By Abdisaid Muse Ali
The chain that links Bosaso to El Fasher is not made of ideology or coincidence. It is built from logistics. In October 2025, Ilyushin IL-76s flew a fixed loop from the United Arab Emirates to Bosaso, then to Kufra and eastern Libyan fields, before returning along the same route, and the repetition of identical tail numbers, stable slot and turnaround times, and unvarying waypoints signaled a managed shuttle rather than commercial variability. That regularity is the mark of intent. It shows infrastructure repurposed into a protected logistics spine that operates behind formal paperwork but outside meaningful end use control, where airspace clearance, customs inspection, and cargo verification function as signatures rather than safeguards.
Patterns of this kind are the signature of intent, revealing infrastructure quietly repurposed for strategic proxy operations under the cover of routine. In this pattern lies the anatomy of a late-forming state’s vulnerability: infrastructure that operates without moral supervision, sovereignty leased by corridor, and legality hollowed into formality. The flights did not merely connect airports; they mapped the political economy of dependence, where repetition substitutes for strategy and access is traded for complicity. These were not commercial charters. Placed against United States intelligence reporting that the UAE has supplied the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan with weapons, including Chinese-made armed drones, the Bosaso waypoint becomes impossible to ignore. It marks Somalia’s territory as part of a clandestine network sustaining a militia accused of genocide.
According to assessments described by United States and regional officials, Emirati support to the RSF intensified after the militia lost Khartoum in March. The shipments included drones from the Chinese Rainbow series together with heavy machine guns, mortars, and large quantities of ammunition, and that mix restored range, persistence, and firepower to the RSF, enabling renewed operations in North Darfur that tightened the eighteen-month siege of El Fasher and further cut civilians off from food, medicine, and relief.
Intelligence assessments identify a consolidated route in which flights departed the United Arab Emirates, transited airfields in Somalia and Libya, and then continued by road into Sudan, a chain whose structure disperses custody across jurisdictions and conceals military purpose behind civilian documentation. The Emirates deny supplying weaponry to any side, and the RSF calls the allegations political fabrications. Satellite images and field reporting align to show a designed sequence of war: sustained airstrikes mapped along approach roads, tightening rings of movement around El Fasher, and the predictable collapse of food and medical access that signals siege.
Under President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, Somalia, including Puntland, is alleged to have issued diplomatic clearances that enabled related flights to transit Somalia’s airspace and facilities, and if so, those approvals converted private logistics into state sanctioned passage and created a chain of responsibility that must be reconstructed in public through cargo manifest audits, end use certification, and verified physical inspections. The legal implications are severe. Diplomatic clearance transforms private flights into officially sanctioned movements. It signals consent, not ignorance. If such permissions were issued without full awareness of their cargo or destination, it reveals institutional negligence. If issued knowingly, it marks complicity in one of Africa’s gravest atrocities in recent memory.
Puntland’s role remains operational. Bosaso’s facilities offered the geography, refueling capacity, and permissive regulation required for recurrent heavy-lift flights. This was not the product of chance but of a political environment where oversight is fragmentary and regional leaders exercise de facto control over ports and airports. What should have been a hub for commerce became a waypoint in a war economy. The airspace of a fragile state was rented to external powers for uses that now stain its sovereignty.
Somalia’s leaders cannot plead surprise. For years, the UAE has blended development aid with strategic projection, arming factions in Yemen, funding militias in Libya, and now backing the RSF in Sudan’s fractured battlefield. The objective is leverage along the Red Sea and Sahel corridors, where logistics and loyalty are more valuable than ideology. Somalia, perched on that corridor, has again become the instrument rather than the author of strategy.
The cost is steep. Every aircraft that left Bosaso for Kufra carrying dual-use cargo helped prolong the siege of El Fasher, where tens of thousands of civilians are trapped amid famine and indiscriminate violence. A Somalia’s clearance stamp on such a flight is not an administrative act. It is a moral signature on a tragedy. It undermines Somalia’s long campaign to lift the United Nations arms embargo and to present itself as a responsible actor in regional security.
The Federal Government’s silence deepens the damage. If clearances were indeed issued from Mogadishu, then the center cannot blame the periphery. The chain of authorization must be reconstructed in full view, step by step from the originating request to the final approval, with a clear accounting not only of who signed but of who stood to gain. Sovereignty is not a posture delivered in speeches; it is a discipline expressed in control. A state that allows external actors to use its airspace for purposes it neither directs nor verifies concedes both moral standing and strategic leverage, and with them the legitimacy on which authority depends.
Somalis should remember that when our institutions had collapsed, Sudan opened classrooms and training grounds that many others kept closed, admitting our students to universities, awarding scholarships, and instructing a generation of officers and civil servants who later carried responsibility in politics, security, and administration, so that thousands studied medicine, engineering, law, and Islamic jurisprudence and returned with skills and confidence a broken homeland could not provide, and that legacy of refuge and instruction should now guide how we speak and act as Sudan faces its own hour of need. That legacy of refuge and instruction belongs to our national memory and should guide how we speak and act now that Sudan faces its own hour of need. It is therefore painful to see that some of those same individuals, many from the Damuljadiid political current, now turn a blind eye to the suffering of the Sudanese people. The silence of those who once found refuge in Sudan reveals how power can harden the heart and how the memory of solidarity has been replaced by the cold calculus of political convenience.
The practical consequences will soon follow. The African Union and the United Nations Panel of Experts are already examining the flow of weapons into Sudan. Should Somalia’s territory or facilities be confirmed as part of that chain, sanctions and compliance downgrades are inevitable. If Somalia’s facilities are tied to prohibited transfers, the correction will come not from diplomacy but from the market. Global banks will reclassify Somalia exposure as high risk, insurers will withdraw cover, and trade finance will contract until the corridors themselves begin to idle. De-risking is how the world disciplines what it no longer trusts. The costs will not land on the officials who issued the clearances; they will fall on merchants, carriers, and wage earners whose livelihoods depend on the steady movement of goods. Misgovernance collects its dues not in speeches but in the slow suffocation of commerce.
The moral consequences are heavier still. A nation that has buried its own war dead cannot afford to be associated with another people’s massacre. The same international system that condemned impunity in Somalia will not excuse it when Somalis enable it elsewhere. To rebuild credibility, Somalia must act as a state that understands both law and conscience: investigate the clearances, suspend the officials involved, audit all cargo flights since mid-2025, and establish a federal-state compliance authority that prevents recurrence.
Puntland too must repair its own name. It should invite independent inspection of its aviation and port records, reaffirm the supremacy of federal law, and abandon the illusion that autonomy permits strategic freelancing. Deni’s administration may have supplied the infrastructure, but Mogadishu’s consent made the operation possible. Both levels of authority are responsible. Both must be accountable.
El Fasher is not a remote tragedy; it is a mirror held up to the kind of sovereignty that drifts into ceremony when rules, verification, and accountability are absent. Somalia’s airspace and ports were built to move pilgrims, commerce, and relief, not weapons that carry other people’s wars into other people’s cities, and restoring that purpose requires a political decision as much as a technical fix, because sovereignty is a discipline of control and verification rather than an immunity from consequence.
If President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is to restore Somalia’s standing, he must make a clear commitment that no Somali clearance, port, or runway will be used for military resupply to destructive militias in Sudan without serialized end use documentation, independent inspection, and a public record of authorization, so that our authority is measured by what we prevent as well as by what we permit.
Abdisaid M. Ali
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Abdisaid is the chairperson of Lomé Peace and Security Forum, Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation and Former National Security Advisor, Somalia.
