GAROWE, SOMALIA – On 21 July Puntland moved troops off the Cal Miskaad front and sent them down to the Bosaso highway to intercept a column of the Puntland Security Force. The same soldiers who had spent nineteen months clearing caves of Islamic State fighters spent that Tuesday disarming men who draw salaries from Mogadishu. Nothing about the redeployment was contradictory. Puntland sovereignty rests on a single proposition, that no armed body operates inside the state without the state’s authority, and the banner a group flies does not alter what it has done.
One Standard for Every Armed Group
A state under construction cannot afford a sliding scale of rebellion. Puntland has spent a quarter of a century assembling the ordinary machinery of government: courts, a treasury, a police force, an electoral calendar. Every one of those institutions depends on the same premise, that the administration alone decides who may carry weapons in its territory. Groups that reject the premise are in the same legal position whatever they call themselves, whether they answer to the Islamic State, to al-Shabaab, to the local coinage of Al-Sheydaan, or to a federal ministry in Mogadishu.
President Said Abdullahi Deni’s standing directive says as much in plain administrative language. Heavily armed forces may not move through towns and populated areas without authorisation, and he warned again this month that Puntland would not tolerate armed groups operating outside the authority of the regional administration. The order names no ideology because movement without sanction is the offence, and the state applies that rule to a jihadist column in the Bari highlands and to a technical convoy on the Laag road in identical terms.
This is where Puntland sovereignty parts company with the analytical habits of its foreign partners, who sort Somali armed actors into terrorists worth funding operations against and political factions worth mediating with. The distinction is useful in Washington and Ankara. It is meaningless in Garowe, where a mortar fired by a man with a federal payslip lands exactly as hard as one fired by a man who swore an oath to Abdulqadir Mumin. The state grades its enemies by their conduct toward its authority, and the vocabulary of their propaganda changes nothing about that conduct.
What ISIS Actually Costs Puntland Sovereignty
None of that argument minimises the war in the mountains, which has been the costliest fight Puntland has ever waged on its own account. Operation Hilaac opened in December 2024 and ground through the caves and wells of the Cal Miskaad range. It took dozens of Islamic State positions with support from US Africa Command and Emirati airpower, at a price counted in dead Darwish soldiers rather than in press releases. Puntland forces have taken wells and cave systems the group used as launch points, captured foreign fighters, and pushed the survivors into the folds of the Baallade drainage.
The state fought that campaign essentially alone, which is the first thing to note about the defence of Puntland sovereignty in the mountains. Mogadishu sent no troops to Bari while the offensive was at its height. That silence sits oddly beside its later insistence that the federal government commands forces inside Puntland. The group had consolidated its hold on Al Miskaad years before the offensive began, and it lost its fixed positions only when Emirati airstrikes broke them.
Yet measure the group against the thing it supposedly endangers. The Islamic State in Somalia governs no district in Puntland, runs no parallel administration, collects no customs at a port, and commands the loyalty of no clan constituency capable of contesting an election. Its numbers run to the low hundreds, heavy with foreigners who cannot recruit locally without protection from a small circle around Mumin. It can kill soldiers, extort businesses and hold ground that nobody else wants. It cannot present itself as the lawful authority in a single Puntland town, which is precisely the capability that would make it a threat to Puntland sovereignty rather than a lethal and expensive security problem.
The Rebellion That Comes With a Payroll
The PSF occupies a different category, and a more dangerous one. Washington built the force as a counter-terrorism unit, trained and financed it through the Central Intelligence Agency, and left it headquartered in Bosaso with a command culture that answered outward rather than upward. The rupture came after the 2019 presidential election, when Deni defeated General Asad Osman Abdullahi, known as Asad Diyano, and then dismissed the PSF commander Mahamud Osman Diyano, the general’s brother. The dismissal was refused. In December 2021 the disagreement became a battle in Bosaso, after which Puntland dissolved the force and stood up the Puntland Intelligence and Security Agency in its place.
What turned a mutiny into a constitutional confrontation was Mogadishu’s decision to adopt it. The federal government appointed Asad Diyano chief of the Somali Police Force. In October 2024 it announced that the PSF had joined the Somali National Armed Forces as the 17th military unit, with federal salaries and federal logistics attached. Defence Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi has since restated that the PSF forms part of federal government forces. Puntland rejected the arrangement outright, arguing that the federal government holds no constitutional power to recognise or deploy armed forces inside the state without the state’s consent.
Read the sequence plainly and the hierarchy of threats to Puntland sovereignty inverts. A group of fighters lost a domestic political contest, refused a lawful dismissal and took up arms. Mogadishu then handed them a federal uniform and a federal wage, which is something the Islamic State can never obtain. That combination contests the question of who holds legitimate authority in Bosaso. Puntland sovereignty survives a hundred fighters in a cave; it does not survive the proposition that a rival government may license armed factions on its territory and call them a national army.
Two Fronts and One Army
The practical cost of that proposition became visible in the Laag operation itself. Puntland said intelligence showed PSF units moving from Bosaso toward the coastal district of Haafuun, and it pulled forces out of the Almiskaad mountains to secure the Bosaso to Garowe highway. Darwish troops ambushed the convoy, surrounded it, and the PSF withdrew overnight on foot through the hills, abandoning its technical vehicles. Puntland captured personnel and seized the vehicles, then told any remaining federal-aligned units to surrender or face the same treatment.
Every soldier on that highway came off the mountain front, and the Islamic State reads redeployment as opportunity. Analysts writing in mid July argued that the group has stepped up operations from Al Miskaad while Puntland’s attention turned elsewhere. That is the predictable arithmetic of fighting two rebellions with one army, and it is the clearest cost the second front imposes on Puntland sovereignty. The federal government has not explained why it wants that front open in Bari while the first war remains unfinished.
Around that operation sits a wider set of measures that show how thoroughly Garowe now treats federal deployments as hostile. Puntland has barred federal officials from entering the region, prohibited federal military recruitment and imposed checkpoints on the movement of federal forces between towns. General Jimaale Takar, Mogadishu’s newly appointed commander for the northern regions, found himself blocked from returning. Garowe has separately accused the federal government of smuggling weapons to provoke civil war, an allegation Mogadishu has not answered. Since Bosaso the same pattern has extended to Galkayo, where Puntland warned that federal military movements risk a direct confrontation.
Where Puntland Sovereignty Is Decided
The federal case for the PSF rests on a legal fiction that collapses under its own logic. If Mogadishu may absorb any armed faction that quarrels with a member state, issue it a unit number and declare the matter settled, then every defeated candidate in every regional election holds a standing option to convert his militia into national forces. Somali federalism would consist of nothing more than the right of the centre to arm the losers. The method is the same one that undermined Jubaland’s elections, applied now with heavier weapons.
Puntland’s answer has been consistent, and it is the answer of a state rather than a faction. It fights the men in the caves and it disarms the men on the highway, using the same forces, the same commanders and the same legal justification. It has offered no amnesty to the Islamic State on grounds of religion, and none to the PSF on grounds of citizenship. In both cases the offence is identical, the refusal to accept the authority of the administration that governs the territory.
The war in Cal Miskaad will end the way such wars end, slowly, with the last fighters starved out of the high ground. The other question stays open, and it will be settled in Mogadishu rather than by soldiers, when the federal government decides whether Somali federalism means a partnership among governments or a licence for the centre to raise armed clients inside its member states. Until Mogadishu answers, Puntland sovereignty will be defended against both rebellions at once, and the treason of the Islamic State will remain the smaller of the two.
