MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Somalia’s deputy foreign minister, Hassan Mohamed Ali Nadaara, said in remarks reported on Monday 12 October that Mogadishu is neutral in the confrontation between Ethiopia and Eritrea, eight days after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed the Alamein communique with the presidents of Egypt and Eritrea and Sudan’s military ruler. The text sides with Cairo and Khartoum on the Nile and says the Red Sea belongs to the states on its shores. Ethiopia, whose soldiers still hold positions for the African Union mission across southern and central Somalia, accused Eritrea on 8 October of an all-out invasion. Egyptian officers, meanwhile, are reported to be preparing a first deployment of Egyptian troops to a base north of Mogadishu.
What Mogadishu Signed at Alamein
The four leaders met at New Alamein on Sunday 4 October, with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as host, President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, chairman of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council. Their joint communique backed the unity of Sudan and Somalia, rejected any recognition of Somaliland and urged steady funding for the African Union mission. It also set up a mechanism to follow up on the summit. The communique named neither Ethiopia nor its prime minister anywhere in its text.
On the Nile, the Alamein text invoked the rules on shared rivers, prior notification and the avoidance of significant harm, and it rejected any unilateral measure affecting the current water use of the two downstream states, Egypt and Sudan. On the Red Sea, it declared that security there is the responsibility of the coastal states. Ethiopia has built the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile over Egypt’s objections. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, for his part, has spent three years saying his landlocked country needs its own access to the sea. Ethiopian officials quoted in Somali media on 7 October objected to both clauses, although no Ethiopian minister has signed an objection.
In October 2024, as Mogadishu fought Ethiopia’s memorandum with Somaliland, the same three presidents met in Asmara. There they announced a strategic alliance pledging to defend Somalia’s sovereignty, weeks after an Egyptian warship unloaded weapons in Mogadishu. Two months later the Ankara Declaration closed the memorandum dispute, and Ethiopia kept its place in the new African Union mission. This year President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud went to Addis Ababa on 29 September at Abiy’s request. On the eve of Alamein he offered Ethiopia two or three Somali ports he did not name. The next morning he took his seat beside the three governments Ethiopia’s army chief accuses of arming the rebellion against Abiy Ahmed.
Neutral With Ethiopian Troops in Four Regions
Nadaara put the government’s case in an interview published on Monday. “Somalia is neutral on this matter,” he said eight days after the Alamein summit, adding that relations with every country involved were unchanged. The federal government, he said, had the right to maintain relations and reach agreements with different states without taking sides in their disputes. He said Mogadishu did not want to be drawn into regional quarrels and was working to stop existing conflicts from spreading. He also acknowledged that a wider war in Ethiopia could hit Somalia’s economy, its security and the movement of people across a long shared border.
The deputy minister also said Ethiopian troops remained at their positions inside the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission (AUSSOM) and were still working with federal forces, and that Mogadishu had received no official notice of any withdrawal. On 30 September people familiar with Addis Ababa’s plans said more than 3,000 Ethiopian soldiers would be pulled out of Somalia to fight in Tigray. A defence ministry official said the next day that Ethiopia had told Mogadishu nothing. Ethiopia’s agreed AUSSOM allocation is 2,500 soldiers, and further Ethiopian units serve in Bay, Bakool, Gedo and Hiiraan under direct agreements with the federal government.
Those garrisons now sit in the middle of Somalia’s own fighting. In Gedo the Doolow district commissioner said in early October that his administration would follow the Ethiopian forces in the town, and in Bay part of the federal garrison of Qansaxdheere went into the Ethiopian camp when former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen’s Darawish took the town. On 9 October Jubaland took over the camps at Beled Hawo, near the Ethiopian border, from Abdirashid Janan, a commander who had sided with Mogadishu. Nadaara did not say what Mogadishu would ask of Addis Ababa if the Ethiopian units were recalled, and the federal government has published no plan for the bases they hold.
Egyptian Troops for Ceel-cade
Five days after Alamein, a report from Cairo published on 9 October said Egyptian advisers, trainers and officers were preparing to deploy army troops to Somalia for the first time since the two governments signed a military cooperation agreement in August 2024. The deployment would come partly under the bilateral agreement and partly inside AUSSOM. The troops are to be based at Ceel-cade, the former Cisiley airfield on Mogadishu’s northern outskirts in Middle Shabelle, about 400 kilometres from the nearest point of the Ethiopian border. Cairo has given no figure for the contingent and no date for its arrival.
The same report placed an Egyptian military delegation with Defence Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi in Mogadishu on 20 September, and Egyptian officers with senior Somali commanders about five days later. On 5 October, the day after Alamein, President al-Sisi said in an address marking the anniversary of the 1973 war that Egypt would give up none of its share of the Nile, which he called a red line. Lieutenant General Khaled Okasha, an Egyptian security analyst, described Somalia as Egypt’s “strategic depth” and said its disintegration would threaten shipping to the Suez Canal.
Egypt’s AUSSOM place has waited more than a year for its soldiers. The mission allocated 1,091 troops to Egypt, against 4,500 for Uganda, 2,500 for Ethiopia, 1,520 for Djibouti and 1,410 for Kenya. Somalia’s defence ministry welcomed the end of the first training course for the Egyptian units in August 2025. On 1 September this year the state minister for foreign affairs, Ali Mohamed Omar, said funding and procedure were still holding them back. “The problem is not Egypt’s political commitment or lack of readiness,” he said, adding that the Egyptians were expected to take over from Burundian troops. The African Union estimates AUSSOM’s annual cost at about 196 million dollars and received about 120 million in 2025. The mission’s mandate, renewed by the Security Council in December 2025, runs out on 31 December.
Alamein and the War North of the Border
Ethiopia’s foreign minister, Gedion Timothewos, wrote in a letter dated Thursday 8 October that Eritrea had launched an “all-out invasion” of northern Ethiopia, with its forces up to 60 kilometres inside Tigray. In the same letter he claimed Ethiopia’s right of self-defence. Eritrea’s information minister, Yemane Gebremeskel, answered that Ethiopia had waged an “unprovoked war of aggression” against his country for more than three years and wanted the Eritrean port of Assab. Ethiopia closed its embassy in Asmara on 1 October and expelled ten Eritrean diplomats. Eritrea then cut its diplomatic ties with Addis Ababa in return.
Ethiopian federal forces have since taken Mekelle back from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, one of seven armed groups in an alliance formed in September to remove Abiy Ahmed’s government. Witnesses also reported Ethiopian drone strikes on Eritrean troops near Adigrat. On 10 October Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an immediate halt to the fighting in Tigray, Afar and Amhara and warned of a wider regional war. The Ethiopian army chief, Field Marshal Birhanu Jula, has accused Egypt, Sudan and Eritrea of backing the rebels, and all three governments deny it. Each of those three governments signed the Alamein communique with Somalia four days before Gedion’s letter.
Somalia’s border with Ethiopia runs for more than 1,600 kilometres. The Ethiopian units on the Somali side of it are stationed in Gedo, Bay, Bakool and Hiiraan, the regions where the federal army has lost Beled Hawo to Jubaland, Qansaxdheere to Laftagareen’s forces and, by one count, Hees to al-Shabaab. Egypt’s soldiers are bound for Ceel-cade, on the road north out of the capital, and its contingent inside the mission was meant to replace the Burundians. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, whose term the opposition says ended in May, now hosts the Ethiopian army in the south-west and awaits Egypt’s at the edge of Mogadishu. His signature sits on the Alamein text whose Nile and Red Sea clauses Ethiopian officials have objected to.
