Between 19-22 February, several major Oromo opposition parties met in Addis to discuss Oromia's sustained upheaval, including the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) insurgency. For several years now, the region has been gripped by still-worsening humanitarian, political, and security crises, while the regional opposition has been essentially co-opted into the government or splintered and unable to mount a response to the deteriorating situation. In this light, the two principal Oromo opposition parties-- the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) and Oromo Federalist Congress (OFC)-- met in Addis alongside representatives from the ruling Prosperity Party and Oromo civil society actors.
Yesterday, Al-Shabaab demonstrated just how potent it remains. Just 18 miles from Mogadishu, Al-Shabaab fighters stormed the town of Bal'ad, which lies on the arterial road from the capital to Jowhar in Hirshabelle. As Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed touched down in Mogadishu in the morning, four mortar projectiles were launched by the jihadists toward Aden Adde International Airport, injuring several civilians. Meanwhile, at least 5 South West State soldiers were killed in an IED blast near Huddur in Bakool, and an explosion at a restaurant in Mogadishu's Kahda district wounded several people.
An internal memo reported by the Associated Press and US court disclosures has revealed the scale of the Trump administration's intended evisceration of USAID. Last month, Washington ordered a 90-day suspension for all USAID programmes, sending the established aid and development sectors into a tailspin and immediately severing thousands of programmes across the world. Waivers could be nominally applied for, but it appears that the depth of the cuts will be permanent, with the Trump government apparently seeking to eliminate 5,800 of the 6,200 multi-year USAID foreign aid contracts, an equivalent of USD 54 billion in assistance.
Reports from Ethiopia's western Gambella region suggest a sudden resurgence in cross-border cattle raids from the Murle ethnic group of South Sudan. Communities on either side of the porous border have long wrestled with cyclical cattle invasions, which are a particularly prominent feature of South Sudan's Jonglei region's profound instability. While the recent attack was the first cross-border raid since mid-2023, it is emblematic of the contraction of the Ethiopian state and the bleeding of instability across the Horn of Africa.
In November 2012, Somalia's federal parliament invited then-Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to address MPs, a gesture of respect only accorded someone deemed a 'special friend' of the Somali nation. The event was considered a way of thanking Türkiye for its swift and impressive humanitarian response to the large-scale famine in Somalia a year earlier, which claimed over 250,000 lives. In 2011, PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan travelled to Mogadishu with his wife to rally humanitarian support-- the first visit of a head of state from outside of Africa in decades. A photo of a distraught Erdogan and his wife clutching two Somali children at an emergency facility for victims, flanked by then-President Somali Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, helped jolt the Muslim world into action. Türkiye convened a summit of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) states and raised over USD 300 million for emergency relief.
Over the weekend, Somalia's federal government and Ethiopia finally agreed to the composition and deployment of Ethiopian National Defence Forces (ENDF) in Somalia, both bilaterally and under the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) auspices. In a signing ceremony in Mogadishu on Saturday, Ethiopia's spy chief, Redwan Hussein, and ENDF Chief of Staff Berhanu Jula signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with their Somali counterparts, which is expected to regulate the operational mandate of Ethiopian forces moving forward.
Much of the federal government's electoral agenda hinges on South West State President Abdiaziz Laftagareen. The regional leader, inserted into his position in Baidoa in December 2018, is the only remaining senior 'elected' non-Hawiye politician still aligned with the federal government. For much of 2024, Laftagareen played a careful balancing act between Addis-- upon which his security depends-- and Mogadishu-- the distributors of his political budget. Where he aligns himself in the coming months regarding the model for South West's long-overdue regional presidential elections could prove the final domino for the growing opposition against Villa Somalia's constitutional and electoral rewrites.
This week, dozens of senior Rapid Support Forces (RSF) commanders, Sudanese politicians aligned with the paramilitaries, and foreign officials gathered at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) in central Nairobi. The widely publicised and controversial ceremony—backed by Kenya, Ethiopia, and the UAE—marks the launch of a "parallel government" intended to challenge the authority of the UN-recognised military administration currently based in Port Sudan.
Last week, Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2024. Once again, Somalia remained mired at the bottom of the table, alongside Venezuela and South Sudan. Only the latter ranked lower than Somalia, which scored just 9 out of 100 in the rankings-- a drop of -2 from 2023. Despite promises of reform, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's administration has again become notorious for its corruption, as was the case during his first term between 2012 and 2017.
On 9 February, during a press briefing in Addis, the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva called on Ethiopia to unite behind the government's economic reform agenda. Buoyed by the progress made by Addis, she said that the "reform Ethiopia has embraced is tough and takes time, but it will yield tremendous results." So far, these reforms– including the rapid liberalisation of the economy– have caused significant financial reverberations amid a period of widespread internal conflicts and rapid state contraction.
On Saturday, after several rounds of secret voting in Addis Ababa, Djiboutian Foreign Minister Mohamoud Ali Youssouf was elected to serve as the next African Union (AU) Commission Chair. He defeated former Kenyan PM Raila Odinga, who dropped out in the 6th round after successive neck-and-neck ballots, with the long-serving Kenyan opposition leader ahead in the first two rounds. Following the elimination of the Madagascan candidate, however, Youssouf inched ahead, and it soon became apparent that Raila would be unable to obtain the 2/3s required of the 49 AU member states.
