By Michael Rubin
On June 30, 2025, Somaliland President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdillahi Irro arrived in Qatar to meet Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim al-Thani, who serves jointly as the Gulf emirate’s prime minister and foreign minister. While previous Somaliland presidents have visited Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the visit to Qatar appeared a diplomatic breakthrough as it marked an expansion of Somaliland’s diplomatic reach.
The Qatari Ministry of Foreign Affair’s subsequent statement was an insult, one that should disqualify Qatar from any future role mediating conflict in the Horn of Africa. The Qatari press release stated that it was “the State of Qatar’s belief that Somalia’s future is built through openness and constructive communication among all its components, to ensure respect for the sovereignty and national unity of the Federal Republic of Somalia.”
Put aside the fact that neither under President Mohamed Farmaajo nor Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has the Federal Republic of Somalia respected constitutional federalism. Under both unelected leaders, the federal government in Mogadishu has encroached on the constitutional rights of Puntland, Jubaland, and the South West State. Both Farmaajo and Hassan Sheikh divert international aid both to their own supporters in Mogadishu and into their own personal bank accounts in countries and territories like Switzerland and Gibraltar or property holdings in Türkiye. The two presidents have hijacked security assistance meant to counter Al-Shabaab in order to target their own political opponents. Meanwhile, both leaders have repeatedly sold Somalia’s sovereignty to the highest bidder, be it Chinese fishing concessions or land grants and construction contracts to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. How does Qatar expect anyone to respect Somalia’s sovereignty when its own leaders make a mockery of it?
Greater Somalia is as much a dream as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism. Djibouti, Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, and Kenya’s former North Eastern Province will never return to Mogadishu’s control. To state that is not to be anti-Somali; after all, more Somalis live outside Mogadishu’s control than inside it and have no desire to be under Mogadishu’s control. Why would they wish to join the least successful, most corrupt, and most dysfunctional government of all Somali-populated regions? If Qatar is not going to share its gas wealth with Egypt’s impoverished Arab population or subject itself to Baghdad’s corrupt leadership, why does Qatar believe Somaliland should give Somalia title over its scant resources?
The real hypocrisy, however, is in any comparison of historical grounds by which Qatar justifies its independence with its own hostility toward Somaliland’s case. After Arabs ended Persian rule over Bahrain in the 18th century AD, the Khalifa family took control not only ruling Bahrain’s main island, but also the Qatar peninsula. Over subsequent decades, the ancestors of Qatar’s current rulers staged a number of rebellions, most unsuccessful. In 1861, Bahrain and British Indian authorities signed a treaty recognizing Qatar as a dependent of Bahrain. In the 1867 Bahrain-Qatar War, Bahraini forces completely destroyed Doha and Wakrah, much as Somali dictator Siad Barre would do just over a century later to Hargeisa. The following year, the British government imposed a settlement that recognized Qatar as a separate entity. In effect, British forces confirmed Qatar’s distinctness less than two decades before they did the same thing in Somaliland.
While Qatar appears to buy the logic of Somali irredentists who say that clan identity should not be enough to justify Somaliland’s independence, the only difference between Qatar, Bahrain’s ruling family, and the United Arab Emirates is tribal identity. Qataris may argue that the Khalifa’s family’s persecution of the Thani shaped Qatari identity, but even the worst Bahraini persecution of Qatari tribes was orders of magnitude less than what Siad Barre and his Darod clan did to Somaliland’s Isaaq.
Qatar’s hypocrisy gets worse, however. While the British may have recognized the Qataris as a distinct entity in 1868, independence did not come for more than a century. Prior to the British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf, Qatar, Bahrain, and the seven Trucial State were part of a joint Federation of Arab Emirates that the British envisioned maintaining control. Qatar and Bahrain ultimately refused to cede political and economic autonomy to the new entity; both unilaterally declared their independence leaving the Trucial States to form the United Arab Emirates.
Qatar today enjoys full independence. Its history shows its willingness to take up arms to prevent outside powers from forcing it into an unwanted union with either Bahrain or the United Arab Emirates. How ironic, then, that its approach to Somaliland forgets its own origins and negates the principles upon which its independence rests.
Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.