The Fishermen, the Farmers, and the General's Wife: Türkiye's Undeclared War on Somali Civilians

On September 13, 2026, Somali Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre held a farewell meeting for Türkiye's outgoing ambassador, Alper Aktaş. He thanked Aktaş for his service. He praised Türkiye as "a close friend and brotherly country" to Somalia.^[1]

Three days earlier, at a Mogadishu panel titled "A New Era in Türkiye-Somalia Relations: Trust, Cooperation, and Strategic Partnership," Federal Parliament Speaker Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur called Türkiye a "brother." He said the relationship had "remained resilient through changes in Somalia's political leadership."^[2] Nur's own career was built in Ankara. He said this roughly four months after Somalia's own parliamentary mandate had technically expired.

That was the celebration. Several hundred kilometers away, at the same time, ordinary Somalis in Jubaland and South West State were burning the Turkish flag in the streets. A recent essay in these pages documented how Türkiye has captured Somalia's ports, airport, oil rights, fisheries, and even the speakership of its parliament, behind a cover of Islamic brotherhood.^[3] That essay told the institutional story. This one tells the story of the people underneath it — the fishermen, the farmers, and the local families who do not sign agreements, are never consulted, and are, increasingly, paying for this "brotherhood" with their lives.

In the past five weeks, three of Somalia's federal member states have separately accused Türkiye of killing or wounding their civilians. Ankara has denied responsibility for all three. One of Somalia's own federal ministers has undercut that denial himself, without appearing to notice the contradiction.^[4]

Fifteen Years in Brief

In August 2011, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan flew into famine-stricken Mogadishu. He was the first non-African leader to visit Somalia in two decades. Within days, an emergency meeting of Muslim nations he convened in Istanbul raised more than $105 million for famine relief. Türkiye reopened its embassy that November, the first non-African country to do so. It remains Türkiye's largest embassy anywhere in the world today. Somalis, with real reason, began calling the relationship a brotherhood.^[5]

Fifteen years later, the record looks different. Turkish companies have held 30-year, no-bid concessions over Mogadishu's port and airport since 2013 and 2014. One review found the government's own revenue share from the port fell, in at least one accounting period, from 55 percent to 16 percent.^[6] In 2025, Somalia's Auditor General reported that his office could not independently verify $34 million in port and airport revenue that these companies claimed to have paid the government.^[7]

A 2024 oil and gas agreement, signed by two ministers and never ratified by parliament, allows Türkiye's state oil company to recover up to 90 percent of its costs before Somalia sees any share of the revenue. By one detailed accounting, that leaves Somalia with roughly a twentieth of the proceeds.^[8] A fisheries deal in December 2025 handed licensing across the entirety of Somalia's maritime territory to a company run by OYAK, Türkiye's military pension fund. That company was registered just six days before the deal was signed.^[9] Since 2016, Türkiye has sent Somalia's federal government a repeating grant of roughly $30 million, simply to help it meet its own payroll. A decade of that kind of budget support looks less like partnership and more like dependency.^[10]

That is the institutional record. What follows is what it has cost in human terms, across three regions, in the past five weeks alone.

Puntland: The Fishermen of Garmaal and Jiifle

On August 17, Somali pirates hijacked the cargo vessel M/V Lutuf off Puntland's coast. According to a Somali official's own account to the Associated Press, the ship was carrying Turkish weapons, communications equipment, and a satellite system, destined for a Turkish military training facility in Mogadishu.^[11]

The following day, an airstrike near Garmaal killed four people and wounded two others, as a small boat returned to shore from the hijacked vessel. The dead were initially described as pirates. Their families and neighbors say otherwise. They were local fishermen.^[12]

Five days later, on August 23, a second strike hit Jiifle, in the Godob-Jiraan district. Nine more people were killed. A resident who reached the site afterward told the BBC he found eight bodies, badly burned. He said some of the dead were well-known local fishermen. He could not say why they were at sea that night.^[13]

Thirteen dead. Two strikes. Five days. No one has claimed responsibility.

Puntland's Deputy Security Minister, Abdirahman Yusuf Dujana, told the BBC that his government holds Türkiye responsible. He said Puntland has its own evidence of Turkish military activity around the vessel that night.^[14] Former Somali Foreign Minister Abdisaeed Muse Ali did not hedge. He called it a massacre.^[15] Puntland's president made a quieter point, but an equally damning one: if these men were suspected of piracy, they were owed courts, not death from the air.^[16]

Türkiye told the BBC it had no information about the strikes.^[17] Somalia's own State Minister for Defense, Omar Ali Abdi, told reporters in Mogadishu that the federal government had prior knowledge of the Garmaal strike.^[18] A government cannot have prior knowledge of an operation and no information about it at the same time. While Omar Ali Abdi was defending the strikes to the press, Somalia's government was also working to shape what the public would be allowed to see about them. One of these two governments — Ankara or Mogadishu — is not telling the truth. Neither has been held accountable.

Bay: Livestock, Farmland, and a Flag on Fire

On August 8, residents of villages around Baidoa held Somalia's first documented protest of this cycle. They burned a Turkish flag. They said recent airstrikes had killed their livestock and damaged the farmland they depend on to survive.^[19]

This was not the first time Turkish-made weapons had been tied to Somali civilian harm. In 2024, Amnesty International investigated two strikes in Lower Shabelle. It found that Turkish-manufactured MAM-L munitions, fired from Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones, had been used. Amnesty could not establish whether the operators that day were Turkish or Somali.^[20] Türkiye supplies the hardware. Türkiye also trains the Somali forces who operate it. That arrangement makes it difficult to ever separate foreign technology from domestic use — and that same ambiguity runs through every incident described here.

