Why the UAE, Israel and Turkey all need a Somali port

The weapons documented moving through Bosaso airport into Sudan, in the Middle East Eye investigation published on 31 October 2025, are not for a war that Puntland is fighting. The Israeli foreign minister's visit to Hargeisa in January 2026 was not about a dispute between Israel and Somaliland. The Turkish military installation under accelerated construction at Laas Qoray, on the contested Sanaag coast, will not be used to defend a federal authority that does not extend to Sanaag. The Somali coastline has, in the course of the past five years, become the address through which three external powers conduct wars that do not have Somali objectives.

This is the part of the Somali geopolitical map that the formal diplomatic framing has not yet absorbed. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation declaration of 10 January 2026, adopted at the 22nd Extraordinary Session of Foreign Ministers in Jeddah and supported by twenty-one Muslim-majority states, called Israel's recognition of Somaliland a 'dangerous precedent' and reaffirmed Somalia's territorial integrity. The territorial integrity of Somalia is a legitimate concern. It is not the variable that explains why three Gulf-adjacent powers are spending tens of millions of dollars per year on positions along a coastline whose own administrative future remains contested.

The explanatory variable is elsewhere. The Bosaso position is about Sudan. The Hargeisa position is about Yemen and the Red Sea. The Mogadishu position, and its extension to Laas Qoray, is about the Eastern Mediterranean and, behind that, about Gaza and the Turkish-Israeli rivalry that the Syria withdrawal and the Somaliland recognition have made more direct. The Somalis live in the theater. They are not the participants.

Bosaso: the Sudan logistics node

The most operationally consequential of the three proxy uses is the one that has attracted the least Western press attention until recently. The Puntland coastline has been part of the United Arab Emirates security architecture in the Horn of Africa for over a decade. The Puntland Maritime Police Force was equipped and trained by the UAE. The base outside Bosaso, the airport facilities, the patrol-craft anchorages: all were built into the regional administration's security cooperation with Abu Dhabi during the period in which the federal government in Mogadishu was either non-existent or non-functional.

What the Sudan war has revealed is the dual-use nature of that infrastructure. The United Nations Panel of Experts on Sudan, in its January 2024 report to the Security Council, found 'credible' allegations that the United Arab Emirates was supplying the Rapid Support Forces with weapons ranging from small arms and ammunition to unmanned combat aerial vehicles and anti-aircraft missiles, predominantly through the Amdjarass airstrip in eastern Chad. Reuters documented in December 2024 that dozens of cargo flights from the UAE had landed at that airstrip. Amnesty International, in a July 2024 weapons-tracing report, identified the same supply line. The Yale-based Conflict Observatory, working with US State Department funding, corroborated the UN Panel findings into 2025.

Somalia entered this picture as a second route. In a November 2025 statement, Somalia's defence minister confirmed reporting that transport aircraft carrying undisclosed cargo had been operating from Bosaso airport in Puntland to destinations linked to the Sudan war. A Middle East Eye investigation published on 31 October 2025 had earlier documented at least twelve flights operated by companies with UAE links arriving at Bosaso between June and October 2025, citing a senior Puntland commander on conditions of anonymity, flight-tracking data, and satellite imagery. The investigation also documented Colombian personnel transiting through Bosaso en route to fight alongside the RSF.

The United Arab Emirates has denied all such allegations across both routes, citing the April 2025 follow-up UN Panel of Experts report, which it states contains 'no substantiated evidence' of UAE support to any warring party. The contested factual record nevertheless points consistently to a logistical pattern that requires an airport with capacity, a ground handling environment that does not generate independent reporting, and a regional administration whose foreign-policy decisions are not gated through a federal capital that would, in this case, decline to authorise the use. Bosaso supplies all three.

The war for which this matters is not in Puntland. It is in Khartoum and Darfur and Kordofan. The objective is not Somali. It is the maintenance of the RSF position in a Sudanese civil war whose outcome the UAE has staked significant resources on shaping. The Somalis hosting the logistics line are not participants in that conflict. The transit fees, the diplomatic friction with the federal government, the occasional Mogadishu cabinet decree annulling the security arrangements — all are the price of being the address.

