The Economist
July 22nd 2025
Tom Gardner
Africa correspondent
The government of Puntland, a semi-autonomous state in northern Somalia, has an impressive story to tell. About a decade ago, the remote mountains in its barren interior became a hideout for members of Islamic State (IS). By 2024, the area was a powerful redoubt of global jihadism. The local IS chief, Abdulqadir Mumin, was so influential that many American spooks considered him the group’s global caliph. But then, while the rest of Somalia and the world were otherwise occupied, Puntland fought back.
Eight months on the group’s leaders, including Mr Mumin, are thought to be still at large. But Puntland nonetheless feels triumphant. A commander in the Puntland Maritime Police Force, the state’s de facto army, told me during a visit earlier this month that almost all jihadist strongholds in the mountains had been captured. One official describes the campaign as “the most successful war on terror in the region in years—maybe ever”. Puntland now plans a similar offensive against al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate that has terrorised much of Somalia for nearly two decades.
Puntland’s leaders like to portray it as a plucky David single-handedly battling the Goliath of global jihadism. That isn’t quite the whole story. In recent months the campaign has been boosted by American and Emirati airstrikes, as well as logistics and intelligence support from Ethiopia and Kenya. Even so, Puntland is mostly justified in trumpeting its achievements. Unlike Somalia’s federal government in Mogadishu, the capital, it receives little direct aid from the outside world. Yet it has a far better track record of maintaining stability and keeping jihadists at bay.
The story has wider lessons. As we report in an article to be published later this week, Somalia’s decades-old state-building project is in crisis. Back in 2023 America committed about $1.2bn in aid to Somalia. This year, following Donald Trump’s closure of the United States Agency for International Development, it promises just $314m. The existing model of state-building, in which development aid and security assistance are mostly channelled through Mogadishu, is increasingly up for debate.
Puntland shows the advantages of a less top-down approach. Like Somaliland, the breakaway would-be country to its west, Puntland has built up institutions largely from scratch, with little input from the federal government. Puntland has its own security forces. It runs its own foreign policy. Of Somalia’s five federal states (excluding Somaliland), it has the strongest claim to being run by a government with a degree of democratic legitimacy. In 2023 it became the first state to hold direct municipal elections.
Puntland’s leaders say this proves donors would do better spending more money directly at the state level. “The West needs to empower the bottom-up approach again,” says Said Deni, Puntland’s president. He argues that the United Arab Emirates’s model of federalism, in which power is supposed to be split equally between seven emirates, would be the best fit for Somalia.
Many donors, notably the World Bank and IMF, worry that a more devolved government means more layers of bureaucracy. Some fear that strengthening the federal states at the expense of the central government could lead eventually to the end of Somalia as a nation-state. But considering the decades of failed efforts to build a strong central state in Somalia, my hunch is that Mr Deni is on to something.
What’s your view on Puntland’s progress? Email me here: analysingafrica@economist.com.