week that the federal government failed to write its own politics into the Kampala communique, watched Washington end the logistics funding that keeps African Union troops in the field, and saw a federally aligned force encircled by Puntland in Galkayo. Villa Somalia has acquired a seat at a table Riyadh will chair, and it has taken that seat with no navy, a coastguard that barely operates beyond its own harbours, and no settled answer at home to the question of who speaks for Somalia.
What Mogadishu Signed Up To in Riyadh
The Saudi defence ministry convened chiefs of staff and senior military representatives from forty-three of the fifty-one countries it invited, together with a European Union delegation. That meeting moved the proposed alliance from concept to draft architecture. Delegates worked through a founding charter, a proposed organisational structure, command-and-control arrangements and the operational mechanisms that would govern the bloc once it exists. Riyadh intends to lead the alliance and to host its headquarters on Saudi soil, which settles in advance the question of whose strategic priorities the force will serve.
Fourteen states then issued a joint statement endorsing the outcome. Somalia appears on that list alongside Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Djibouti, Yemen, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Turkiye. Several other participants indicated support while they complete domestic ratification, and Riyadh left the door open to any willing state that finishes its internal procedures later. For now the Red Sea coalition remains a framework on paper. Military planners from the signatory capitals will spend the coming weeks finalising the charter and standing up the technical teams that any joint maritime command requires.
Somalia’s presence in that group places it among the Red Sea and Horn of Africa littoral states that Riyadh regarded as indispensable, next to Djibouti and Sudan. That is a meaningful diplomatic position, since the waters the alliance claims as its area of responsibility wash against roughly three thousand kilometres of Somali coastline, the longest in mainland Africa. The obvious question is what Mogadishu brings to the arrangement beyond geography and a signature. Somalia contributes no hulls, no maritime patrol aircraft, no surveillance architecture and no bases it fully controls. Its participation in the Red Sea coalition is therefore a political undertaking rather than a military one, and the politics behind it point north rather than out to sea.
The Red Sea Coalition Is a Somaliland File
Israel became the first United Nations member to recognise Somaliland’s independence in December 2025, and Mogadishu described the decision as a naked invasion of Somali sovereignty. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has since argued that the recognition was transactional, telling Al Jazeera in February that Hargeisa had agreed to host an Israeli military base and to accept Palestinians displaced from Gaza in exchange for it. He has said Somalia will confront any such base. Somaliland’s administration rejects that account of its dealings with Tel Aviv, and nobody has yet confirmed a base. Investigative reporting in June placed an Israeli intelligence presence at Berbera International Airport.
Read against that background, Somalia’s decision to join the Red Sea coalition is a positioning move in a fight over the northern coastline. Hassan Sheikh warned Somaliland only weeks ago against entangling itself in the widening confrontation between Israel and the Houthis, arguing that neither Hargeisa nor Mogadishu could contain a war imported into Somali waters. By signing with Riyadh, he binds the federal government to the Gulf Arab camp confronting Houthi and Iranian expansion at the precise moment Somaliland edges toward the opposing pole. The alliance gives Mogadishu a multilateral platform on which to contest Hargeisa’s diplomatic gains, and it does so in a forum where Somaliland cannot answer.
The calculation is coherent as far as it goes, and it carries an obvious cost. A Red Sea coalition headquartered in Riyadh will define Somali maritime interests through Saudi strategic needs, and those needs currently centre on keeping the Yanbu terminal open while the Strait of Hormuz stays closed. Somalia’s own maritime grievances, from illegal fishing to the toxic dumping that fuelled the piracy of the 2000s, have never registered on a Gulf agenda. Mogadishu has traded a claim on the alliance’s attention for a place in its membership list, and the two are not the same thing.
A Coastline Without a Fleet
Somalia’s federal maritime capability is close to notional. The country has had no functioning navy since 1991, and successive attempts to rebuild a coastguard have produced small units confined to port approaches at Mogadishu and dependent on foreign donors for fuel, boats and salaries. Turkiye trains and equips much of what exists, the European Union has underwritten legal and administrative capacity through successive missions, and the United Arab Emirates funded a separate maritime police force in Puntland that answers to Garowe. The federal government cannot survey its exclusive economic zone, cannot escort a convoy and cannot sustain a vessel at sea for the duration of a patrol.
