King Ahmed Iman Warsame was supposed to be travelling through Europe at the end of June. He had planned to visit Holocaust memorial sites in Lithuania and Poland — including Treblinka and Auschwitz — before continuing on to Austria. Instead, he and his entire delegation were refused visas. It is a familiar frustration for travelers from Africa, and I found it telling that holding the title of “King” carried no weight at all with European consular officials.

I spoke with Warsame, a traditional leader of the Gabooye clan in Somaliland, about what Israel’s recognition of his homeland actually means — to him, to his community, and to a region I suspect most of my readers have rarely thought about. Somaliland is the autonomous, unrecognized territory in the northern part of Somalia that declared independence in 1991 following a civil war. Warsame does not sit in the region’s government in Hargeysa; as king, his role is to represent the Gabooye, protect their interests, and help resolve social and individual disputes within the community.

A Historic and Lonely Recognition

At the end of 2025, Somaliland made headlines around the world when Israel became the first — and so far only — UN member state to recognize it as a separate country. Taiwan, which is not a UN member, also recognizes Somaliland, and the territory maintains informal relations with countries including Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates, though neither has extended formal recognition.

When I asked Warsame about the embassy’s opening in Jerusalem, his delight was unmistakable. He called it a courageous move by the Israeli government — and, listening to him, I believed he meant it.

He described Israel’s recognition as a “great opportunity to build very close relations with a Sunni Muslim community of six million people.”

Echoes of Shared Trauma

What struck me most in our conversation was how quickly Warsame drew a line between Israel’s history and Somaliland’s own. He spoke of the “Isaaq genocide” of 1987 to 1989, during which he says more than 200,000 civilians — mainly women and children — were killed under the leadership of Somalia’s former president, Siad Barre. I don’t think this comparison is made lightly by him, even if the historical record is messier than his framing suggests.

For a more measured accounting, I turned to Markus Virgil Höhne, an ethnologist at the University of Göttingen who has spent years researching Somalia and Somaliland and has personally taken part in the exhumation of mass graves from that period. He describes the violence as fitting a pattern of “the most serious human rights crimes,” though the United Nations has stopped short of formally labeling it genocide, describing it instead as a possible “escalation of violence amounting to genocide.” Even the death toll is contested: Höhne points me to a 1989 report by Robert Gersony citing roughly 5,000 deaths, against a later Africa Watch estimate of around 50,000. That gap alone tells me how much of this history is still unsettled.

Warsame also drew what he sees as a shared geopolitical reality: both Israel and Somaliland, in his telling, are surrounded by neighbors that refuse to recognize their existence — with Ethiopia, he was careful to note, standing as the exception in Somaliland’s case.

Recognized Instability, Unrecognized Democracy

This is where Warsame’s frustration turned, understandably I think, into something closer to bitterness. Why, he asked me, does the international community continue to recognize Somalia — which he describes as undemocratic and chaotic — while withholding recognition from Somaliland, which has held successive local, parliamentary, and presidential elections with peaceful transfers of power between four different presidents? It’s a fair question. Somalia has not held parliamentary elections since 1969; local elections held at the end of 2025 were meant as a trial run for planned nationwide elections that have since been postponed from May 2026 to 2027.

Höhne cautions, however, that Somaliland’s democracy has real limits. Voting tends to follow clan lines, and every party contesting elections is a subgroup of the Isaaq clan, the region’s largest. That leaves people outside the Isaaq clan without meaningful representation, he says, and roughly 30 percent of Somaliland’s territory — the eastern part of the country — opposes independence altogether and largely refuses to vote.

On safety, Warsame and Höhne broadly agree: daily life in Somaliland is markedly safer than in Somalia, where the terrorist group al-Shabaab, once focused on toppling the government, now operates in a more mafia-like fashion in the south, particularly around Mogadishu.

Questions of a Future Israeli Military Presence

Asked about reports that Israel might one day resettle Palestinians in Somaliland, Warsame said there was no basis for the claim, noting that both governments have denied it. On the more strategically plausible question of an Israeli military base — potentially useful in countering Houthi militia activity across the narrow Gulf of Aden in Yemen — Warsame said the matter falls outside his role as a traditional leader, adding only that “whenever the two governments reach an agreement on a matter, it will be implemented.”

Such a base would not be without precedent in the region. Somaliland signed a defense agreement with the United Arab Emirates in 2017 permitting use of Berbera Airport in the north, where the Emirates have since built up a substantial military presence. The French newspaper Le Monde has reported, citing anonymous sources, that construction work there is being carried out by the UAE on behalf of Israel and the United States to build ammunition depots — a claim both Somaliland and Israel have denied.

Höhne views the prospect of an Israeli military and political presence in Somaliland as “an extremely high risk to stability in the region,” arguing that the government in Hargeysa is taking a considerable gamble that may not reflect what most of the population actually wants.

He notes that most of Somaliland’s population has traditionally sided with the Palestinians — shortly after October 7, 2023, then-President Muse Bihi Abdi declared, “As Somaliland, we stand in unwavering solidarity with Palestine.” For many, Höhne suggests, the desire for international recognition as a sovereign state has simply outweighed that earlier position.

An Uncertain Path to Broader Recognition

Warsame told me he hopes more countries will eventually follow Israel’s lead. I left our conversation less convinced than he is. Höhne, for his part, is openly skeptical. He describes an informal alignment among Ethiopia, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel around the Horn of Africa — but points out that, with the exception of Israel, every one of those countries remains active in Somalia as well. Ethiopia has troops stationed in southern Somalia as part of an African Union mission, and Höhne believes that if Addis Ababa were to recognize Somaliland, it would trigger a popular uprising against Ethiopian forces there.

Without a credible African partner in any recognition push, Höhne argues, moves by the US and UAE alone would likely draw accusations of “neo-colonialism” from across the continent. That, more than anything, is why I don’t expect Somaliland to gain further international recognition anytime soon — whatever hope King Warsame carries with him.

What I keep coming back to is this: Warsame speaks about Israel with a warmth that feels entirely genuine, rooted in a real sense of kinship between two peoples who see themselves as unrecognized and encircled. But Höhne’s caution is worth taking seriously too. A king’s gratitude is not the same as a population’s consent, and the people of Somaliland, by most accounts, still lean toward the Palestinian cause they held before Israel came calling. Whether that tension resolves into partnership or backlash may end up mattering more than anything said in Jerusalem.