USA Unlikely to Return to Dual Track Policy in Somalia

[Deeq A.]

The transactional foreign policy of the Trump administration could increase the intensity of the conflict in northern Somalia between unionists and secessionists.

Garowe (PP Report) — The US Congress has been instructed to prepare a report on Somaliland Administration, a secessionist entity in Somalia. The report will highlight areas in which the USA could engage with Hargeisa. The timing of the report created speculation among secessionists that formal recognition is in the pipeline.

Since 2005, US foreign policy towards Somalia has undergone major changes under different administrations. In 2005, the American government was arming warlords in Mogadishu and, at the same time, undermining the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, then based in Baidoa. The engagement with warlords prolonged the suffering of people in Mogadishu, who threw their weight behind the Islamic Courts based in Mogadishu districts, which united in 2006 to form the Union of Islamic Courts.

“Starting in late 2002, agents from the US Central Intelligence Agency began making surreptitious contact with the warlords whose fighters effectively controlled the streets of Mogadishu and other key cities. Their goal was to recruit forces that would help the United States capture suspected terrorists travelling through or hiding in Somalia,” Harun Maruf and Dan Joseph wrote in Inside Al-Shabaab: The Secret History of Al-Qaeda’s Most Powerful Ally. In 2006, Somali warlords formed the Counterterrorism Alliance to formalise their plans to extradite Somalis identified by US authorities as Al-Qaeda members. This move by warlords resulted in battles between the warlords and the Union of Islamic Courts. The Union of Islamic Courts defeated the warlords and took control of large parts of Somalia.

Dr Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the President of the Federal Republic of Somalia.

Conflict between the Transitional Federal Government of Somalia (TFG), backed by Ethiopia, and the Union of Islamic Courts ensued. In 2008, the TFG and the Alliance for the Re-liberation of Somalia reached an agreement in Djibouti to form a new government and pave the way for the withdrawal of Ethiopian troops from Somalia. In 2010, the Obama administration introduced a Dual Track Policy to engage with Puntland and Somaliland, two sub-national entities,  but this policy was replaced by formal recognition of the Somali Federal Government in 2013 by the USA after the end of the transition.

Any US engagement with the secessionist Somaliland administration will have to take into account the nature of engagement with the fully recognised Federal Government of Somalia. In 2024, the US government reiterated its support for the territorial integrity of Somalia after the Somaliland administration signed an illegal maritime agreement with Ethiopia to lease a coastal area to the landlocked country.

Two Democratic administrations’ (Obama’s and Biden’s) engagement with Somalia produced tangible state-building initiatives that markedly reduced ungoverned spaces in Somalia and the threat of transnational terrorism. How the US Congress will address the conflict in northern Somalia between unionists and secessionists is unclear. “It does not serve the interest of the US to repeat the mistake of funding non-state actors to undermine successive Somali governments, as it did during the two terms of the Bush administration. The US government is unlikely to reintroduce the Dual Track of the Obama administration when Somalia had a transitional government,” said a researcher at a think tank in Garowe.

© Puntland Post, 2025

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