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By his own account, Somalia’s president keeps turning Israel away — a weakened suitor, refused on principle — while warning that Somaliland’s recognition is a “trap.” His government’s own lobbying filings in Washington tell a different story. This week, that trap is expected to open an embassy in Jerusalem.
In a recent interview, Somalia’s President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said it plainly, and more than once: Israel has approached his government repeatedly to establish relations, and Somalia has refused.
He was careful not to cast Israel as an enemy. Somalia has been a state for sixty-six years, he said, and “there has never been a single day when we and Israel have exchanged aggression.” Somalia does not deny Israel’s statehood — it is a UN member — and Mohamud endorsed a two-state outcome in plain terms: let Israel “become a state,” and “let these other people also settle down, let them become a state on their own land,” a position he called the view of “most of the world.” There is, he said, “no animosity… to the point of killing each other.” Somalia’s objection is one of principle — “part of it is religious and faith-based, and part of it is humanitarian and concerns human rights” — and of timing: “the time has not come” for relations.
What he described next is the part worth dwelling on. By his account, Israel approached from weakness. It had “entered wars” and “felt a threat,” and concluded that “part of the our land could reduce its threats” — and on that basis “approached us, the Somali government, several times in the past,” asking to establish relations. Many African states already maintain ties with Israel, he allowed; Somalia, repeatedly courted, declined.
It is a flattering inversion: Somalia the coveted prize, Israel the embattled suitor seeking relief on Somali soil. There is nothing hedged about it. The trouble is that Somalia’s own paper trail in Washington describes a government doing the knocking.
What the Filings Show
Under FARA, Somalia’s Embassy in Washington retained the lobbying firm BGR Government Affairs in December 2024, in a contract reported at $600,000. BGR’s supplemental statement, filed in July 2025, records repeated outreach to senior U.S. officials through spring 2025 — among them National Security Council Africa director Brendan McNamara and senior staff on the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs committees. The stated subject was an “Abraham Accords agreement.”
Subsequent reporting on the file goes further. Media outlets that reviewed the records report the overture was conditional: Mogadishu signalled it would consider formal ties with Israel under the Accords if Washington and Israel withheld recognition from Somaliland. A separate claim — that Somalia later urged Israel to reverse its recognition in exchange for signing on and granting access to military bases — rests on allegation rather than the filings, and should be read that way. Somalia’s government has not publicly addressed the records.
Even on the documented record alone, the filings sharply complicate Mohamud’s portrayal of Somalia as a government that rejected engagement with Israel on principle. A refusal grounded in faith and human rights is hard to reconcile with a paid campaign, mounted in the same window, to secure the very agreement that refusal supposedly forbids. Somalia’s government has not publicly addressed the filings.
The Public Fury, the Private Pitch
The claim of principled distance is hardest to reconcile with how Somalia reacted when Israel recognised Somaliland on 26 December 2025. The response was not quiet diplomacy but national fury. Within days, tens of thousands filled streets and stadiums across the country — a clergy-led rally at Mogadishu Stadium, with further protests in Mogadishu and other cities — waving Somali and Palestinian flags, stepping on images of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and chanting against the division of their country. Mohamud flew to Istanbul to stand beside President Erdogan, branded the recognition illegal, and vowed to confront any Israeli forces that might arrive. Somalia forced an emergency session of the UN Security Council; the African Union convened an emergency ministerial meeting and its peace and security council demanded the recognition’s “immediate revocation”; more than twenty states, the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation lined up to condemn it. In April 2026, after Israel moved to appoint its first ambassador to Hargeisa, Somalia’s ambassador to Ethiopia and the African Union, Abdullahi Warfa, warned in a social-media post that any state interfering in Somalia’s sovereignty could face “restrictions” on access to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. The remark, widely read as aimed at Israel, was not an official policy declaration — and Mogadishu had no means to act on it in any case. Somalia does not border the Bab el-Mandeb, whose shores belong to Djibouti, Eritrea and Yemen. The long, strategically valuable coastline in proximity to the strait — roughly 850 kilometres along the Gulf of Aden, anchored by the port of Berbera — belongs not to Somalia but to Somaliland, the very territory Mogadishu claims and was purporting to defend, and the asset that draws Israel’s interest in the first place. Somalia itself fronts the open Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean, has no navy, and sees even its own waters policed largely by foreign forces. The Somali press dismissed the warning as rhetoric.
The defiance is also personal. Asked whether Israel’s powerful influence gives him pause, the Somali President answered with a chuckle that he is unafraid — all the more so, he said, when someone is trying to divide his country — and reached for the language of sacrifice, invoking the many sons Somalia has lost in defense of its homeland. It is rousing material, pitched to a domestic audience already primed by the protests. It also cuts against his own script. A leader who has just explained that force was “removed from the agenda,” and that Somalia “cannot enter that proxy war,” reaches the moment the cameras settle on him for the martyr’s register — a nation unafraid to bleed — the very martial posture he claims to have set aside.