The gap matters because Somali waters are already contested by actors the Red Sea coalition is not designed to handle. Piracy revived through 2024 and 2025 off the Puntland coast, with hijacked dhows used as launch platforms deep into the Indian Ocean, and the Puntland Maritime Police Force rather than any federal body has conducted the interdictions. Al-Shabaab taxes coastal traffic and moves supplies through small ports in the south. Islamic State’s Somalia branch, headquartered in the Cal Miskaad mountains until Puntland’s offensive pushed it back, has drawn revenue from the same littoral economy.
An alliance built to protect international shipping lanes and energy corridors will address none of that. The Red Sea coalition exists to keep tankers moving through the Bab el-Mandeb, and it carries no mandate to police the Somali coast against the armed groups that use it. Mogadishu has therefore joined a security architecture that will operate in its neighbourhood without operating on its behalf. Should the alliance ever deploy, the practical Somali contribution will consist of overflight rights, port access and diplomatic cover, each of which is a concession rather than a capability.
The Timing Tells the Story
Any government may pursue foreign policy while managing a domestic crisis. The difficulty for Hassan Sheikh is that the crisis is now consuming the instruments he would need to honour the Riyadh commitment. Washington ended logistics support for the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia in early July, and the emergency summit convened in Kampala this week produced a communique stripped of Somalia’s political disputes and no replacement funding. Troop contributors left Uganda with the same shortfall they arrived with, and with a clearer sense that the mission carries an expiry date.
The commander of United States Africa Command delivered a related message in Mogadishu the day before, telling Villa Somalia that American engagement now depends on ending the political infighting between the federal government and the federal member states. That infighting has since escalated into something closer to a standoff. Puntland forces have surrounded a federally aligned Puntland Security Force camp in Galkayo, having already seized thirteen vehicles and detained thirty personnel near Bosaso. Former prime minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke has warned that the country risks sliding back into internal conflict.
The fiscal picture removes the last argument for ambition abroad. Somalia’s finance ministry expects between four hundred and fifty and six hundred million dollars of the federal budget to arrive as foreign grants. A government that cannot pay its own soldiers without donor transfers has committed itself to a Red Sea coalition. Al-Shabaab, meanwhile, killed five Kenyan police officers near Lafey in Mandera on Tuesday and detonated a roadside bomb against the rescue convoy, demonstrating that its cross-border reach has outlived every offensive announced against it. A state in that condition joins alliances to be seen inside them.
What the Alliance Asks of Somalia Next
The Houthi movement declared a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia on 20 July and has since struck vessels linked to the kingdom. Brent crude pushed past a hundred dollars a barrel for the first time since May. Riyadh has answered with air strikes on Hodeidah and with the diplomatic scramble that produced the Riyadh meeting. Sanaa and Riyadh now set the timetable, and the Red Sea coalition will face its first test long before anyone ratifies the charter.
Somalia’s exposure in that scenario is asymmetric. The Houthis have shown a willingness to strike targets associated with states they regard as belligerents, and Somali ports, waters and airspace are considerably easier to reach than Saudi ones. Mogadishu did not consult Puntland on the Riyadh declaration, and Garowe controls the coastline nearest the Gulf of Aden shipping lanes. That combination hands Puntland both a grievance and a veto over any practical implementation. Somaliland controls Berbera. The federal government has signed on behalf of a coast it does not administer, which is the recurring structural fact of Hassan Sheikh’s foreign policy.
There is a version of this that works for Somalia. Membership in a Riyadh-led bloc could unlock maritime domain awareness, training and equipment that no bilateral partner has been willing to fund at scale, and it would give Mogadishu standing in the one arena where Somaliland has recently outmanoeuvred it. Realising any of that requires a functioning state to receive the assistance, a settled relationship with the federal member states whose coastlines are involved, and an electoral process that ends the argument over the government’s legitimacy. The Red Sea coalition will publish its charter well before Somalia resolves any of those questions, and Mogadishu will discover that the alliance treats it as a coordinate rather than a partner.
