Somalia Says It Resolved Its Visa Standoff With Somaliland. The Visas Still Don't Work at Hargeisa's Airport, and Somaliland's Aviation Minister Just Took the Fight to Canada.

Abstract: Ahmed Moallim Hassan, director general of the Somali Civil Aviation Authority (SCAA), told BBC Somali this week that the roughly 13-month dispute between Mogadishu and Hargeisa over Somalia's mandatory electronic visa has been resolved, saying "the recent dispute concerning the eVisa has been resolved, and there is now a mutual understanding regarding the implementation of the system," and that travel agencies and other businesses based in Hargeisa can now take part in it, according to reporting carried by Hiiraan Online and summarised by Rio Times Online. The claim did not survive contact with the government it describes as a party to the understanding. Somaliland's Minister of Civil Aviation and Airports Development, Fu'aad Ahmed Nuh, told BBC Somali in a separate interview reported the same week by Hiiraan Online that no such agreement exists: "There is no truth to it; if an agreement had been reached, their visa would be valid in Somaliland — but it is not." In practice, Hiiraan Online reported, Somalia-issued e-visas presented by travellers arriving at Hargeisa's airport are still being cancelled on arrival, with those travellers required to purchase a separate Somaliland visa before they are allowed to enter. Nuh added that he was leading a Somaliland delegation in Canada, home to the International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) headquarters, to raise the dispute with international aviation bodies and seek a review of an airspace-management arrangement he says Mogadishu abandoned when it took unilateral control of the Mogadishu Flight Information Region (FIR), a claim he grounded in a 2013 understanding under which both governments were meant to ask ICAO to place joint Hargeisa-Mogadishu oversight over the airspace. Neither government has published a signed text of any new agreement, the US State Department's Somalia advisory remains at Level 4, "Do Not Travel," and Somalia's own civil aviation authority has, in the same stretch of days, separately pressed rather than relaxed its claim to what reporting by journalist Harun Maruf described as "legally mandated operational control" over the entire Mogadishu FIR, warning that any operator failing to comply with ICAO-notified Somali procedures risked safety and legal consequences. A government that says a dispute over how its documents are treated at a neighbouring airport has been settled is, on the same week's evidence, pressing a separate and broader claim to control the airspace above that airport altogether.

What Hassan actually claimed

Hassan's remarks to BBC Somali, as reported by Hiiraan Online, were narrow in form but broad in implication: he described the "recent dispute concerning the eVisa" as resolved and said the result was a "mutual understanding" on how the system would be implemented going forward, specifically that businesses operating in Hargeisa, including travel agencies, could now participate in Somalia's electronic visa system rather than being excluded from or opposed to it. Rio Times Online's own account of the claim, published under the headline "Somalia Says Somaliland Visa Row Is Over," treated the announcement with evident scepticism, noting explicitly that no signed text of any agreement had been made public by either side and that Somalia's own US travel advisory, Level 4, had not moved, a detail that sits awkwardly next to a government narrative that has, separately, promoted a tourism uptick partly credited to the same e-visa system, according to CNN's own reporting on Somalia's "surge in tourism" earlier this year. A resolved visa dispute would ordinarily be the kind of claim a government could point to a joint statement, a signed protocol or at minimum a reciprocal confirmation to support; Hassan's version has none of the three.

Hargeisa's answer, tested at the arrivals hall rather than in a statement

Nuh's rebuttal, carried in the same week's Hiiraan Online reporting, was not limited to a diplomatic denial. He said plainly that had an agreement actually been reached, the practical test would be whether Somalia's visa worked inside Somaliland, and it does not: travellers arriving at Hargeisa's airport holding a Somalia-issued e-visa have that document cancelled on arrival and are required to purchase a Somaliland visa instead before being permitted entry, according to Hiiraan Online's account of his remarks. That is a falsifiable, operational claim rather than a rhetorical one, and it is the kind of detail that is difficult for Mogadishu to contest without producing counter-evidence from its own side, something Hassan's version of events, as reported, did not include. Nuh separately challenged the security of Somalia's e-visa platform itself, alleging it had suffered repeated breaches capable of exposing travellers' personal data, an echo of warnings the US and UK governments issued late last year after Somalia's immigration authority quietly migrated its visa service to a new platform without public explanation, a migration FIKIR Institute has not previously covered in detail but that multiple outlets reported drew formal traveller advisories from both governments.

