Somaliland is still dealing with the effects of the mass murders committed under Siad Barre’s rule, decades after the Isaaq genocide claimed tens of thousands of lives and left half a million refugees. As efforts to find mass graves and preserve testimonies face political and temporal challenges, survivors call for justice, remembrance and international recognition for the self-declared republic.

 

Content warning: this story includes descriptions of violence and suffering.

 

“I was supposed to be one of those people in that grave,” says 54-year-old Nuur Ismail Hirsi. Closing his eyes, he shudders at the memory of when decomposed skeletons were first unearthed from a mass grave site in Somaliland. 

The corpses were among the tens of thousands of victims of the First Somali Civil War, which divided the country between 1988 and 1991. President Siad Barre, who had ruled over the country with US backing since 1969, oversaw a brutal crackdown on members of the Somali National Movement (SNM) and civilians in northwest Somalia. Those civilians were mostly from the Isaaq clan in the territory that in 1991 became Somaliland. Today it remains an internationally unrecognized nation-state. 

It was 1997, just six years after Barre was overthrown and Somaliland officially declared independence from Somalia in response to this genocidal state campaign. Heavy rains and flash floods caused the human remains of this mass grave in Malko Durduro, a valley area on the outskirts of Somaliland’s capital, Hargeisa, to come to the surface. 

Earning the moniker the “Valley of Death,” this area was the most notorious execution site during the war. Over the years, about a dozen other mass graves have also been identified and excavated around Somaliland.

“There’s not a single day that goes by that I don’t think about the things that I saw,” says Hirsi. “I have never been able to make peace with the past. Every day I cry for the souls of all those people who are still piled in the ground beneath us.”

This year marks the 37th anniversary of the Isaaq genocide, often called the “Hargeisa Holocaust,” when about 90% of the city was destroyed and tens of thousands of Isaaqs were hunted down and killed. 

In 1991, when Somaliland, which mostly makes up the traditional territory of the Isaaq clan, broke away from Somalia, clan elders agreed to forgive and forget the atrocities of the past to ensure peace between the majority Isaaq clan in Somaliland who were victims of the violence and minority clans who fought alongside Barre’s government forces.

But, over the years, activists and survivors have worked diligently to challenge this initial ‘forgive-and-forget’ approach of the autonomous Somaliland government, actively documenting the voices of survivors and promoting the memorialization of the atrocities the population endured.

Despite the coastal territory having been a self-governing region of Somalia for more than three decades, building a relatively stable democracy and attracting major foreign investors, its claim of independence has not been recognized by any foreign government or by the central Somali government in Mogadishu, which fervently opposes it.

Some survivors of the genocide, however, have intertwined their own healing and pursuits of justice to the recognition of Somaliland’s independence. Last year, a controversial memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between Somaliland and neighboring Ethiopia, which would see Somaliland leasing out 20 kilometers of sea access for 50 years and allowing landlocked Ethiopia to build a military base on its coast. In return, Ethiopia would become the first country to officially recognize Somaliland as an independent state.

While this has further raised tensions with Somalia and provoked friction in the broader Horn of Africa region, for Somalilanders the deal has been excitedly celebrated, with hopes it brings them a step closer to an international recognition of both their sovereignty and the pains of their past. 

‘It was a slaughterhouse’

During the civil war in the 1980s, Barre unleashed a reign of terror and lawlessness on northern Somalia following the creation of the SNM (Somali National Movement), an Isaaq-based anti-government guerilla organization. 

Between 1987 and 1989, the regime massacred an estimated 200,000 members of the Isaaq clan, while half a million people fled the country. 

A 2001 UN report investigating the attacks against the Isaaqs concluded that “the crime of genocide was conceived, planned and perpetrated by the Somalia Government against the Isaaq people of northern Somalia.” 

 

The state’s genocide policy was allegedly outlined in an official “genocide report”, The Final Solution to the Isaaq Problem, of which an unauthenticated digital copy exists.

Somalia used its airforce, army and navy to flatten Somaliland’s largest cities, poisoned its wells, aerially bombarded critical infrastructure, strafed fleeing civilians, and used rape and a man-made famine as weapons of war. 

It also imposed a 15-year state of emergency and curfew, and laid more than a million mines in civilian areas. A report commissioned by the United States government in 1989 concluded that the Somali army’s practice of killing victims “principally because of their ethnic identity” was “unmistakable.” 

