🇸🇴 SOMALIA STABILITY INDEX

Al-Shabaab's 2025 Shabelle offensive reversed years of government gains and put the group in its strongest position in over a decade — including a methodical pressure campaign around Mogadishu itself.

• Encirclement, not blitz: Analysts describe exhaustion-and-encirclement rather than a Kabul-style collapse race — severing roads, taxing commerce, and striking government facilities in the capital (the December 2025 suicide-attack wave).
• Territorial picture: Recaptured ground in Middle and Lower Shabelle undid the 2022-23 Macawisley-era offensive; government control increasingly means towns and corridors, not countryside.
• The war economy: Extortion/taxation networks reach into Mogadishu's ports and businesses — al-Shabaab's revenue resilience is the insurgency's quiet engine.
• Strategy read (sensor-level): The group does not need to win battles; it needs the state divided, under-resourced, and unable to hold what it nominally controls. The election standoff serves that requirement.

The African Union's AUSSOM mission (successor to ATMIS, Jan 2025) is operationally essential and financially hemorrhaging — the buffer for Mogadishu through the electoral period, running under strength.

• The funding fight: Most Security Council members back hybrid UN-assessed funding (resolution 2719 framework); the US remains strongly opposed — leaving the mission dependent on ad hoc donors while troop contributors go unpaid.
• Transition-gap lesson: The ATMIS→AUSSOM drawdown-and-handover created exactly the vulnerability al-Shabaab exploited in 2025 — a case study in sequencing peacekeeping exits against insurgent tempo.
• Command friction: Reporting documents chain-of-command strain and political interference in mission management from Mogadishu — degrading coherence just as the threat peaks.
• Watch items: Reauthorization cycles, troop-contributor payment crises, and any accelerated drawdown announcements — each is a direct input to the capital's security floor.

The Islamic State's Somalia branch operates from the Cal Miskaad mountains of Puntland's Bari region — small next to al-Shabaab, but outsized in the global network: a hub for IS finance and foreign-fighter facilitation.

• The finance role: The al-Karrar office in Somalia moves money across the IS global system — making this enclave a counter-terror-finance target well beyond Somali borders.
• The 2025 Puntland offensive: Puntland forces' mountain campaign — backed by US AFRICOM and UAE airstrikes — degraded the enclave without eliminating it; foreign fighters (Ethiopian, Yemeni, Gulf, North African) remain a distinguishing feature.
• Coexistence with al-Shabaab: Episodic clashes and defection flows between the groups; ISIS-Somalia recruits from al-Shabaab's discontented ranks.
• The federal irony: The counter-ISIS fight is run by Puntland — the member state that has withdrawn recognition of the federal government — so CT cooperation and constitutional rupture coexist awkwardly.

The federal model is functionally fractured: Puntland has withdrawn recognition of federal authority since the 2024 constitutional dispute, Jubaland's rift produced armed standoffs, and the Somaliland question went international.

• Somaliland's arc: The Jan 2024 Ethiopia-Somaliland port/recognition MoU detonated regional diplomacy; Turkey's Ankara Declaration (Dec 2024) de-escalated Mogadishu-Addis tensions — but US recognition debate around Berbera keeps the question alive and Mogadishu anxious.
• The UAE rupture: In January 2026 the federal government cancelled all bilateral security and defense agreements with the UAE on sovereignty grounds — against $600M+ of Emirati investment concentrated in Puntland (Bosaso) and Jubaland, plus $500M+ in Somaliland's Berbera. External patrons now map onto internal fractures.
• Turkey's position: Defense pact, naval training, port/airport management, and offshore hydrocarbon exploration make Ankara the federal government's deepest external partner.
• Why it matters (sensor-level): Every external alignment shift re-weights the internal balance — the platform reads patron moves as federalism pressure, with the analysis living at the rhetoric/BLUF layer.

Somalia has no functioning stock market to put a pulse card on — but its real financial architecture is remarkable: a remittance-and-mobile-money economy that outperforms the state.

• Remittances ~$2B/yr: Diaspora transfers exceed humanitarian aid and FDI combined — the true social safety net, moved through Somali money-transfer networks (Dahabshiil and peers) that survived state collapse.
• Mobile money saturation: Among the world's highest penetration rates — dollarized, phone-based commerce (EVC Plus and successors) substitutes for a banking system in much of the country.
• Debt relief milestone: HIPC completion in December 2023 wrote off ~$4.5B — restoring access to international financial institutions for the first time in a generation and enabling new-currency plans.
• Livestock is the export economy: Gulf-bound livestock (peaking on the Hajj cycle) dominates formal exports — which makes Gulf port politics (Berbera, Bosaso) and Red Sea shipping security first-order economic variables.