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Somaliland Fights the World for Recognition. A Somali Passport Pipeline in Hargeisa Undercuts It

Staff

KEY POINTS

For thirty-five years, the Republic of Somaliland has told the world that Somalia has no authority over its citizens. Every day in Hargeisa, in an unmarked office with no sign on the door, that claim is quietly overridden. A citizen’s photograph, fingerprints, and personal details go electronically into Somalia’s federal passport system in Mogadishu. Within days, a Somali passport, stamped with the government’s own coat of arms, flies back to Hargeisa to document the holder as a Somali national, the very status Somaliland says Somalia has no authority to impose.

The price is $300, or $400 expedited. Somalia’s own government lists the ordinary passport fee at $180. Of what’s left, roughly $30 goes to a Hargeisa travel agent as a referral commission, confirmed independently by multiple agents and by sources with direct knowledge. Subtract both from the $300 and roughly $90 remains, an estimate built from the two confirmed numbers rather than a third figure anyone has verified, leaving that amount unexplained. This has continued across at least three changes of government in Hargeisa and at least one in Mogadishu.

Somaliland’s own passport, by comparison, is accepted in roughly a dozen countries: Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa, the UAE, Taiwan, and, since December 2025, Israel. Somalia’s passport ranks near the very bottom of the 2026 Henley Passport Index, good for visa-free or visa-on-arrival entry to roughly thirty countries worldwide, one of the weakest travel documents on earth. Neither government’s passport is strong. What changes hands in that unmarked office is not strength. It is a UN seat Somalia has never earned on the ground, and one that thirty-five years of functioning Somaliland statehood still hasn’t bought.

That star on the passport’s cover is not neutral in Hargeisa. It marks the tail of the MiG-17 mounted atop this city’s war memorial in Freedom Square, the same Somali Air Force jet that took off from Hargeisa’s own airport to bomb it, crashed during the campaign, and was later dragged back into the center of town as a monument. Between 1987 and 1989, the regime of Siad Barre killed an estimated 200,000 members of the Isaaq clan. Roughly 90 percent of Hargeisa was destroyed; more than 40,000 died within the city limits alone. A 2001 United Nations investigation concluded that the crime of genocide was conceived, planned, and perpetrated by the Somali government against the Isaaq people. Somaliland’s 1991 declaration of independence followed directly from that campaign.

A pattern, not a workaround

One senior Somaliland official, who would not be quoted, did not deny the program exists when asked about it directly. He called it “a necessary disease we must live with,” then asked where else people should go, Mogadishu or Garowe, and spent most of the rest of the conversation trying to talk this publication out of writing about it.

That exchange is the story in miniature. If the government doesn’t run the pipeline, how has it survived three administrations without interruption? If it’s purely private, how does a facilitator get a standing door into a foreign country’s passport system? Asked directly, officials rarely deny it exists. What they offer instead is a decision not to look, and an arrangement this consistent doesn’t survive on ignorance. It survives on choice.

This account rests on multiple sources with direct knowledge, several of whom were directly involved in running the operation at different points, and others among them high-ranking appointees in the current government and officials who served under former presidents Silanyo and Bihi. None would speak on the record.

There is no freedom-of-information law in Somaliland, no functioning mechanism to compel a ministry to release a file, and no real record of officials being held accountable for withholding one. Where a similar investigation elsewhere might rest on a leaked memo or an obtained contract, this one rests on multiple people, independently, describing the same thing from the inside, because official documentation of something like this was never going to be available for the asking.

That caution is easier to read as politics than practicality. In September 2021, Somaliland police intercepted a man at Egal International Airport carrying about 200 shield-tailed agamas, lizards worth up to $500 apiece, bound for Egypt, the first reptile-smuggling case they had handled. The episode illustrates how visible contraband can trigger enforcement at the same airport where, according to sources familiar with the operation, shipments of Somali passports have passed without comparable intervention.

The machinery

The mechanism does not run on improvisation. According to multiple sources with direct, first-hand experience running it, biometric and biographical data goes in electronically, straight into Somalia’s own federal passport and immigration system. Book an appointment. Data goes in. Within days, a finished passport flies back to Hargeisa on a commercial route.