More than three decades later, however, the events have been mostly forgotten. It was not until 2022 that the first ever commemoration of the genocide was held in Hargeisa. 

Other than international prosecutions of some perpetrators — such as General Mohamed Cali Samatar and Yusuf Abdi Ali, commonly known as “Tukeh” — no one in Somaliland has ever been charged for crimes related to the genocide, with authorities fearing that such a move could spark conflict between clans in the territory. 

In the education curricula of Somaliland’s schools, this bloody history that led to Somaliland’s long pursuit for independence is notably absent. 

But the horrors of the genocide continue to play out in a torturous loop for survivors. Experts say there are more than 200 mass graves in Somaliland, most of them in Malko Durduro, which was in the vicinity of the former headquarters of the 26th division of the Somali National Army. 

Hirsi remembers the horrors he witnessed when he was detained there decades ago. “It was a slaughterhouse,” Hirsi says, his eyes widening as his mind returns to memories that continue to haunt him. 

“Each day, the soldiers would collect the prisoners, tie them together, and then take them to the valley and shoot them dead. They were executed not more than 20 yards away from us.”

“We could see all of them being killed and the ugly fate that awaited us,” he continues. “Some would scream out their wills as they were being tied up and led to the killing fields, in hopes that if any of us survived we could help their families.” 

Hirsi, who says he witnessed the execution of hundreds of Isaaq during his detention, was miraculously spared and released in 1988. 

For years after Somaliland declared independence, peace and stability was the nascent nation’s top priority, particularly as violence escalated in southern Somalia and is still ongoing. But the executed victims below the earth’s surface refused to stay quiet. 

Old wounds ripped open

After the bones first emerged in 1997, many Somalilanders demanded the establishment of a war crimes tribunal. In response, the United Nations, at the request of the Somaliland government, initiated an explorative forensic mission at the site, which found that the bodies were bound together by ligature and thrown into the site haphazardly — indicative of mass human rights violations. 

However, according to scholars, there was no follow-up on the visit of the experts and no tribunal was set up. Old wounds, meanwhile, were ripped wide open. 

“When I saw the bones, I cried like I was living through the horrors all over again,” says Hirsi, dropping his face in the palms of his hands. 

“In Somaliland, we have peace… and that’s it,” his eyes blurring with tears. “But we don’t have any recognition of what happened to us.” 

As public outcry over the government’s inaction followed the unearthing of the mass grave site, Somaliland authorities attempted to appease its population by establishing the War Crimes Investigation Commission (WCIC), which began compiling testimonies of survivors. These testimonies, however, remained confidential and were not accessible to the public.

‘It felt like he was being killed again’

Over time, Somaliland authorities buckled under public pressure and, in 2012, partnered with Equipo Peruano de Antropología Forense (EPAF), a Peruvian NGO specialising in forensic anthropology, who brought in a team of forensic experts to exhume the human remains from mass grave sites throughout the country. 

Their goal was to gather enough evidence to bring alleged perpetrators of war crimes to justice in foreign courts, many of whom had settled overseas. The government further hoped that revealing evidence of the atrocities would help convince other countries to recognize Somaliland’s independence from Somalia. 

“Apart from documenting the evidence of crimes, we also wanted to give them a proper Islamic burial,” explains Mahmoud Abdi, head of the WCIC, which is now known as the War Crimes and Genocide Investigation Committee. 

“This is an important part of all of it — to give these people some dignity in their burials.” According to Abdi, after their partnership with EPAF ended in 2018, the government independently continued the excavation of mass graves. 

“We are discovering mass graves all the time in Somaliland, so we are continuing this work up until today,” Abdi says. 

Around two dozen mass graves have so far been excavated in the territory since 2013 and about 250 bodies have been reburied, mostly in Hargeisa. Most of these bodies, however, have not been identified. 

“We don’t have the resources to do DNA matching on the bodies with families who have reported missing loved ones,” explains Abdi. “So, the few who have identified their relatives were able to do so based on clothing on the bodies or items found on them.” 

Zainab Nur Alen loudly wails and buries her face in her palms while sitting on a couch in her home in Arabsiya, a town located about 30km west of Hargeisa. 