Between 2010 and 2016, over 6,000 Somali children were forcibly recruited into armed groups, and 2,000 in 2018 alone — the highest number recorded globally. Some were as young as 8. Since the collapse of the state in the early 1990s, Somalia has served as an example of how instability and social fragmentation can fuel the exploitation of children in conflict. Today, Al-Shabaab is widely regarded as the most culpable of Somalia's myriad armed forces for their indoctrination and abduction of children into their ranks.
Political jockeying ahead of the 2027 presidential elections in Kenya is already underway. With the William Ruto administration nearing its third year and its approval ratings remaining slumped, the president appears to have shifted into campaign mode. In early February, accompanied by senior Cabinet officials, President Ruto embarked on a significant tour of North Eastern Kenya, offering several incentives to the long-marginalised border region that backed Raila Odinga in the 2022 polls. Among these was the pledge to abolish ID vetting, the reopening of the Garrissa passports office, and promising livestock vaccinations to open up market access. With support for the central government dwindling in the vote-rich Mt Kenya region and elsewhere, President Ruto's northern charm offensive is no coincidence—it's a political insurance policy.
The federal government has taken another leaf out of the Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo playbook– attempting to break up MP and opposition meetings in Mogadishu. In January, a missive was sent out to several hotels to inform them that any such meetings are banned without prior federal approval. And on Monday, federal MP Dahir Amin Jesow accused Villa Somalia of directing soldiers to break up a hotel gathering of 5 opposition parties in Mogadishu. As Villa Somalia lauds the opening of the registering of political associations and the promise of 'one-person, one-vote' (OPOV) elections, it is simultaneously working to choke the country's fragile civic and democratic space. The need for a transitional political arrangement only continues to grow.
Since the beginning of the year, the schism within and between the two factions of the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Tigray Interim Administration (TIA) has continued to deepen. The two groups-- led respectively by TPLF Chairman Debretsion Gebremichael and TIA President Getachew Reda-- have dug in despite multiple mediation attempts.
Reports of a government offensive in the Hiiraan region recall the heady days of the 2022 ma'awiisley offensive against Al-Shabaab that left the jihadists bloodied and on the back foot. At that time, community defence forces from the Hawaadle rose up against Al-Shabaab in protest against the group's pitiless 'taxtortion' during a time of brutal drought, and succeeded in dislodging the extremists from significant parts of Hiiraan, Middle Shabelle and Galmudug. Known as the 'ma'awiisley' for the typical 'ma'wiis' (sarongs) that Somali men wear, it was a clan and community-led offensive that the fresh Hassan Sheikh administration eagerly appropriated as a 'success story' for the federal government. Today, once again, scenes of young men with AK-47s battling Al-Shabaab along the Shabelle River valley are being touted as a token of Villa Somalia's counterterrorism zeal.
Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's attempts to mimic his predecessor, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, continue to fragment the country. In late 2019 and early 2020, the disruptive president and his spy chief, Fahad Yasin, deployed hundreds of federal troops and National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) operatives to the Gedo region of Jubaland, having been unable to dislodge regional President Ahmed Madoobe from Kimsaayo after his re-election in August 2019. Alongside security forces, cash was poured in to leverage the Mareehaan-dominated districts of Luuq, Dollow, Beled Hawo, Garbaharey and Bardheere away from Madoobe's Ogaadeen-majority administration. Sporadic deadly violence erupted between federal and regional troops as Al-Shabaab expanded and consolidated its presence in Gedo, which has not diminished since.
The military balance in Sudan continued to shift in 2025, with the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) making significant territorial gains against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Since capturing Wad Maddani on 11 January, the Sudanese army has steadily advanced along the Blue Nile and to the north, east and south in Khartoum. And in late January, for the first time since the war began, the Sudanese army was able to break through to its besieged General Command headquarters. These advances have now allowed SAF to position itself to assert near-full control of the capital in the coming days. The RSF, meanwhile, has preferred to fight only minor rearguard actions, as it transfers fighters, vehicles, and material from central Sudan towards its western heartlands in Darfur. With the RSF's renewed devastating assault on El Fasher in North Darfur ongoing, the 'Libya-style' split of the country appears only a matter of time.
Puntland's 'Operation Hilaac' (Lightning) continues to progress against the Islamic State-Somalia (ISS)-- and with a new partner. On 1 February, the Trump administration ordered its first drone strikes on an ISS position in the Al-Miskaad mountains near Dhasan village, one of the jihadist's key command-and-control bases. It was the fourth set of strikes of the offensive overall, with the UAE having also conducted three others against the extremist group. According to US President Donald Trump on social media, the strikes targeted a senior ISS operational leader, though his identity remains unconfirmed.
Since its inception, Brigade N'Hamedu, also known as the 'Blue Revolution,' has focused on targeting the pro-Eritrean regime's cultural festivals-- long used to fundraise, intimidate potential opposition, and serve as propaganda tools. While Brigade N'Hamedu is not Eritrea's first diaspora-based opposition movement to challenge these notorious events, its scale and scope have set it apart from previous efforts. The movement gained particular momentum toward the end of 2022, with protests aimed at exposing and resisting the transnational and domestic repression orchestrated by the Eritrean regime and its diaspora institutions garnering significant attention.