BOSASO, SOMALIA – The Puntland Defence Forces took over the PSF headquarters in Bosaso on Thursday morning without a shot fired, ending more than two decades of the compound’s occupation by a force that now answers to Mogadishu. The handover of the Bosaso camp followed hours of talks with the men inside and their officers, held to keep the battle that consumed Galkayo a day earlier out of Puntland’s commercial capital.
How the Bosaso camp changed hands
Puntland’s security services announced the takeover of the Bosaso camp in a statement issued during the morning. The Defence Forces had “formally taken over the command and the headquarters that had been occupied by armed militias who unlawfully passed themselves off as security forces, formerly known as the PSF,” the statement said, adding that the site was now fully in government hands with its security and administration secured.
The language carries the whole of Garowe’s legal argument in one clause. By calling the occupants militias who impersonated a security force, the administration casts the transfer as the recovery of a state facility rather than a victory over a rival army. That framing has governed every step of this confrontation, and it is the framing under which Puntland has been detaining, disarming and now accepting the surrender of men who until recently drew federal salaries. Garowe has applied it consistently enough that its foreign partners have never had to choose a side in public.
Accounts from the city describe the departure itself as orderly. The fighters walked out of the base they had held for more than twenty years, and Puntland troops moved in behind them. Residents reported no gunfire and no cordon of the surrounding districts, in a city where the same compound produced days of shelling five years ago. Traffic through the port road ran normally while the transfer took place.
Neither the statement nor the reporting from Bosaso put numbers on any of it. How many men left, what weapons and vehicles stayed behind, whether anyone was detained, and what was promised to those who walked out are all unstated. Puntland published a detailed inventory within hours of taking the Galkayo camp, down to the boots and the handcuffs. The silence over the Bosaso camp suggests terms that both sides would rather leave undescribed, which is usually the price of getting men to leave a position voluntarily.
The talks that replaced a battle
The withdrawal came after negotiations that ran through the preceding hours, aimed squarely at averting a fight inside Bosaso. An officer named Cabdullaahi Cismaan Diyaano is reported to have agreed on Wednesday to give the Bosaso camp up, a day before his men filed out. The family name matters here: the Diyaano brothers sit at the origin of this entire dispute, and one of them agreeing to hand over the last major PSF position in the north closes a circle that opened in 2019.
President Said Abdullahi Deni had set the clock the day before. Hours after his forces stormed the Galkayo camp, he gave federal-aligned fighters still inside Puntland territory a 48-hour window to present themselves to the state, pairing the threat of further operations with an open door for anyone who came in voluntarily. The Bosaso officers used the door. They watched what the alternative looked like in Mudug and moved before the deadline ran out. Every hour that passed made the terms available to them worse.
The contrast between the two cities is the story of the week. Puntland’s dawn assault on the Galkayo camp ended with 101 detainees, 60 wounded fighters in custody and a boy killed by a mortar round in a residential district. Bosaso got the same outcome for the price of a conversation. Garowe has now demonstrated both instruments in 24 hours, which strengthens the ultimatum still running against the units left in Garowe and elsewhere.
Geography sharpened everyone’s incentives. The Bosaso camp sits beside the port that carries Puntland’s trade and the World Food Programme facility next to it, so a firefight there would have closed the northeast’s commercial artery and its aid pipeline in the same morning. Both sides understood what a battle would have cost, and the talks reflected that arithmetic. The quarrel underneath is untouched.
Twenty years inside one compound
The force that walked out was built to fight a different enemy. The PSF was raised with American backing and trained for intelligence-led operations against the Islamic State faction in the Cal Miskaad mountains, work that gave Puntland its standing with Washington and gave the unit capabilities no other formation in the northeast possesses. For most of two decades the Bosaso camp was the base from which that campaign was run, and its officers were the men Washington dealt with in the northeast.
The command dispute began with an election. Said Abdullahi Deni defeated General Asad Osman Abdullahi, known as Asad Diyano, in the 2019 state contest, then dismissed the PSF commander Mahamud Osman Diyano, the general’s brother. The commander refused to go. By December 2021 the disagreement had become a battle inside Bosaso, with shells landing in residential districts of the city the force existed to protect. Puntland dissolved the PSF on paper afterwards and stood up a new intelligence and security agency in its place, though the men in the Bosaso camp stayed where they were.
Mogadishu then adopted the losing side. It made Asad Diyano chief of the federal police and announced in October 2024 that the PSF had been absorbed into the Somali National Armed Forces, a claim Garowe rejected as constitutionally void. From that point the compound in Bosaso housed a force with Puntland’s name, Mogadishu’s payroll and no agreed chain of command, which is the condition that produced the confrontation at Laag in July, where Puntland stopped a PSF column and took 30 fighters and 13 vehicles.
Seen against that record, Thursday’s quiet exit is the most consequential thing to happen in the compound since the shelling. The dispute that survived a dissolution, an absorption and two armed confrontations ended with officers walking their men out through the gate.
What Mogadishu has left in Puntland
The federal position in the northeast is now a scatter of fragments. A PSF element holding nine vehicles near Qardho has gone over to the North East State administration. Others who fled Galkayo crossed into Galmudug and are reported at the Danab base in the south of the city, sheltering with the American-trained commando brigade that was ordered into Wednesday’s battle too late to affect it. Units claiming federal affiliation remain in Garowe and a few other locations, and Deni’s ultimatum is aimed at them.
Villa Somalia has said nothing about Bosaso, as it said nothing about Galkayo. The federal government spent the summer moving weapons, uniforms and recruits toward Puntland, and Garowe intercepted the most recent shipment in south Galkayo on Tuesday before taking the camp it was meant to supply. Two days later the instrument that investment was meant to serve has given up the Bosaso camp, its last northern stronghold, without a fight.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is left holding the argument he began the week with. His government has no foothold in Puntland, no answer to the accusation that it armed a rebellion inside a federal member state, and a war against al-Shabaab that lost a garrison at Teedaan in the same seven days. The administration that spent those days fighting on his behalf in Mudug and Bari is also the one carrying the campaign against the Islamic State faction in the mountains above Bosaso.
What Garowe holds now is a set of compounds and a queue of men deciding whether to walk in voluntarily. What it has not resolved is the politics underneath, and Puntland’s own forces are stretched across three fronts to keep it that way. The Bosaso camp changed hands on the strength of a conversation; the quarrel that filled it with federal payroll will take considerably more than that.
