Somalia: the chaos in Mogadishu casts a shadow over Erdogan’s investments

by | Jun 20, 2026

 

Mogadishu has plunged back into chaos following the extension of the presidential term. This situation also complicates Turkey’s ambitions in the country

NAIROBI – The Somali President, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, has already made it clear: Mogadishu’s natural resources – both underground and offshore – are ‘worth billions, perhaps thousands of billions’. Without conflict or tension, he added, the oil “could already have reached international markets”. Mohamud made these remarks in April, when the Turkish exploration vessel Çağrı Bey reached the Somali coast to begin its deep-sea operations. His assessment seemed to refer to the past. Today, it sounds, more than anything else, like a warning about the future.

Somalia, with a population of less than 20 million along Africa’s longest coastline, has once again been plunged to the brink of outright chaos following clashes in early June in Mogadishu between security forces and militias linked to the opposition. The authorities subsequently declared that order had been restored against the ‘illegally armed’ forces, accusing former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire and former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed of having armed the anti-government forces.

The tone of the communication is far from conciliatory. The country’s prospects seem even less so. The casus belli that triggered the violence is the decision by Leader Mohamud himself to extend the presidential term – due to expire in mid-May – by (at least) one year, thereby postponing an election that was supposed to mark a historic transition in Somalia’s institutional history: the first election since 1969 to be held on the principle of ‘one voter, one vote’, following the years of Siad Barre’s dictatorship and the clan-based quota system that has governed voting in Mogadishu for decades.

Turkish expansion in Somalia

Last week’s clashes appear to have subsided, at least on the surface. But the unease pervading the country remains, casting a shadow over Somalia’s aspirations for energy and economic growth, a country crippled by its instability. Mogadishu has awarded Erdogan’s Turkey almost all the rights to exploration off its coast, with the aim of exploring and verifying the estimates released by the government. The ‘billions of dollars’ announced by Mohamud refer primarily to the potential for oil and gas reserves in the region of 30 billion barrels: a figure that has yet to be confirmed and is, for the time being, subject to verification by the Turkish Petroleum Corporation.

This is not Ankara’s only interest in a country that has risen to become its leading African partner, given that at the end of May Turkey expanded its ‘negotiations’ with Mogadishu to include other raw materials it has set its sights on. “The relationship has strengthened considerably since Erdoğan’s visit in 2011 and has become one of Turkey’s most important partnerships in Africa,” explains Volka Ipek of Yeditepe University.

At the top of the list are the reserves – still theoretical – of 10,200 tonnes of uranium within the Somali perimeter, in addition to lithium, copper, titanium, gold and rare earths. The factor that would work in favour of Erdogan’s strategies is also the one that is most lacking: the country’s stability across the three fronts of politics, security and the economy (see our Thermometer).

The three unknowns weighing on the aspiring ‘energy hub’

On the domestic political front, Somalia is caught between the tensions arising from Mohamud’s split and the independence movements in Puntland and, above all, a Somaliland that has only just been recognised by Israel.

The clashes in Mogadishu, explains Corrado Čok of Med-Or, confirm the extent to which the lack of agreement between the government and a clan-based opposition undermines ‘that inter-clan balance enshrined in the 2012 provisional constitution and the parallel electoral power-sharing mechanism which (at least temporarily) halted the civil war that began in the 1990s’. On the international front, the country finds itself exposed to and caught up in the turmoil pervading the Horn of Africa and its links with the Gulf. Abiy Ahmed’s Ethiopia signed an agreement with Somaliland in 2024, which was first rendered moot by the Ankara agreement with Somalia and then came back into play following Israel’s diplomatic blitz.

The United Arab Emirates are accused by Mogadishu of being close to Somaliland itself and have provoked the wrath of the Somali government over the Aidarous al-Zubaidi affair: a Yemeni rebel who flew to Abu Dhabi via the port of Berbera – a snub that led to the severing of diplomatic and economic ties (the Emirates have always denied this).

On the issue of terrorism, Mogadishu is under siege from al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda-linked group, and fears a closer alliance with the pro-Iranian Houthi rebels. “Any crisis works in their favour,” says Omar Mahmood of the International Crisis Group. On the economic front, the country is weighed down by poverty, inflation, agricultural yields eroded by drought, and the resurgence of piracy in the Red Sea. Erdogan has woven a network of ‘cross-cutting’ relationships to safeguard his interests, says Federico Donelli of the University of Trieste, but he faces two risks: the very escalation of internal tensions and the perception of an ‘increasingly less discreet’ closeness to Mohamud, which also runs counter to Ankara’s traditional line in its international relations. ‘Plan B’, says Donelli, could be to focus on coastal investments and offshore activities, which are more ‘defensible’ in the face of the dynamics shaking Somalia’s internal balance. Once again, the situation hangs in the balance between fragility and those investments that could be ‘worth billions’.

 

Source  En.ilsole24ore

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