“It felt like he was being killed again,” cries Alen, remembering when her husband’s remains were excavated from a mass grave at Malko Durduro in 2015. 

She was only married to her husband, 25-year-old Yusef Ahmad Gudal, for a little over a year when Somali national soldiers executed him, forcing Alem, who was pregnant at the time, to watch. 

“My husband and father had their hands bound and they were led out to a field and tied onto a pole,” Alen says, her voice shaking. “Then they shot my husband dead.”

Her father was spared at the last moment. “But he’s never been the same,” she adds. “He went crazy after that. He’s become psychotic. Even today, you can find him roaming around the streets talking to himself.” 

The only thought that gave Alen some faint hope over the years was that perhaps the bullets did not actually kill her husband and he miraculously survived the shooting. 

“My husband was always still alive in my head,” she says, wiping tears from her face. “But when the bones were removed from the grave, it felt like that was the day he truly died. It destroyed the hope I had that he would come home one day.”

Alen was unable to identify her husband’s body because the remains were too decomposed. “But I knew deep down that my husband was one of the skeletons,”  Alen says, tears overwhelming her again. 

“I’m reliving this memory every day. It’s the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning and the first thing I think about when I close my eyes to sleep. I still cannot heal from it.” 

The Somaliland government reburied these bodies in Hargeisa and there is now a tombstone bearing her husband’s name. But this has done little to comfort Alen. 

“The least the world could do is recognize our independence from the brutal government that did this to us,” she barks, the injustices still dancing behind her wide eyes. 

Alen is not alone in her sentiments. As the mass graves forced Somaliland’s population to revisit an agonizing past, many began advocating for the memorialization and documentation of the atrocities, believing these efforts are integral to the territory’s process of nation-building. 

They hope that educating the world about this past will one day allow the international community to understand the necessity of recognizing the territory as an independent country. 

‘Pact of silence’

Hargeisa’s streets are lined with flourishing businesses and elegant hotels; the only sign that a war — and with it a genocide — had occurred here is the War Monument located in the center of the city. 

Erected on top of the monument’s large columns is a fighter aircraft of the Somali Air Force, which had ravaged the city during the war before crashing. It was later seized by the SNM guerillas. 

“After independence, all our resources were put into security, schools, hospitals, and police stations,” explains Abdirazak Abdi, director of the Isaaq Genocide Foundation. 

“We liberated the country and found ourselves in the middle of nowhere and we were forced to focus on rebuilding the city and economy.” 

“And now our economy is booming and we are a financial center in the region,” he continues. “We built a strong and functioning state with the meagre resources we had. And, yet, behind all the fancy buildings, we still have people on the streets suffering from severe mental issues because they have never received any help to process what happened to them.” 

According to Abdirazak, out of each Somali household in the Somaliland territory, at least one person is mentally unwell owing to what they experienced during the war. 

It’s not possible to just forget your loved ones being shot dead in front of you,” he continues. “Forgiving and forgetting are not possible when the injustices have never truly been recognized.”

Despite the Somaliland government taking steps to document the crimes committed decades ago, activists and survivors say it is not enough – and they have worked diligently to fill in these gaps. Over the years, survivors, including Hirsi, have written autobiographies and memoirs about their experiences during the war. 

“In Somaliland, our leaders took a pact of silence in order to maintain peace,” explains Mohamed Barud Ali, author of The Mourning Tree: An Autobiography and a Prison Memoir, which describes his experiences being imprisoned by the Somali government for nearly a decade, during which time he faced prolonged torture and was held in solitary confinement for years. 

“But, in my opinion, this is the wrong approach. If we erase and forget about these atrocities then we run the risk of the same thing happening again. As survivors, we need to tell our stories so that our future generations remember what happened here.” 

“If you ask young people about the war and what happened, most of them don’t know much about it,” Ali continues, sitting behind a desk at an office in Hargeisa. 

“In schools they don’t learn about it and family members who experienced the trauma are reluctant to talk about it. We are running the risk of forgetting a huge part of our history.” 

Ali has also advocated for more resources to be allocated to mental health programs in Somaliland’s ministry of health, which has long been neglected by the government.

For many survivors, however, talking about this past is extremely difficult. Hoodo Mohamed Jama, 45, was just 10 years old during the war. Her family, along with about one million other Somalis across the country, eventually fled the territory and resettled as refugees in the United Kingdom. 