The claim beneath the claim: a 2013 arrangement Nuh says Mogadishu dropped

What makes Nuh's denial more than a tit-for-tat statement is the specific institutional history he invoked to support it. According to Hiiraan Online's reporting on his remarks, Nuh said the two sides had earlier agreed, under an understanding dating to 2013, to jointly request that ICAO place management of the airspace over Somaliland and the rest of Somalia under a shared Hargeisa-Mogadishu framework, rather than leaving it solely under Mogadishu's SCAA. He accused Mogadishu of abandoning that joint track and instead asserting unilateral control. The background supports the basic shape of his account even where it cannot independently verify the 2013 specifics: Somalia's airspace was managed by ICAO's own regional office, operating out of Nairobi, for decades after the collapse of Somali state authority in the 1990s, and Mogadishu did not resume formal national control of its Flight Information Region until 2018, a transition FIKIR Institute's prior reporting on the Somaliland-Somalia airspace dispute has traced through the practical, informal arrangement that followed, under which Hargeisa's own Civil Aviation and Airports Authority continued managing day-to-day traffic over Somaliland's own territory even as Mogadishu held the formal FIR designation. That informal buffer, FIKIR Institute reported in September, collapsed in 2024, the same year a Somaliland-born SCAA employee, Abdinasir Muse Abdirahman "Dahable," was found dead in Mogadishu under circumstances Somaliland's parliament has since formally, if unverifiably, linked to the airspace dispute's politics.

Why Canada, and what going there signals

Nuh's choice of Canada as the venue for pressing the dispute internationally is not incidental. ICAO, the UN specialised agency that sets and administers the global framework for Flight Information Region designations and national airspace sovereignty under the Chicago Convention, is headquartered in Montreal, and it is the body whose 2013-era, ICAO-brokered joint-management track Nuh says Mogadishu has since bypassed. Hiiraan Online's reporting on the trip is explicit that Nuh did not disclose which specific international aviation bodies the delegation met, nor confirm whether a formal complaint had been lodged, leaving the visit's concrete legal weight unclear as of this writing. What is clear is the strategic logic: a government with no UN seat and no vote inside ICAO's own Council cannot bring a formal state complaint the way Somalia, a recognised ICAO member state, in principle could; appealing directly to the organisation's home jurisdiction and to the diaspora and diplomatic contacts Somaliland can mobilise there is one of the few channels available to a government pursuing recognition-adjacent leverage rather than a seat at the table itself. It is the same asymmetry FIKIR Institute has tracked in Somaliland's parallel, UN-adjacent push for international recognition, including President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi Irro's own September appearance at a rally opposite UN headquarters in New York during the General Assembly's high-level week.

A dispute that began over money, not just sovereignty

The e-visa fight did not start as an airspace argument. Somalia's Immigration and Citizenship Agency launched the mandatory electronic visa, priced at $64 and required in advance of travel, on 1 September 2025, framing it as a digitisation measure aligned with international border-control standards. Puntland rejected the centralised system on constitutional grounds; its information minister, Mahmoud Aydiid Dirir, called it "robbery," and Puntland has required travellers holding the federal e-visa to pay additional fees on arrival rather than accept Mogadishu's documentation as sufficient. Somaliland's response was more categorical: President Irro rejected the e-visa outright and ordered airlines to seek Hargeisa's own clearance before entering Somaliland's airspace, while Somaliland's foreign ministry separately argued the system was unsafe, warning that travellers' personal data could, in its characterisation, "fall into the hands of extremist groups." The dispute has since reshaped airline behaviour independent of either government's official position: Ethiopian Airlines and Flydubai have each dropped the e-visa requirement for passengers travelling to Somaliland, a decision Mogadishu's federal government has criticised but, on the available reporting, not reversed through any enforcement action against either carrier.