Hargeisa: the Red Sea and Yemen position

The Israeli foreign-policy investment in Somaliland's recognition is not principally about Somaliland. The Israeli rationale, made explicit in the Washington Institute analysis 'Recognizing Somaliland: Israel's Return to the Red Sea' and the N7 Initiative paper 'Gateways to the Red Sea: The case for Israel-Somaliland normalization,' is the strategic value of a Red Sea position from which to operate against the Houthi maritime corridor in Yemen, and against the broader Iranian-aligned shipping pattern through Bab al-Mandeb that has interdicted Israeli-bound vessels throughout the war on Gaza.

The recognition itself was a means. The means provides what Israeli planners have lacked: a friendly coastline on the African side of the Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint, on which intelligence, naval, and air assets can be positioned without depending on Saudi or Egyptian permissions that have become harder to obtain. The cost of this position is the diplomatic backlash from the OIC and the rupture with the Federal Government of Somalia and most of the Muslim-majority world. The benefit is a forward-deployable architecture against an Iranian regional position whose maritime extension has been a strategic Israeli concern since 2023.

The United Arab Emirates' role in enabling the Israeli recognition — through the parallel decisions to accept Somaliland passports, deepen DP World's commitments at Berbera, and refrain from joining the OIC chorus against the recognition — is consistent with the Sudan pattern. The Somali position is being used to advance a UAE foreign-policy objective whose theater is elsewhere. The Emirati position vis-à-vis the Houthis is operationally entwined with Israel's; the Berbera infrastructure serves both.

None of this is about Somaliland's case for independence. The Hargeisa government has a case for independence that pre-dates the Yemen war, that pre-dates the Israeli interest, and that would exist if neither were a factor. The case is not being advanced on its merits. It is being advanced because two external powers have identified a use for the recognition that is not Somaliland's use. This is the difference between a sovereign claim and a proxy theater.

Laas Qoray and Mogadishu: the Eastern Mediterranean back-door

Turkey's Somali position appears, at first reading, to be the cleanest of the three. Camp TURKSOM has trained Somali troops since 2017. The TPAO offshore hydrocarbon agreement provides commercial substance to the bilateral relationship. The naval cooperation pact, signed in February 2024, responds to genuine Somali maritime-security needs. The Erdogan-Mohamud relationship produced the diplomatic intervention that froze the Ethiopia-Somaliland MoU in December 2024.

The Laas Qoray base announcement, accelerated after the Israeli recognition, has complicated this reading. The base is in the Sanaag region, which is administered by Puntland and claimed by Somaliland. The Federal Government in Mogadishu has authorised the installation. The Federal Government does not control the territory on which the installation will sit. The arrangement, in practice, requires regional acquiescence that the formal authorisation cannot deliver. It is, in other words, the same kind of arrangement the UAE has openly cultivated with Puntland at Bosaso — but described with federal cover.

The theater for which the Laas Qoray base matters is not Somali either. Burcu Ozcelik of the Royal United Services Institute describes the Turkish-Israeli dynamic in the Horn as part of a 'low intensity cold war' whose primary fronts are the Eastern Mediterranean, Syria, and Gaza. Turkey's energy-import dependence — approximately ninety-three percent of its oil and ninety-nine percent of its natural gas, per the International Energy Agency — has driven a fifteen-year campaign to secure offshore hydrocarbon access. The Eastern Mediterranean has not yielded that access. Cyprus, Greece, and the European maritime regime have refused the terms Ankara required. Somalia has agreed to them, on terms Horn Review has described as recovering up to ninety percent of operational costs to TPAO before profit-sharing begins.

The Somali coastline, in this reading, is a substitute for the Cypriot and Aegean coastlines that Turkish energy diplomacy did not secure. The Laas Qoray base is a forward-deployable Turkish naval and air position that responds to the Israeli Somaliland presence at the same Bab al-Mandeb chokepoint, in the same Red Sea theater. The conflict to which the base belongs is not in Sanaag. It is the Turkish-Israeli rivalry whose theaters have multiplied since the Syrian transition and the Gaza war's regional spillover.