That is the public posture: protests, flags, an emergency Security Council session, a regional condemnation campaign — all on grounds of religious and humanitarian principle. It is hard to reconcile with what Somalia’s own agents were doing in Washington months earlier. A government that spent that period courting the Abraham Accords did not, on the evidence, hold the settled objection to them that its public response implied.
Taking Somaliland Back by Force
The same interview contains a second disclosure. Asked about the territory he calls “the north,” Mohamud framed Somalia’s choices as a binary: force, or dialogue and persuasion. Force, he said, was “what brought things to this point,” and so it was set aside. By his own account, the option Somalia weighed and then “removed from the agenda” was to “consult among itself and cooperate with whoever it can cooperate with to use force on that land” — to assemble outside partners to retake Somaliland by arms.
He never says whose force “brought things to this point,” and the omission does quiet work. If he means the campaign that severed Somaliland to begin with — the Siad Barre regime’s destruction of Hargeisa and the slaughter of Isaaq civilians in the late 1980s, widely described by scholars and human-rights organisations as the Isaaq genocide — he is conceding that it was Mogadishu’s own violence that created the separation, and the grounds on which Somaliland restored the independence it briefly held in 1960. If he means the recent fighting in Las Anod, he folds his own government’s role into the same indictment. Either way, the hand he leaves unnamed is Mogadishu’s, not Hargeisa’s.
The more revealing point is what the framing says about the path he chose. In his account, force and dialogue were not opposites in purpose — they were two routes to one destination: the “northern territory” recognised as part of Somalia. Dialogue won out as “the best interest,” not because it pointed anywhere different. That answers a question that shadowed every round of Somalia–Somaliland talks. Hargeisa entered them insisting they were a negotiation between two states over the terms of a separation already 34 years old. Mohamud’s own words indicate Mogadishu never accepted that premise: dialogue was reunification by gentler means — persuasion in place of coercion, but with the same object. The talks were never a route to recognising Somaliland’s independence; they were a way to end it without a war. The misalignment was foundational. The two sides were never negotiating the same thing.
“A Trap,” He Says
On Somaliland’s recognition, the interview turns from history to warning. Somalia must stay out of any confrontation over Israel, Mohamud argued — “there is no political benefit in it for us” — even as, he conceded, “the general public… want Somalia to look at Israel as the enemy,” a pressure he likened to the politics of “many Gulf countries.” Somalia, he said, “cannot enter that proxy war.”
From there he made his central claim about the recognition itself: that it is not real. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland “is not an existing recognition,” he said — “very, very mistaken and distorted.” Somaliland has gone unrecognised for more than thirty years, he argued, and this changes nothing: “this is not recognition either. It is a trap; it is a small trap.” A “very, very big problem could come out of it,” he warned, and “some of its manifestations are appearing” already.
In one passage, its translation uncertain, he appears to suggest that Israel, having been rebuffed by Mogadishu, turned instead to “the representatives who are here today” — Somaliland’s officials — and that this is “how they came to recognise it.” If that reading holds, it folds his two stories into one: the approach he says Somalia refused on principle became, in his telling, the recognition he now dismisses as a snare. Either way the rhetorical purpose is plain — to tell Somalilanders that what looks like a historic breakthrough is bait.
And This Week, in Jerusalem
The claim that the recognition is fake faces an awkward test this week. Somaliland’s President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi — “Irro” — is expected in Israel between 15 and 17 June, according to Israeli and regional media, to formally open Somaliland’s embassy in Jerusalem and carry forward its accession to the Abraham Accords, the step Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed on 30 January. An investment forum convened with Israel’s Foreign Ministry is set for 17 June at the Dan Tel Aviv, where Irro is to lead a delegation pitching deals across agriculture, mining, energy, infrastructure and financial services.
A recognition that produces an embassy, an ambassador and a head-of-state visit to Jerusalem is not easily described as “not existing.” Neither the Somaliland presidency nor the Israeli government had publicly confirmed the visit’s full schedule at the time of writing, and dates may shift — but the trajectory is not the one Mohamud’s “small trap” was meant to describe.
The Throughline
Strip away the framing and the interview offers more than a denial. Mohamud accepts Israel’s statehood and a two-state outcome, says Israel came to him from weakness and was refused on principle, warns his own public against a proxy war, and tells Somalilanders their recognition is a trap. Running beneath all of it is a single thread the record keeps snagging: the principled refusal is hard to square with a paid campaign in Washington to join the Abraham Accords; the patient “dialogue” with Somaliland was, by his own framing, reunification by gentler means; and the recognition he calls fake becomes, this week, an embassy in Jerusalem.
For 34 years Somaliland has been told its sovereignty is Mogadishu’s to grant or withhold, by a government that calls the Accords a betrayal in public and chased them in private. The neighbour it is trying to block walks through the door Somalia could not open.