By the grace of God, I was carried out of Somalia’s darkness and into the light of freedom. When I became an American citizen, I did so knowing exactly what it meant. I understood that renouncing one citizenship for another isn’t an exchange of passports, but a solemn vow to live by the principles my new country strives to uphold.
So when I am asked where I am from, I answer without hesitation: America. We are not defined by where we begin, but by where we choose to stand and belong. And from that belonging—rooted in my past, yet spoken as an American—I say Senator Ted Cruz is right about Somaliland. When he calls for U.S. recognition, he isn’t indulging in nostalgia or sentiment. He’s stating a fact.
For 34 years, Somaliland has governed itself. It holds elections that matter and maintains an army that defends its borders. It collects taxes and delivers services, and it issues passports that are used across the world. By every measure of sovereignty, Somaliland is a state. What it lacks isn’t legitimacy, but acknowledgment. And the time for acknowledgement is now.
I know this not as an abstract argument, but as lived experience.
My family escaped Somalia when Siad Barre started persecuting supporters of democracy, my father included. He helped found the Somali Salvation Democratic Front, calling for a return to parliamentary government after Barre’s coup in 1969. For that defiance, Barre imprisoned him and condemned our family to death. We ran because to stay was to be executed. Barre didn’t merely rule Somalia—he dismantled it.
This wasn’t the crude tyranny of a petty strongman. It was Marxist-Leninist ideology enforced with calculated cruelty. Barre tore up the constitution, dissolved parliament, and outlawed political parties. In their place, he erected his Supreme Revolutionary Council, a body that answered not to the Somali people but to his Soviet masters. Under his regime, to speak of democracy wasn’t dissent. It was a death sentence.
The Majeerteen clan learned this firsthand in the late 1970s. When they dared to resist his rule, Barre’s forces answered with collective punishment. More than 2,000 civilians were massacred.
The Umar Mahmud sub-clan suffered a worse fate: their wells were poisoned, their reservoirs were drained, and their herds were wiped out. Tens of thousands of camels, cattle, sheep, and goats were slaughtered—an assault not only on livelihoods, but on survival itself.
For the Isaaq clan, the punishment was somehow even more savage. Between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, entire cities were bombed into rubble. Hargeisa and Burao—once proud centers of commerce and culture—were reduced to ashes. Fathers were executed in public squares before the eyes of their children. Mothers were violated, not as accidents of war, but as weapons of it. Families fleeing toward Ethiopia carried infants across the desert, only to be strafed from the skies.
These were deliberate acts of annihilation, designed to erase a people’s dignity and extinguish their will to resist. The death toll is difficult to reckon with. Conservative estimates put it at 60,000 lives in two years; some reports suggest nearly 200,000. A community was targeted for destruction simply because it refused to bow to tyranny.
And yet, this is where Somaliland’s story bends from tragedy to something extraordinary.
When Barre’s regime finally collapsed in 1991, the survivors had every reason to answer in blood. Their children lay in mass graves. Their women bore scars of violation. Their cities were reduced to rubble. Generations of trauma cried out for vengeance. In almost any other place, at almost any other moment in Africa’s turbulent history, the answer would’ve been the gun.
But Somaliland chose differently. Instead of succumbing to the familiar cycle of vendetta, its elders convened peace conferences rather than war councils. They drafted a social contract from the ashes of burned-out towns. They chose forgiveness where revenge would’ve been expected, consensus where rage was justified.
From that decision emerged something almost without precedent in the Horn of Africa: a functioning democracy. Somalilanders wrote a constitution. They held elections. They built institutions from nothing but determination and the will to endure.
As the rest of Somalia slid into warlordism and jihadist terror, Somaliland chose governance and order. While Mogadishu was consumed by militias and Islamist factions, Somaliland built courts. It built schools. It established a functioning police force. Where Somalia became a byword for anarchy, Somaliland proved that order was still possible, even after devastation.
And three decades on, that decision still defines them. In a region where cycles of blood feud have long dictated history, Somaliland broke the pattern. Elders, clans, and communities chose negotiation over reprisal. They made consensus, not violence, the cornerstone of their state. This is nothing short of a miracle.
As a human being, I see the hand of God in that choice. Scripture teaches that suffering can yield redemption, but only when the wounded refuse hatred and choose healing. Somaliland chose healing. And against every expectation, it endured.