A hidden scanner in a back room describes a small operation a handful of people could run alone, on the margins. What’s described here is a working door into a sovereign government’s identity infrastructure, used routinely to produce that government’s own documents for people it does not administer. That process requires authorized access to Somalia’s federal passport infrastructure. This publication has not independently identified the individual or institution providing that access.

The payment follows its own trail. Caalin Travel Agency, one of several Hargeisa agents identified in this investigation, confirmed the application fee is paid to the agent, not to whoever ultimately processes the passport, in exchange for a receipt and directions to the office that does. One applicant this investigation reached went through the process at a separate agency, Airsoma Travel, paying the standard $300 fee, and provided a redacted copy of the intake form: full name, mother’s name, place of birth, date of birth, occupation, contact number, stamped and signed. One field isn’t left blank. Place of birth is pre-printed, in bold, bigger than everything else on the page: HARGEISA. What came back said something else.

There is a newer requirement, and by multiple accounts a recent one: applicants must now present their Somaliland national identity card, which is photocopied and kept on file. That alone would be unremarkable. According to multiple applicants, if the details an applicant provides differ at all from what’s on their Somaliland ID, the facilitator office in Hargeisa, not Mogadishu, contacts Somaliland’s own national identity agency directly, the body that issued the card in the first place, seeking approval for the discrepancy. Without it, the application proceeds using whatever the Somaliland ID says. That agency sits inside the Ministry of Interior, whose minister was separately asked, in writing and by phone, whether this contact occurs and who authorized it; he has not answered. Somaliland Chronicle has not identified or reached a contact inside the identity agency itself. If accurate, it means an institution Somaliland built to establish its own citizens’ identities is functioning as a verification backstop for the operation that feeds them into the passport system of the government it was built to be separate from.

It wasn’t always this clean. These sources trace the operation back to former president Ahmed Mohamed Silanyo’s administration, describing applicants shuttled car to car through Hargeisa’s streets, biometrics taken inside a Toyota Noah minivan with the engine running. During the presidency of Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed “Farmaajo,” the passport’s place-of-issue field stopped reading “Hargeisa” and started reading “Mogadishu,” the result, these sources say, of a direct negotiation by Osman Sh. Mohamed Sh. Isaaq, known as Osman Marehan, then personally close to Farmaajo. Somaliland officials, these sources say, made their cooperation conditional on exactly that change. There is no paper trail for the negotiation itself, but this publication has independently confirmed the outcome: passports issued to Somaliland citizens today list Mogadishu, not Hargeisa, as place of issue. Asked about his alleged role, Marehan declined to comment.

The people behind the machine

Under former president Muse Bihi Abdi, sources with direct knowledge name Hamda Egal as the facilitator: years inside Somali federal political circles, a run at a seat in the Somali parliament. Egal declined to comment.

Under the current administration, the same sources name Khadar Hussein Harir, whose footprint inside Somalia’s federal political system is a matter of public record. In August 2021, he was elected, then re-elected after infighting, chairperson of the Somaliland Interim Election Team, seated under then-Deputy Prime Minister Mahdi Guled. Harir declined to comment.

Neither Egal nor Harir holds any formal position inside the Federal Government of Somalia. Neither is described by any source as its employee. Both moved through Somali federal political life with an ease an ordinary Somaliland citizen does not have, and Osman Marehan, the earlier handler identified above, fits the same pattern. What connects all three, across three administrations, is not a title or a salary. Each was someone who could operate credibly on both sides of the border at once: Egal’s years inside Somali federal circles and her own run for Somali parliament, Harir’s documented chairmanship of a body seated by a sitting Somali Deputy Prime Minister, Marehan’s personal closeness to a sitting Somali president. That dual standing appears to be the qualification the operation required.

Who actually decides?

One former facilitator with direct knowledge, drawing on first-hand experience running the operation, disputes the obvious assumption that handovers track Somaliland’s own elections. Somaliland’s government does not choose the facilitator, this source says. It only permits the arrangement to continue. The real decisions, who controls the Somaliland side and when the handoff happens, are made in Mogadishu. This is not one person’s theory; every source in a position to address the question gave the same account.