Mogadishu is not actually retreating on the airspace claim it says is separate

The clearest evidence that Hassan's "resolved" framing describes, at most, one narrow strand of a much larger dispute is Mogadishu's own conduct on the airspace question in the same period. According to reporting by journalist Harun Maruf, Somalia's Civil Aviation Authority issued a statement in the same stretch of days as the eVisa exchange asserting that it holds "legally mandated operational control" over the entire Mogadishu Flight Information Region and warning that any failure by operators to comply with Somalia's ICAO-notified aeronautical procedures could create safety risks and legal consequences. That statement, coming from the same federal aviation authority whose director general was simultaneously describing the visa dispute as settled by mutual understanding, reads less like a government standing down from a dispute with Somaliland than one pressing its most consequential underlying claim, control of the airspace itself, at full strength while offering a narrower, unverified concession on the visa question as evidence of goodwill. It mirrors the pattern FIKIR Institute has already documented in Somalia's November 2025 Aeronautical Information Circular reaffirming its control of the entire FIR against Somaliland's own Prior Permission Required regime: statements of sweeping formal authority on one side, met by operational facts on the ground, a cancelled visa stamp, an unenforced Prior Permission Required notice, an airline quietly routing around the dispute, that neither side's formal claims have yet resolved.

What to watch

Three signals will indicate whether this week's exchange settles into a genuine, if partial, de-escalation or hardens into the same unresolved standoff that has defined the dispute since September 2025. First, whether Mogadishu or Hargeisa publishes any joint statement, protocol or signed text supporting Hassan's "mutual understanding" claim; its continued absence, more than a week after the claim was first reported, would leave the resolution unsubstantiated by either government's own documentation. Second, whether Somalia-issued e-visas actually begin working for arrivals at Hargeisa's airport, the specific, checkable fact Nuh says disproves Hassan's account; a change there would be a more credible indicator of substantive resolution than any statement from either side. Third, what, if anything, comes of Nuh's delegation in Canada, including whether ICAO or another international aviation body issues any response, a formal complaint becomes public, or the visit instead produces no further public record, which would suggest the trip functioned mainly as a diplomatic signal rather than the opening of a live international process.

Policy implications

For Somalia, claiming a resolution that the other named party flatly denies, and that its own airport-level practice does not yet support, risks the same credibility cost FIKIR Institute has flagged in other unverified claims across the region this year: a government narrative gets ahead of a fact Somaliland can quickly and specifically contradict, undercutting the broader case Mogadishu is making, including to prospective tourists and investors, that Somalia's governance institutions function as advertised. For Somaliland, Nuh's rebuttal and his trip to Canada extend a now-familiar strategy, using specific, falsifiable operational facts, a cancelled visa at an arrivals desk, rather than broad political argument alone, to contest Mogadishu's claims on the international stage, the same approach Hargeisa's parliament took in September when it used the unresolved Dahable case to argue Mogadishu's institutions cannot be trusted. For the aviation sector and the airlines caught between the two governments' competing FIR and visa claims, continued ambiguity over which government's documentation and clearance regime actually governs Hargeisa's airport leaves carriers exposed to inconsistent enforcement and the same kind of diversion risk that grounded an Ethiopian Airlines flight in January 2024, a risk Somalia's own fresh assertion of "legally mandated operational control," issued in the same week as Hassan's resolution claim, does nothing to reduce. For ICAO and the wider international aviation community, a Somaliland delegation appealing directly to aviation bodies in Canada, outside any formal state channel Hargeisa's non-recognition forecloses, is a reminder that the FIR dispute's resolution depends on an international body engaging with a government it does not formally recognise, a structural tension no statement from either Mogadishu or Hargeisa this week has resolved.