Jama, now a mother of six children – aged from four to 23 – returned with her family to Somaliland a few years ago. 

At the start of the devastating government aerial bombardments on the territory, Jama, who is from Burao, fled to a hospital where her father, who was an SNM member, was being treated after being shot in his leg. “It was a hospital so my family thought we would be safe there,” Jama says. Instead, however, the Somali army targeted the hospital with a barrage of artillery. 

“I remember there was a huge explosion,” Jama recounts. “All I could see was dust and I heard everyone coughing. Then someone shouted that my mom had been hit. I felt very confused and I looked around to see my mom….” She pauses for a moment, choking back tears. “I saw her forehead had been blown off her head and it was on the floor. Blood was everywhere.”

“That picture has never left me, more than 30 years later,” Jama explains. “I don’t like to talk about this because I still haven’t really processed all of it.” Despite the difficulties of revisiting these memories, Jama has made sure to share her experiences with her children.

 

“When I was a child, I was always angry and getting expelled from school,” continues Jama, who now works for the diaspora department in Somaliland’s foreign ministry. “That was my cry for help. But the adults around me just wanted me to move on from it. Even now, when I ask them questions about what happened during the war, they tell me to just forget about it. It’s their way of coping — just pretending that nothing happened and trying to forget about it.” 

“But I wanted my children to know what happened. It is important for them to know who their mom is and what I’ve been through. And it’s important to teach them how Somaliland came to be – and the violence that we faced cannot be separated from that.” 

Despite having returned to Somaliland about six years ago, Jama has still not mustered the courage to visit her childhood village in Burao, where her mother is buried in a mass grave. “I’m just worried it may be too much for me to emotionally bear,” she says. 

‘Never again’

Other Somalilanders are promoting the arts as a way of helping young people understand their history and build an identity that can help them process the past. 

“What happened in Somaliland is that we built up all the facilities to become an independent country, but we forgot about the human beings,” explains Jama Musse, the director and co-founder of the Hargeysa Cultural Centre, which stimulates the revival of art and human expression among Somalis, including through storytelling, poetry, drama, graphic art, and photography. 

“But when you remove the stories of genocide and art and culture from the state-building process, then you remove what makes a human a human being,” he continues. “You strip people of their humanity… because while you are building these beautiful buildings, you are leaving the soul empty. You are creating a people who have no identity anymore.” 

Nada Yousef, a 31-year-old poet who grew up in the UK, visits Somaliland with her family most summers. She is involved in the local arts and poetry scene in Hargeisa. 

Sitting on the couch in her family’s home in Hargeisa, Yousef, whose uncle was killed in the war, recites a poem she recently performed at a poetry night held at the Hargeysa Cultural Center. 

 

“I wrote this a few years ago when I was in the UK and feeling nostalgic about Somaliland,” Yousef says. “I really want the whole world to know what happened to us. I believe the world recognizing our pain is the only way for us to heal.”

But many survivors have already passed on before telling their stories. “When these people die, their stories die with them,” explains Abdelaziz Mohammed Yunus, an English teacher and writer in Hargeisa. 

“We need to give more priority and focus on documenting the stories of those who are left so that the next generation can understand what happened and that it should never happen again.” 

Yunus, who grew up in a village on the border with Ethiopia where SNM fighters would cross into the territory to fight government forces, remembers being nine years old and watching a young SNM fighter who had been captured by the Somali army being stripped naked, tied to a Toyota, and then dragged throughout the streets of his town. 

“That’s an image that never leaves my mind,” says Yunus, who has also written a book about his experiences during the war. “They tied his legs to the vehicle and he was on his back, facing up. The vehicle passed by our family’s home.”

According to Yunus, the man’s body was then tied up to a tree. “That’s a scene that no human being should ever see. I was never the same after that. Animals wouldn’t even do this to their own kind. And we are Muslims, hanging human bodies off tree branches. It was an image I still cannot make sense of.”

“They did all of this to torment the civilians and show us what would happen to us if we went against them,” he adds. 

Growing up in Somaliland, Yunus says there was always a fear that this violence could happen again. 

“Even now, I am still scared,” he says. “As long as the [central] Somali government does not recognize what happened here, then the threat of it happening again will always remain… because our killer has never given us an apology.”