Somalia’s president names Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti as “missing parts” of greater Somalia – reviving a dream that once started a war

It was the kind of sentence that travels. Measured in delivery, incendiary in implication.

Standing before his nation on its independence anniversary this week, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud spoke not only of the Somalia that exists – a republic still rebuilding from more than three decades of civil war – but of the Somalia that, in the nationalist imagination, was never completed.

“The hope visible in Somalia today is not confined solely to the Republic of Somalia established through union in 1960,” he said. “It is also shared by the other three missing parts, which look upon it with the same hope and expectation.”

Those three missing parts, as widely understood in the context of Somali political history, are Ethiopia’s Somali Region, Kenya’s Northeastern Province and the Republic of Djibouti – territories that Somali nationalists have long regarded as severed limbs of a nation that colonial borders never allowed to be whole.

The president did not elaborate on what he meant. He did not need to. The idea is old enough, and consequential enough, that the mere invocation of it carries its own weight.

The Five-Pointed Star: What It Was, and What It Promised

To understand why those words reverberate, it is necessary to go back to 1960 – and to the flag.

When British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland merged on 1 July of that year to form the Somali Republic, the new nation adopted a light blue banner bearing a single white star with five points. Each point was not decorative. Each pointed, deliberately, toward a Somali-inhabited territory that nationalists believed belonged within a single sovereign state.

The five territories were: Italian Somaliland, which became the republic’s southern and central regions; British Somaliland, its northern half, now the self-declared Republic of Somaliland; French Somaliland, the small coastal territory that became the independent Republic of Djibouti in 1977; the Ogaden – known to Somali nationalists as Western Somalia – the vast arid expanse that remained inside Ethiopia and is today designated its Somali Region; and the Northern Frontier District, a predominantly Somali-speaking territory that stayed within Kenya at independence and is now its Northeastern Province.

Successive Somali governments did not merely carry this vision symbolically. They pursued it. Through diplomatic pressure. Through support for cross-border insurgencies. And, ultimately, through war.

In 1977, under the military government of President Mohamed Siad Barre, Somalia launched a large-scale offensive into the Ogaden, briefly seizing substantial territory and bringing the dream of a Greater Somalia closer to realisation than it had ever been. What followed ended any such prospect for a generation. A combined Cuban and Soviet-backed Ethiopian counteroffensive drove Somali forces back across the border. The military humiliation accelerated the internal fractures within the Barre regime, which collapsed in 1991 under the weight of clan conflict, economic ruin and armed insurgency – dragging the Somali state down with it.

The country that followed was not a country in any conventional sense. It was a territory, contested and ungoverned, across which armed factions fought for three decades while its population endured famine, displacement and violence on a scale that drew the world’s attention and, ultimately, its soldiers.

The Soldiers of the “Missing” Neighbours Now Guard Somalia’s Streets

There is no gentle way to state the following, and it is necessary to state it plainly.

The two nations whose borders President Mohamud identified as parts of an incomplete Somalia – Ethiopia and Kenya – are among the principal external military powers currently operating inside Somalia’s own borders.

Ethiopian troops have served as a core component of the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia for years, deployed across the country’s south-central regions, holding towns, conducting offensive operations against Al-Shabaab and providing the backbone of a security architecture that the Somali state itself cannot yet fully supply. Kenyan forces have been similarly embedded within the same mission. Both nations do not merely have a presence in Somalia; they have, in practical terms, a decisive one.

Djibouti, the third territory named, hosts one of the most concentrated clusters of foreign military installations on earth – including bases operated by the United States, France, China, Japan and others – and has constructed a national identity, an economy and a geopolitical significance entirely independent of any pan-Somali framework.

What, then, should these neighbours make of a Somali president publicly invoking their territory as part of something incomplete?

The question is not rhetorical. It is diplomatic, strategic and, for the millions of Somalis and Ethiopians and Kenyans living along these borders, profoundly human.

A Domestic Signal, a Rhetorical Gesture – or Something Else?

Analysts and observers will debate for some time what President Mohamud intended.

One reading is domestic. Somali politicians have long drawn on pan-Somali sentiment as a source of national cohesion, a reminder to a fractured population of a shared identity that transcends clan. In a country still scarred by civil war, the Greater Somalia idea functions less as foreign policy and more as national mythology – a story a people tell themselves about who they were before everything fell apart.

A second reading is rhetorical. Independence day addresses are not policy documents. They are performances of national identity, and in the Somali political tradition, invoking the five-pointed star and what it represents is as conventional as any other appeal to founding ideals. It need not imply a programme of action.

A third reading is more troubling. Somalia is currently renegotiating its relationships with its neighbours – particularly Ethiopia, with whom it has had significant tensions in recent years over Addis Ababa’s agreement with Somaliland that alarmed Mogadishu. In that context, words about “missing parts” carry a harder edge, functioning as a signal of unresolved grievance rather than an aspiration to be deferred indefinitely.

What is clear is that the practical distance between the sentiment and any conceivable reality is vast. Somalia is a country still requiring foreign troops on its soil to maintain a functional security environment. The military power that once made Somali irredentism a credible threat – powerful enough that it briefly seized the Ogaden – was destroyed in the 1991 civil war and has never been rebuilt. The three claimed territories are, each in their own way, more stable, more internationally integrated and more resistant to any such claim than they have ever been.

An Idea That Buried the State That Championed It

There is a profound and still largely unexamined tragedy at the heart of Somali irredentism.

The ideology did not merely fail. It consumed the state that carried it. The Ogaden War, launched in pursuit of Greater Somalia, fractured the Barre government’s alliances, exhausted its military and delegitimised its leadership in ways from which it never recovered. The civil war that followed – the one still shaping Somalia today – was in part the aftershock of that defeat, as a weakened government turned increasingly brutal and the clans that had been held together by the prospect of nationalist triumph began to tear apart.

Somaliland, one of the five territories the flag once pointed toward, responded to that collapse by declaring its own independence and building its own institutions – a state that now governs itself more effectively than many parts of the republic it refuses to rejoin.

And yet the flag still has five points. The speeches still invoke the missing parts. The idea persists – not as a programme of action, but as something more durable: a wound in the national imagination that has not healed, and that political leaders reach for, generation after generation, when they want to remind their people of what they have been taught to believe was taken from them.

Whether President Mohamud’s words were strategy, sentiment or something more difficult to categorise, they have done what such words have always done in this part of the world: travelled further than intended, arrived differently than planned, and reminded every nation in the Horn of Africa that the borders drawn by others in the nineteenth century have never quite been accepted by all of the people expected to live within them.

Somalia achieved independence on 1 July 1960 through the union of the former British Somaliland and the United Nations Trust Territory of Somalia, previously administered by Italy. The country has been engaged in internationally-supported efforts to rebuild its federal government and security forces following decades of civil conflict.