Gedo: A General's Wife, Wounded in Her Own Home

In the early hours of September 3, a drone struck the home of General Mahad Abdirahman, known locally as General Shub. He is a former Custodial Corps commander who has lived under federal house arrest since South West State's military takeover in March. He was inside the house with his wife and other family members. All survived. All were injured.^[21]

Jubaland's regional government determined that Türkiye carried out the strike. Protests followed almost immediately in Doolow and Garbahaarrey, then spread to Kismayo and Afmadow — all under Jubaland's administration. Demonstrators burned Türkiye's flag, and in some towns, Egypt's as well. Placards read, in Somali: "We don't want Erdoğan, we don't want Turkey." Some carried images of the Turkish president with blood painted across his hands.^[22] In Kismayo, District Governor Omar Faraweyne put the sentiment in blunter terms still: "Turkey is a new colonialist that has occupied Somalia."^[23]

Jubaland went further than Puntland or Bay's residents had. It formally demanded the reimposition of an international arms embargo on Somalia, and called for outside intervention.^[24] Somalia's federal government denies a strike occurred at the location Jubaland named. Türkiye's embassy in Mogadishu has said nothing at all.^[25]

Three Regions, One Silence, and a Rally Instead of an Answer

Puntland's fishermen, Bay's farmers, and Gedo's protesters are not connected by geography. They are hundreds of kilometers apart, under different regional administrations, with different grievances in the particulars. What connects them is the shape of the response each received: a foreign denial, a domestic contradiction, and no investigation.

Instead of opening one, Somalia's federal government organized a rally. Mogadishu Mayor Hassan Mohamed Hussein, known as Muungaab, personally organized the demonstration in the days immediately following the Kismayo protests. Sources describe it as intended to "showcase public support" for the relationship with Türkiye. Organizers said the event would highlight Ankara's contributions over "the past fifteen years" — the very same fifteen years this essay has just tallied.^[26] Federal cabinet members were expected to attend.^[27]

A government with nothing to hide would investigate. A government that organizes a counter-rally instead is answering a different question than the one it was asked.

Silencing the Voices Reporting It

There is a fourth front in this undeclared war, and it targets the people trying to tell these stories, not the fishermen or the farmers themselves. In the week after the Gedo protests spread, Himilo Media, a Mogadishu outlet that had published more than a dozen reports on the anti-Turkey demonstrations, found nearly all of them taken down through fake copyright claims.

One of the accounts responsible used the name "The Odyssey." It told an undercover reporter for the Somali Journalists Syndicate that it would remove a media organization's content for $5,000. It claimed to do "communication work for the Somali government."^[28] Kaab TV, whose reporting on the Doolow protests appears throughout this piece, was targeted the same way. Even Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni's own Facebook page was removed.^[29]

This did not happen in a vacuum. It arrived the same week Somalia's Ministry of Information met with Türkiye's Directorate of Communications to discuss, in the ministry's own words, "strengthening bilateral cooperation in the field of information" — days after the "New Era" panel described above, and shortly after a separate, Chinese-sponsored strategic communications forum in Mogadishu.^[30] No evidence directly ties either government to the takedowns themselves. But neither government has answered a simple question: what does "cooperation in the field of information" mean for journalists whose reporting these governments would rather the public not see? The Somali Journalists Syndicate has asked the Minister of Information to clarify.^[31] As of this writing, he has not.

A Fifth Front: Deportations

On September 15, Türkiye deported nearly 50 Somali nationals — 25 men and 25 women — to Mogadishu's Aden Adde International Airport.^[32] Somali media report that nearly 300 more Somali nationals remain in a detention facility in Istanbul, facing possible removal. Some of those facing deportation say they had committed no offense in Türkiye and include university students and workers; others are reportedly suspected of involvement in irregular migration. A Turkish ministry told Somali media that Türkiye "had the right to deport people it did not want to remain in the country," without detailing the specific grounds for the removals.

No official link has been established between the deportations and the protests described in this piece. But for a country already asking who this partnership actually serves, the timing has not gone unnoticed.

This is what capture looks like once it reaches the people who were never in the room. A fisherman's family in the Nugaal region is still waiting to hear who killed him. A farmer in the Bay region lost his livestock to a war he had no part in. A general's wife in Gedo was wounded in her own bedroom, and her government still refuses to say who is responsible. Nearly 300 more are waiting in an Istanbul detention facility to find out if they will be next to come home against their will.

Brotherhood was the word Türkiye offered Somalia in 2011, in the middle of a famine. Fifteen years later, in Puntland, Bay, and Gedo, that word no longer describes what Somalis are living through.

Ismail Abukar is a Somali human rights defender, investigative writer, and institutional reformer. He is the Co-founder and Chairperson of the Mogadishu-based Organization for Prisoners' Rights (OPR), and a lecturer and researcher on minority rights in Somalia. His investigative work has been published by African Arguments, Horn Observer, and Pambazuka News. He holds an MA in International Law and Human Rights from the University for Peace (UPEACE) and is currently based in Honolulu, Hawaii.

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