The same source describes Harir as “a mere employee” and alleges that Khadar Hussein Looge, Somaliland’s Minister of the Presidency, was directly involved in negotiating the transition from the previous team to the current one. Multiple independent sources have separately pointed to Looge in connection with that handover. This publication cannot rule out that a source who no longer runs the program has reason to direct scrutiny toward whoever replaced them; the allegation has not been independently proven. The Presidency redirected inquiries to the Ministry of Interior. Looge did not respond.

Whoever controls it, one fact does not move: a foreign government’s passport is being issued to citizens of a state that insists that government has no jurisdiction over them, and it has continued for years without incident, comment, or apparent concern from anyone with the power to stop it.

The route it replaced

Before Hargeisa had the quiet, institutional pipeline it has now, Garowe was where most of this business happened. Citizens traveled east into Puntland and got Somali passports directly from Puntland’s own authorities. It wasn’t a backup. Back when the Hargeisa side still meant a Toyota Noah minivan with the engine running, Garowe was the primary channel.

What moved the business to Hargeisa, according to multiple sources, including current and former officials and people who ran the program directly, wasn’t convenience. It was a story, told to three successive presidents, about young women: sending citizens to Garowe or Mogadishu put them at risk of exploitation they wouldn’t face if the same service quietly existed at home. This investigation hasn’t verified that comparison. What it did do is give three governments, who agreed on almost nothing else, the same reason not to look too hard at an operation growing inside their own capital.

The same line still gets used, on anyone who asks. Sources describe it as the default answer: some version of do you want our girls raped in Garowe or Mogadishu? Not an answer so much as a way of ending the question, and it reliably shuts down everything else, who runs it, who profits, why it has lasted this long.

Garowe’s dominance didn’t survive Las Anod on its own terms either. Somaliland and Puntland forces had clashed for years over Sool and Sanaag, but it was Las Anod, escalating in early 2023, that severed the land route outright. By then Garowe was already losing ground to a story that worked. After Las Anod, it lost the rest. Hargeisa wasn’t built as Garowe’s fallback. It earned its tolerance first, on an appeal no president wanted to be the one to reject, and became the only route left once the alternative was gone.

The necessity explanation, and what it may be concealing

Every official interviewed reached for the same defense: the Somaliland passport isn’t widely accepted, leaving citizens no real choice. None engaged with what that framing sidesteps, that the fix for a document the world won’t accept is a document from the government Somaliland says has no claim over it. Every official led with medical travel, not Hajj or Umrah, even though this program’s own handlers describe pilgrimage, not medicine, as the primary use case. Not one official pointed to anything the government has done to change the underlying problem.

Sources with direct knowledge told Somaliland Chronicle that most applicants were not medical cases. They were pilgrims. Multiple sources have corroborated that, though it hasn’t been tested against independent data from travel agents or Hajj operators yet. If it holds, medical necessity is the most sympathetic justification available, and it may not be the one actually driving demand.

Even the Saudi picture is more specific than a flat reading suggests, and less favorable to Somaliland. In 2019, Saudi Arabia’s King personally invited then-President Muse Bihi Abdi to perform Hajj as a state guest; Bihi and his ministers traveled on their own Somaliland diplomatic passports, accepted for that single occasion. It was a head-of-state exception, not an ongoing relationship. This investigation found no indication Saudi Arabia has ever otherwise accepted the Somaliland passport. The Hajj quota itself runs through Somalia, not Somaliland: Riyadh allocates a national quota to the Somali government, and a portion is informally set aside for Somaliland pilgrims through private channels. By every account, those pilgrims travel on Somali passports to use it, which is exactly why Hajj and Umrah demand feeds directly into this same pipeline rather than sitting apart from it. Saudi Arabia has also explicitly rejected Israel’s December 2025 recognition of Somaliland since. None of that establishes how Somaliland’s own passport fares at a Saudi border, since almost no one tests it that way.

Israel changes the equation

For most of three decades, Somaliland had a clean argument: no diplomatic alternative existed. On December 26, 2025, Israel became the first UN member state to formally recognize Somaliland. The two governments have exchanged ambassadors and named health cooperation a stated priority.

This publication asked Somaliland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs what, if anything, has been done to turn that recognition into a real medical-travel arrangement. The Ministry did not respond. The Presidency redirected the same question to the Ministry of Interior. Beyond the general statement naming health cooperation a priority, this publication found no public record of a specific bilateral health or medical-travel agreement between the two governments. Silence doesn’t prove nothing happened behind closed doors.

