Somalia's Government Says It Is 'Neutral' Between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Eight Days Earlier, Its President Had Signed a Declaration Siding Against Ethiopia on Both Its Biggest Regional Claims.

Abstract: Somalia's deputy foreign minister, Hassan Mohamed Ali Nadaara, told BBC Somali this week that Mogadishu remains neutral in the deepening Ethiopia-Eritrea standoff, saying Somalia wants good relations with both governments and has no wish to be pulled into their dispute, in remarks carried by Hiiraan Online, Garowe Online, Somalia Today, Kulu Media, Somali Dispatch and The Somali Digest. The statement answers a question these outlets, and the security analysts they quoted, had already raised about Somalia's own conduct: eight days before Nadaara's remarks, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud travelled to New Alamein, Egypt, to sit alongside Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki, Sudanese army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi for a summit that produced a joint declaration, reported by Al Jazeera and Dawan Africa on 4 and 5 October, stating that governance of the Red Sea is the exclusive responsibility of its coastal states and rejecting any recognition of Somaliland as inconsistent with Somalia's sovereignty. Neither clause names Ethiopia, the region's only landlocked state of consequence and Somaliland's only serious international patron, but both land squarely on the two claims Addis Ababa has pushed hardest in the region since 2023: Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's pursuit of a sovereign Red Sea or Gulf of Aden outlet, and Ethiopia's 2024 memorandum of understanding with Hargeisa that has kept alive Somaliland's bid for recognition. Somali security analyst Ahmed Kaboole told BBC Somali the Alamein appearance shows a gap between what Mogadishu says about its posture and what it has actually done diplomatically. The dispute over Somalia's own alignment is not abstract: separate reporting this year has described Ethiopian forces serving in the African Union's AUSSOM mission, deployed alongside Somali troops fighting al-Shabaab, as candidates for partial withdrawal and redeployment toward the Tigray, Amhara and Afar fronts, a move Nadaara said Somalia has received no official notice of.

What Nadaara told BBC Somali, and when

Nadaara's comments, reported this week by Hiiraan Online, Garowe Online, Somalia Today, Kulu Media and allied Somali-language outlets relaying the same BBC Somali interview, were narrow and defensive in scope. He said Mogadishu's relationships with both Addis Ababa and Asmara had not changed, that Somalia wants to maintain good ties with both and has no interest in being drawn into their quarrel, and that Somalia, as a sovereign state, retains the right to build partnerships and take part in regional consultations on its own terms. None of the outlets reviewed for this analysis reported him disputing the underlying facts of the Ethiopia-Eritrea standoff, the Eritrean incursion Ethiopia has described to the UN Security Council, or Eritrea's own Chapter VII letter answering it, both of which FIKIR Institute has covered separately. His remarks addressed Somalia's posture, not the dispute's merits.

What the Alamein declaration actually commits its signatories to

The summit Nadaara's remarks were widely read as a response to took place on 4 October in New Alamein, hosted by President el-Sisi and attended by Mohamud, Afwerki and al-Burhan, according to Al Jazeera, Dawan Africa, the Xinhua wire and Egypt Today. Its joint declaration, as reported consistently across these outlets, rests on three pillars: a statement that Red Sea governance, including freedom of navigation through the Gulf of Aden and Bab el-Mandeb, is the exclusive responsibility of the sea's littoral states; a rejection of any international recognition of Somaliland as a violation of the Federal Republic of Somalia's sovereignty and territorial integrity; and, on the Nile, an affirmation of international law and the principle that no state should take unilateral action harming downstream water users, a position Egypt and Sudan have pressed against Ethiopia's Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam for more than a decade. The four leaders also agreed to set up a standing mechanism to follow up on the declaration and to reconvene the summit periodically. The text does not mention Ethiopia by name, a framing Horn Review's analysis has described as allowing each signatory to deny targeting Addis Ababa specifically even as the declaration's substance addresses almost nothing else.

Two claims, aimed at the two things Ethiopia wants most

The declaration's silence on Ethiopia's name has not obscured its target for Addis Ababa itself. Ethiopia's foreign ministry issued its own statement on 5 October, as reported by Horn Review, grounding its reply in what it called the Horn's enduring geographic and historical facts and reasserting Ethiopia's claimed role in both Nile management and Red Sea security architecture, including a reminder that the Ethiopian highlands generate roughly 85 percent of the Nile's flow through the Abay River. Ethiopia has pursued sovereign maritime access, including naval basing rights, since Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed made the issue a declared national priority in 2023, and it signed a memorandum of understanding with Somaliland's government in January 2024 that offered recognition in exchange for access to the port of Berbera, a deal FIKIR Institute and others have tracked as the central irritant in Ethiopia-Somalia relations since. The Alamein declaration's two substantive clauses, that the Red Sea belongs to its coastal states and that Somaliland's recognition would violate Somalia's sovereignty, answer those two Ethiopian positions directly, even without naming them. Egypt's own foreign minister has separately accused Ethiopia of using the Tigray war and its accusations against Cairo, Asmara and Khartoum to deflect attention from its domestic crisis, according to Egypt Today, a charge Ethiopia denies.

