Mogadishu, 1991–2026: Thirty-Five Years Without a Functioning State

On the morning of January 27, 1991, Abdirahman Hassan Awale was seven years old. He was standing in the courtyard of his family's house in Mogadishu's Hamar Weyne district when his mother told him they were leaving. She did not say where they were going or when they would return. She packed two bags. His father had already disappeared three days earlier—taken, his mother said later, by men loyal to President Mohamed Siad Barre, though no one ever confirmed it. By nightfall, they were at the port. Barre's government would collapse the next day. Abdirahman would not see his house again for eighteen years.

He is forty-one now. He lives in Mogadishu again, in a different house, in a city that bears almost no resemblance to the one he fled. The neighborhood where he grew up is rubble. The government that replaced Barre never consolidated power. Successive administrations have controlled, at best, a few city blocks. For most of the past thirty-five years, Somalia has not had a functioning state. It has had militias, warlords, an Islamist insurgency, foreign peacekeepers, and a federal government that cannot pay its own soldiers. What it has not had is sovereignty.

The Collapse

Siad Barre ruled Somalia for twenty-one years. His regime was built on clan patronage, Soviet then American military aid, and systematic repression. By 1988, the Somali National Movement—a rebel group drawn largely from the Isaaq clan—had begun an armed insurgency in the north. Barre's response was scorched earth. Government forces shelled Hargeisa and Burao. Human Rights Watch documented the killing of between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians, most of them Isaaq, between May 1988 and March 1989. Mass graves are still being exhumed.

By late 1990, the United Somali Congress—representing the Hawiye clan—had pushed Barre's forces back to Mogadishu. On January 26, 1991, Barre fled the capital in a tank convoy. There was no successor government. The USC fractured immediately into rival factions led by Ali Mahdi Muhammad and General Mohamed Farah Aidid. Mogadishu became a battlefield. The city was divided along the so-called Green Line. Civilians were targeted based on clan affiliation. Hospitals were looted. The national archives were burned.

Abdirahman's family spent two years in a refugee camp outside Mombasa. His mother worked cleaning houses. He attended a school run by Save the Children. In 1993, he watched on a borrowed television as American soldiers landed on the beaches of Mogadishu. The United Nations mission—UNOSOM II—was supposed to rebuild the state. Instead, it became a combatant. On October 3, 1993, U.S. forces attempted to capture two of Aidid's senior aides in the Bakara Market. The operation went wrong. Eighteen American soldiers died. Between 500 and 1,000 Somalis, most of them civilians, were killed in the firefight and subsequent helicopter downings. The Americans left six months later.

The Warlord Economy

By 1995, Somalia had effectively ceased to exist as a state. Mogadishu was controlled by at least four rival militias. The north—former British Somaliland—declared independence in 1991 and established a functioning government that no country recognizes. Puntland, in the northeast, declared autonomy in 1998. The rest of the country fragmented into clan fiefdoms. Warlords controlled ports, airstrips, and checkpoints. The economy ran on livestock exports, remittances, and extortion.

Abdirahman returned to Mogadishu in 2009. He was twenty-five. The city was unrecognizable. Entire neighborhoods had been reduced to rubble. The roads were cratered. There was no electricity grid, no water system, no garbage collection. Warlords had given way to a new threat: Al-Shabaab, an Islamist insurgency that had emerged from the wreckage of the Islamic Courts Union, which briefly controlled Mogadishu in 2006 before being ousted by an Ethiopian invasion backed by the United States.

The Insurgency That Would Not End

Al-Shabaab—'The Youth'—formed around 2006 as the militant wing of the Islamic Courts Union. When Ethiopian troops invaded Somalia in December 2006, Shabaab became an insurgency. It formally pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda in 2012. At its peak, between 2009 and 2011, the group controlled most of southern and central Somalia, including parts of Mogadishu. It imposed a brutal interpretation of Sharia law: amputations for theft, stonings for adultery, bans on music and movies. It also provided services the government could not—courts, taxation, security—creating a parallel state.

In 2007, the African Union deployed a peacekeeping force—AMISOM—to protect the Transitional Federal Government. The mission was supposed to last six months. It lasted sixteen years. At its height, AMISOM fielded 22,000 troops from Uganda, Burundi, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Djibouti. It pushed Shabaab out of Mogadishu in 2011 and out of the port city of Kismayo in 2012. But it never defeated the insurgency. Shabaab retreated to rural areas and adapted, becoming a guerrilla force that controlled territory by night and launched complex attacks on government and AU targets.