Israel already has a track record here. An Israeli medical charity, Save a Child’s Heart, has for two decades brought Somaliland children to Wolfson Medical Center for cardiac surgery, a channel that predates recognition entirely. Israel has named health cooperation a stated priority of its new relationship with Somaliland. Officials have not answered the obvious question that raises: if that channel already exists, why hasn’t it visibly reduced reliance on Somali passports for medical travel to Turkey or India? The accountability question stands exactly where it started.

The sovereignty contradiction

The United States does not recognize Somaliland. It also sends military delegations to Hargeisa on what Somaliland officials describe as a near-monthly basis, has reportedly spent the past year negotiating basing rights at Berbera, and has told Congress Somaliland’s security cooperation is worth taking seriously. Former president Muse Bihi Abdi traveled to the US on his own Somaliland passport; this week, President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi “Irro” was granted a US visa on the same document for a September inaugural visit. Washington calls this pragmatism: engagement without paperwork, tolerance without recognition. Somaliland has demanded exactly that treatment from the world for thirty-five years. It has never extended the same pragmatism back toward Mogadishu, not on the e-visa, not anywhere else it has a choice, with one quiet exception: the Somali passport pipeline running inside its own capital, which this investigation has spent itself describing.

In September 2025, Somalia rolled out a mandatory e-visa for every traveler entering the country. Somaliland refused it outright. President “Irro” delivered the declaration in person, at Somaliland’s Aviation Ministry headquarters next to Egal International Airport, flanked by cabinet ministers including Khadar Hussein Looge, the Minister of the Presidency multiple sources in this investigation allege was directly involved in the handover of the passport pipeline to its current operators, an allegation this publication has not confirmed. No one holding Somalia’s e-visa, Irro said, would be allowed to land on Somaliland soil. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs called it a direct violation of sovereignty. It’s the same airport passport shipments from Mogadishu have arrived through for years, according to sources with direct knowledge. Nobody at the podium mentioned it.

The same airport, according to sources familiar with the operation, has continued to receive the passports on a schedule this investigation has not been able to pin down. Boxes of finished Somali passports from Mogadishu move through the same terminal where Irro and Looge stood declaring Somalia’s paperwork unwelcome, without the fanfare that greeted the e-visa rejection.

If a Somali visa is intolerable, what is a Somali passport, freely issued in Hargeisa with the government’s own knowledge and tolerance?

The leverage nobody has used, yet

Mogadishu is not simply a government with other priorities. For two decades it has been close to the textbook case of a failed state, consistently ranked among the most fragile on earth, and the risk is not abstract: a rapid, Kabul-style collapse to al-Shabaab remains a possibility analysts take seriously, a government that could end in days rather than years. And still, carrying that risk, Somalia runs an open diplomatic campaign to keep Somaliland isolated: lobbying regional governments, rolling out the e-visa, banning Taiwanese passport holders in retaliation for Somaliland’s ties to Taipei. A government that can’t fully secure its own capital has made administratively holding Somaliland hostage a working priority instead. That is not a government with patience to spare for people it doesn’t administer. It is one that has decided this fight matters more.

And yet, across multiple presidents on both sides, it has kept a door open that lets a steady stream of Somaliland citizens be documented by Somalia as Somali nationals, cheaply and with minimal friction. This investigation cannot put a precise number on how many, only that the flow has been continuous across three administrations and shows no sign of slowing.

That’s not generosity. It’s leverage, possibly the single most valuable card Somalia holds. Every citizen who has obtained a passport this way is now functionally dependent on Mogadishu’s continued cooperation. Revoke it, and the disruption lands immediately on however many people have gone through this pipeline over the years, not abstractly on a government in Hargeisa.

Somalia hasn’t exercised that option. It may be the sharpest tool in Mogadishu’s drawer precisely because it stays there, undetonated. A revoked passport creates headlines and a domestic crisis overnight. An always-available one creates dependency instead, and dependency doesn’t need to be used to function as leverage. It only needs to be understood.