Qatar's anomaly

The analytical category that organises this piece — Somali soil hosting wars not fought for Somali reasons — is not exhaustive. It does not include Qatar. The reason it does not is that Qatar's Somalia policy is not built around a war Qatar is fighting somewhere else.

Doha has theaters, plural — the Gaza mediation, the Iran-United States communication channel, the Lebanon reconstruction file, the Afghanistan diplomacy. None of them produces a coastline requirement. The Qatari investment in Somalia is, by the standards this piece is measuring, anomalous: it engages the federal government for the federal government's reasons, supports the territorial-integrity norm because Qatar values that norm in general, and contributes to humanitarian and development files whose objectives are local.

This is the structural difference between mediation and proxy positioning. A mediator does not need a forward base. A proxy actor does. The Qatari diplomatic instrument — OIC declarations, multilateral coalitions, financial backing for federal institutions — is the instrument available to a state whose strategic posture does not require a Somali address. The three Gulf-adjacent powers whose strategic posture does require one have built the addresses correspondingly.

This does not mean Qatar's instrument is sufficient to the actual Somali emergency. What this piece argues is narrower: the limits of the Qatari instrument are the limits of a non-proxy actor in a theater that has been organised, by the other actors, as a proxy theater.

What the Somalis bear

The Somali civilians displaced by drought and the Al-Shabaab offensive in Lower Shabelle did not benefit operationally from the Emirati training of the Puntland Maritime Police Force. The protesters in Mogadishu in May 2026, demonstrating against the constitutional crisis of President Mohamud's expired mandate, did not benefit from the Turkish military presence at Camp TURKSOM or the planned base at Laas Qoray. The civilians of Hargeisa whose city is being prepared, at intervals, for a recognition ceremony that the Mogadishu government opposes did not authorise the Yemeni and Israeli strategic logic that the recognition serves.

The proxy theater takes Somali real estate and converts it to the geographic substrate of other countries' wars. The rent paid to Somali political actors — in cash, in security cooperation, in diplomatic backing — is a price calculated against those wars, not against any Somali objective. When the wars end, the rent ends. The infrastructure remains. The questions of who lives there and under whose authority do not become easier because the underlying conflicts have moved.

The analytical task for any state that wants to engage Somalia on Somali terms is to separate the territorial-integrity defence from the proxy-theater operation. The first requires multilateral diplomacy of the kind Qatar has developed. The second requires either a counter-proxy capability that Qatar has chosen not to develop or a political settlement among the proxy actors that none of them has reason to seek as long as their respective theaters elsewhere remain active.

The Somali coastline is not Sudan. It is not Yemen. It is not the Eastern Mediterranean. It is being used as the connecting tissue among these conflicts. The connection runs through Bosaso, Hargeisa, Berbera, Kismayo, and now Laas Qoray. The Somalis who live at these addresses did not draw the map. They are charged the rent on it.

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Sources: United Nations Panel of Experts on Sudan, final report S/2024/65, January 2024. Reuters investigation, December 2024. Amnesty International, 'New weapons fuelling the Sudan conflict,' July 2024. Yale Conflict Observatory (US State Department-funded), Sudan arms-transfer reports, 2024-2025. Middle East Eye, 'Exclusive: Inside the UAE's secret Sudan war operation at Somalia's Bosaso,' 31 October 2025, and 'Somali defence minister confirms MEE report,' November 2025. Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, 22nd Extraordinary Session resolution, Jeddah, 10 January 2026. Royal United Services Institute (Burcu Ozcelik), 'The New Scramble: Turkey, Somalia and the Battle for the Red Sea,' and 'From Syria to Somaliland: Turkey-Israel Competition Reshapes Region.' Sahan Research (Matthew Bryden, former UN Monitoring Group on Somalia coordinator), quoted in Alhurra coverage. Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 'Recognizing Somaliland: Israel's Return to the Red Sea.' N7 Initiative, 'Gateways to the Red Sea: The case for Israel-Somaliland normalization.' International Crisis Group, 'The Stakes in the Ethiopia-Somaliland Deal.' Horn Review, 'Tracing UAE-Somalia Relations: Evolution, Breakdown, and Regional Impact' (January 2026). International Energy Agency country profile, Türkiye.