Turkish intelligence chaired a new round of Mogadishu talks this week between Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s federal government and a slice of the Somali opposition. Turkish security sources said the effort was carried out under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s personal instructions. Ankara told the parties that lasting peace could come only through “dialogue, compromise, and an inclusive political process.” The Somali government thanked Turkey for its facilitation. Former President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, on behalf of the political opposition, spoke of an inclusive process going forward. The vocabulary was about compromise; the guest list suggested otherwise.
A prominent Somali senator called it a “serious mistake” for the opposition to accept Turkey’s deputy intelligence chief as mediator.
The federal states of Puntland and Jubaland stayed away. Both administrations rejected the Turkey-led format, arguing that Ankara was not impartial given its direct support for the federal government in Mogadishu. A prominent Somali senator called it a “serious mistake” for the opposition to accept Turkey’s deputy intelligence chief as mediator. Puntland and Jubaland both rejected the March 2026 constitutional amendments extending Mohamud’s mandate and pushing elections to 2027 as being equivalent to a constitutional coup, which makes their exclusion from the talks appear deliberate. At the time, Mohamud’s government barred several dozen opposition parliamentarians from the session where the amendments passed, perhaps even denying the session a quorum.
Opposing Mohamud’s consolidation of power has become a high-stakes game. In Somalia’s South-West State, federal forces moved into the state capital Baidoa after President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen won re-election. Turkish drones reportedly backed the operation that forced Laftagareen to resign. Mohamud’s federal parliament had already declared his re-election illegal. In his place, the federal government installed its own second deputy prime minister as caretaker, with a mandate to prepare one-person, one-vote elections on Mogadishu’s terms. Mogadishu re-assigned parliamentary seats tied to Laftagareen’s bloc to Mohamud’s own loyalists. The parliament also excluded opposition Puntland and Jubaland deputies. Mohamud does not negotiate with opponents; he replaces them.
Three of Somalia’s five federal member states, at various points, have severed ties with Mogadishu over the dispute. Turkey marked the end of Mohamud’s legal term with F-16 flyovers of Mogadishu to intimidate those who might take to the streets to protest their proxy’s self-coup. Turkish-trained Somali troops deployed to the streets with Turkish-supplied armor and used live-fire against protesters. While Turkish authorities denied using military assets to pressure the opposition, when protests reignited in June 2026, witnesses reported sustained gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades in Mogadishu’s Howl Wadaag district. The U.S. Embassy in Mogadishu called the violence reckless. Ankara did not care then, and its exclusion of opposition critical of Turkey’s overreach in Mogadishu shows Ankara has not changed.
The two federal states with the strongest claim to represent a rejected constitutional order were not invited to shape its terms.
The reasoning behind that backing is not sentimental. Turkey’s military footprint in Somalia—Camp TURKSOM, the Gorgor special forces Turkey trained, and a naval task group operating under a mandate that Turkey’s own parliament has extended with few limits—is now the most extensive foreign military presence in the country. Turkey also has begun oil and gas exploration off Somalia’s coast, under an agreement granting Turkey hydrocarbon survey and drilling rights across Somali territory and maritime zones, part of a relationship Erdoğan himself described as being rooted in six decades of ties. Those arrangements would not necessarily survive a political transition negotiated with Puntland and Jubaland at the table.
Framed this way, the Mogadishu talks function less as conflict resolution than as a legitimacy supply chain. Ankara stages a process, the process yields language about inclusive dialogue, and that language later gets cited, first by Mogadishu and eventually by foreign chancelleries, as evidence that Somalia’s political crisis is being managed through consensus. The two federal states with the strongest claim to represent a rejected constitutional order were not invited to shape its terms. Turkish hardware and personnel were used against their allies in the streets months earlier, and the opposition figures who did attend the talks had already accepted Ankara’s premise that the amended constitution and its 2027 timeline are the starting point for discussion, not the matter under dispute.
Washington and European capitals should be precise about what they are endorsing when they praise Turkish-facilitated dialogue in Somalia. Turkey’s military and economic interests appear to be mutually exclusive with solving the current constitutional dispute. They depend on Hassan Sheikh Mohamud remaining in Villa Somalia as the man with whom Ankara does business. Calling that arrangement mediation gives it a legitimacy it does not deserve.
SomaliaTurkeyDiplomacyHorn of Africa