There’s a version of this that cuts deeper. Revoking every Somali passport ever issued to a Somaliland citizen in one stroke wouldn’t just create disruption. It would look like Somalia conceding the argument Somaliland has made for thirty-five years, that these were never really its citizens if one decision in Mogadishu could end it.

Continuing to issue does the opposite. A passport system doesn’t discard the records behind the documents it produces, and this one runs on a working line into Somalia’s own federal identity infrastructure, not a scanner in a back room. By its nature, it would generate a record of exactly how many Somaliland citizens have received Somali passports, and who they are, documented, individualized proof of a citizenship relationship Somaliland insists doesn’t exist. That’s not a threat Somalia would need to say out loud. It only needs to be understood. Whether anyone in Mogadishu has thought about it in exactly those terms, this investigation can’t confirm. The pipeline doesn’t need them to have.

Djibouti has run a narrower, documented version of the same play for years, aimed at Somaliland’s political class rather than its ordinary citizens. Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board found that as far back as 2013, roughly half of Somaliland’s officials at every level held Djiboutian passports, renewed every three years, personally authorized by Djibouti’s president. One Somaliland MP told Somaliland Chronicle he feared losing his own. Foreign Policy magazine called Djibouti a “Friendly Little Dictatorship” with an effective veto over how much of Somaliland’s political class could travel.

That leverage has been exercised, not just held. In December 2025, amid a diplomatic rupture, Djibouti closed its land border with Somaliland and began refusing Somaliland’s own passport at that crossing. Unconfirmed January 2026 reports, sourced only to Mogadishu-aligned outlets, claim Djibouti went further, canceling roughly 1,400 Djiboutian passports held by Somaliland officials. This publication cannot confirm that figure.

Obtaining a Djiboutian passport requires traveling to Djibouti and, by multiple accounts, demonstrating personal loyalty to President Ismail Omar Guelleh. Somalia’s version requires nothing but an appointment and a fee, inside Hargeisa. Djibouti’s leverage runs through proximity to one man. Somalia’s, if this reporting holds, runs through a bureaucratic pipeline that scales.

What role, if any, does the government play?

Nothing in this reporting establishes that Somaliland’s government administers this system. What multiple sources describe instead is tolerance: silent, unbroken, running across administrations that agree on almost nothing else.

Tolerance is not neutrality. Every Somaliland citizen who comes out of that unmarked office with a Somali passport is, at that moment, filed as exactly what Mogadishu has insisted all along Somalilanders still are: citizens of Somalia. If the facilitator office really does contact Somaliland’s own identity agency to verify applicant details, that entanglement runs deeper than a shared record: an institution Somaliland built to assert its own citizens’ identities, functioning as a verification arm for the operation that feeds them into the passport system of the government it was built to be separate from. A government doesn’t have to intend that outcome to produce it. It only has to keep looking away, three administrations running.

The passport as a test of statehood

Somaliland is the state that, on the ground, actually functions. Somalia is the paperwork that has strangled it administratively. This pipeline is not a clever workaround. It is the visible proof of that imbalance.

For the first time, a country, Israel, has said Somaliland’s own passport deserves recognition. At the same moment, Somaliland’s own government has, at minimum, tolerated a system that lets its citizens route around the very document it is fighting the world to recognize, handing Mogadishu fresh proof of the one claim Somaliland says is no longer true.

Necessity can explain why a workaround begins.

It does not, by itself, explain why a workaround becomes an institution.

Response

This publication sought comment from Osman Sh. Mohamed Sh. Isaaq (Osman Marehan), Hamda Egal and Khadar Hussein Harir. All three have declined to comment.

Minister Khadar Hussein Looge did not respond. The Presidency, asked the same questions, redirected inquiries to the Ministry of Interior. This publication was unable to independently corroborate the underlying allegation of his involvement or extent of it.

Written questions went to Minister of Interior Abdalle Mohamed Arab (Sandheere) and Chief of Police Major General Abdirahman Abdillahi Hassan (Abdi Dheere). Neither the written questions nor follow-up calls to either official have been answered. In addition, we sought comment from Somaliland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Ministry did not respond.

Some individuals interviewed for this story spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject matter.

Notice: This is an article by Somaliland Chronicle. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Under this license, all reprints and non-commercial distribution of this work is permitted.

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