The AUSSOM question underneath the neutrality claim

Somalia's stated neutrality carries a direct operational stake that outlets covering Nadaara's remarks raised alongside the Alamein question: Ethiopian troops serving under the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), deployed for more than a decade alongside Somali National Army units fighting al-Shabaab, are reported candidates for partial withdrawal. Ethiopian AUSSOM forces formally handed over their long-held base in Buurhakaba, in Bay region, to Somalia's 60th Division on 8 August after nearly twelve years there, according to Somali Guardian and Kulanpost reporting, part of a broader transition already straining AUSSOM's force levels. FTL Somalia has separately reported that more than 3,000 Ethiopian troops are expected to withdraw from South West State in the coming weeks to redeploy toward the Tigray, Amhara and Afar fronts, a specific figure this analysis could not independently corroborate from a second outlet. Nadaara, asked about the reports, said Ethiopian forces remained at their existing AUSSOM positions and bases working alongside Somali federal forces, and that Mogadishu had received no official Ethiopian notification of any withdrawal plan. The distinction matters: Ethiopian troops leaving Buurhakaba as part of a planned handover to Somali forces is a different event, with different consequences for al-Shabaab's room to manoeuvre, than Ethiopian troops leaving Somalia altogether because Addis Ababa needs them on a second front against Eritrea.

Analysts: a gap between what Mogadishu says and what it has done

Kaboole's critique, relayed by BBC Somali and the Somali outlets that followed its reporting, is not that Somalia has formally taken Eritrea's or Egypt's side against Ethiopia, but that its actions since late September read differently from Nadaara's language of even-handedness. Appearing at a summit whose declaration directly undercuts Ethiopia's two most contested regional positions, eight days before telling the public that Mogadishu is neutral, is the specific sequence Kaboole pointed to. Separately, the scholar Liban Igal has urged Somalia's government to avoid taking sides in the Horn's hardening rival camps altogether, an argument that implicitly accepts Kaboole's premise that Somalia's Alamein attendance already reads as taking one. Neither critique disputes that Somalia, as Nadaara argued, has the sovereign right to attend regional summits and build the partnerships it judges useful; the disagreement is over whether a government can credibly call itself neutral while standing next to Ethiopia's two principal regional adversaries as they issue a declaration aimed, however indirectly, at Ethiopia's stated national priorities.

What to watch

Three signals will show whether Somalia's neutrality claim holds. First, whether Ethiopia follows through on reports of an AUSSOM troop withdrawal from South West State, and whether Addis Ababa gives Mogadishu the formal notice Nadaara said it has not yet received; a withdrawal executed without consultation would be read in Mogadishu as confirmation that Ethiopia already treats the Somalia partnership as secondary to its war with Eritrea, regardless of what either government says about neutrality. Second, whether the Alamein grouping's promised follow-up mechanism produces further joint statements or coordinated action involving Somalia specifically, which would make Kaboole's "gap" argument harder for Mogadishu to rebut with language alone. Third, whether Ethiopia's government responds to Nadaara's remarks directly, either accepting Somalia's neutrality claim at face value or treating the Alamein summit attendance as the more operative fact, a choice that will shape how much latitude Addis Ababa extends Mogadishu going forward on both AUSSOM and the wider regional alignment.

Policy implications

For Somalia, a neutrality claim that outside analysts already describe as contradicted by its own diplomatic calendar is a credibility cost Mogadishu did not need to take on while it is simultaneously trying to secure continued Ethiopian troop contributions to its own counter-insurgency campaign; the AUSSOM question gives Ethiopia direct leverage to test whether Somalia's declared even-handedness has practical limits. For Ethiopia, a declaration it was not named in but plainly understood as targeting its two central regional claims adds diplomatic cost to a war it is already fighting on the ground against Eritrea and the TPLF, and gives Addis Ababa reason to weigh whether Somalia's AUSSOM contribution still serves Ethiopian interests if Mogadishu is seen leaning toward the opposing camp. For Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan, securing Somalia's presence at Alamein without requiring Mogadishu to explicitly abandon its neutral posture lets the three-country core of that grouping claim broader regional backing than a formal alliance would, while leaving Somalia to absorb the resulting scrutiny on its own. For the wider Horn of Africa, a dispute over whether attending a summit constitutes taking a side illustrates how far the region's institutions have moved from formal alliances toward looser groupings whose membership and intent remain deliberately ambiguous, a pattern that leaves smaller states like Somalia exposed to exactly the credibility questions Kaboole has raised.