Abdirahman found work with an international NGO doing demining in Mogadishu. The job paid $200 a month. He married in 2012. His first child, a daughter, was born in 2013. On September 21, 2013, Shabaab gunmen attacked the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, killing sixty-seven people. It was retaliation, the group said, for Kenya's participation in AMISOM. On October 14, 2017, a truck bomb exploded at a busy intersection in Mogadishu, killing 587 people and injuring more than 300. It remains the deadliest terrorist attack in Africa's history. Shabaab never claimed responsibility, but investigators traced the truck to a Shabaab-controlled area.

The Government That Cannot Govern

Somalia has had a federal government since 2012, when the Transitional Federal Government was replaced by the Federal Government of Somalia under a new provisional constitution. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was elected that year by a parliament chosen by clan elders—Somalia has never held a direct national election. The government controls Mogadishu and a few regional capitals, but only because African Union troops hold the perimeter. When AMISOM began withdrawing in 2021, Shabaab immediately recaptured territory.

The federal system is fractured. Somalia is divided into five federal member states—Puntland, Jubaland, South West, Galmudug, and Hirshabelle—plus the unrecognized state of Somaliland. The federal government and the member states are in near-constant conflict over resources, security, and political control. Puntland has refused to participate in federal elections. Jubaland's president, Ahmed Madobe, controls his own militia and ignores Mogadishu's directives. The Somali National Army is composed of clan militias who report to regional leaders, not the federal government.

Abdirahman's daughter is now twelve. She attends a Turkish-funded school in Mogadishu. Turkey has become Somalia's most important foreign patron, investing in infrastructure, education, and healthcare. Turkish construction companies rebuilt the port and the airport. Qatar has also invested heavily, funding hospitals and government buildings. But foreign aid cannot substitute for a state. The government cannot collect taxes outside Mogadishu. It cannot pay soldiers regularly. It cannot extend its authority beyond the areas protected by foreign troops.

What Remains

In December 2024, the African Union announced that ATMIS—the successor to AMISOM—would complete its withdrawal by the end of 2025. The mission formally ended on December 31, 2024. A new, smaller force—the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM)—is supposed to take its place, but as of May 2026, only 6,000 of the planned 12,900 troops have deployed. Shabaab has already retaken villages in Middle Shabelle and Lower Jubba regions. Somali forces have abandoned checkpoints they cannot defend without AU backup.

Abdirahman no longer works in demining. He runs a small shop near the Bakara Market, selling phone credit and household goods. His son was born in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Mogadishu's only major hospital was overwhelmed and the government imposed a curfew it could not enforce. The boy has never known a Somalia at peace. Neither has his sister. Neither, for that matter, has Abdirahman.

Somalia's federal government announced in early 2026 that it would hold its first-ever one-person, one-vote election in 2027. It is a promise that has been made before and never kept. The government does not control enough territory to hold a census, let alone a nationwide vote. Voter registration would be impossible in Shabaab-controlled areas. The logistics—polling stations, ballot boxes, security—are beyond the capacity of a state that still cannot pay its civil servants on time.

Thirty-five years after Siad Barre fled Mogadishu, Somalia is not a failed state in the process of recovery. It is a state that never reconstituted. Three generations have grown up in a country where sovereignty is a fiction, where clan and militia affiliation matter more than citizenship, and where the government controls only what foreign troops allow it to hold. Abdirahman's father disappeared in 1991. His fate was never determined. No court investigated. No official answered for it. There was no state to hold accountable. There still is not.

Still Waiting

On a Tuesday morning in March 2026, Abdirahman took his daughter to the Turkish school. They walked past a checkpoint manned by Somali soldiers and AUSSOM peacekeepers. A block away, the road was cratered from a car bomb two weeks earlier. Shabaab had claimed responsibility. The government had issued a statement condemning the attack. No arrests had been made. None were expected.

His daughter asked him when the soldiers would leave. He did not know how to answer. The soldiers have been there her entire life. They were there before she was born. They were there when her father returned to Mogadishu in 2009. They have been there, in one form or another, since 2007. And still, the government they are protecting cannot govern. Still, the insurgency continues. Still, Somalia waits for a state that has not existed in thirty-five years to somehow come into being.

Abdirahman told his daughter the soldiers would leave when the government was strong enough to protect people on its own. He did not believe it. Neither, he suspected, did she.