A Study in Contrasts
Today, the differences between Somaliland and Somalia couldn’t be starker. Somaliland funds the vast majority of its own budget. Somalia survives almost entirely on foreign donors. Because it lacks recognition, Somaliland is locked out of the global aid system, denied World Bank loans, denied IMF support, and excluded from the very institutions designed to assist developing states. Mogadishu, meanwhile, treats foreign money as entitlement. Billions flow in, only to be squandered through corruption, ghost payrolls, and the endless recycling of failure.
Somaliland holds genuine elections where leaders lose and step down peacefully. Somalia’s federal government clings to a few blocks of Mogadishu, while Al-Shabaab holds territory larger than many European nations—enforcing barbaric punishments, recruiting child soldiers, and holding civilians hostage.
In Somaliland’s core regions—Maroodi-jeex, Sanaag, and Sahil—human development indices hover around 0.45. Schools function. Clinics remain open. Families, though poor, see progress.
By contrast, Somalia’s national Human Development Index languishes at 0.361, among the very lowest in the world. Children there receive on average less than two years of schooling. Youth unemployment stands near 70%, leaving an entire generation jobless, resentful, and robbed of hope.
In the capital, a city of more than two million, just two public hospitals strain to serve the entire population. These are not numbers on a page, but life-and-death realities. They mark the difference between a society struggling to build a future and one condemned to never-ending failure. And they should matter enormously to America, because where despair festers, extremism takes root.
Somaliland, meanwhile, has immense strategic value. The Gulf of Aden carries one-fifth of all global trade. From Berbera to Zeila, its ports operate with discipline. They help safeguard sea lanes and protect commerce. But cross the border into Somalia, and the picture changes markedly. Criminal networks operate with impunity. Arms traffickers sell weapons as casually as fruit in a market. Human smugglers trade in misery. Cartels thrive in lawless corridors.
But geography is only part of Somaliland’s worth. What makes it exceptional is that it’s a working democracy that wants to partner with America. Its army fights terrorism rather than harboring it. Its government blocks Islamist takeovers rather than enabling them. Its economy builds legitimate businesses rather than surviving on perpetual patronage. In a region where corruption and failure are the rule, Somaliland stands apart.
Compare this record to Somalia’s failures. Unreasonably large sums of Western aid disappear into the accounts of warlords and politicians. The “federal government” is little more than a donor-funded fiction. Meanwhile, the abovementioned Al-Shabaab flourishes, spreading violence and imposing medieval punishments.
Which deserves America’s partnership—the functioning democracy or the failed state? The self-reliant nation or the dependent disaster? The ally who fights extremists or the territory that breeds them?
The answer should be obvious, but Washington has chosen the wrong one for too long.
Does America Have the Will?
Beijing, however, has drawn the right conclusion. China recognizes Somaliland’s significance even as America looks away. It punished Hargeisa for daring to recognize Taiwan, wielding loans and diplomacy as weapons of isolation. The same divide-and-rule tactics Beijing deploys across Africa are now fixed on Somaliland. Because where America hesitates, China advances—dangling loans, tightening debt, and strangling any nation that dares defy it. We’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends.
Somalia once became a Soviet proxy, flooded with weapons and ideology until the state itself collapsed. Now Beijing seeks to run the same play. The difference is that China thinks in decades while America thinks in news cycles. That’s how great powers lose strategic regions. Chinese influence is never about trade alone—it’s about control. The Communist Party wields economic coercion and diplomatic isolation with ruthless precision. To abandon Somaliland now would be to repeat history, handing Beijing a foothold in one of the world’s most vital corridors and watching another generation pay the price.
President Trump understands competition better than most. He sees Iranian proxies attacking commercial ships in the Red Sea, threatening one of the world’s busiest waterways. He sees Islamist movements toppling governments across the Sahel, replacing fragile order with full-blown terror. He sees Beijing exploiting every vacuum left by American hesitation—building ports, binding minerals, and tightening its grip on global supply chains. These rising dangers are reshaping the balance of power in plain sight. They can’t be answered with UN resolutions, press releases, or periodic performances of condemnation. They demand partners on the ground—partners who share our values, defend our interests, and have already stood firm against extremists and authoritarians. Somaliland is such a partner.
Its constitution names Islam as the national religion, not the state religion. That distinction, almost unheard of in the region, creates space for pluralism. Its parliament hosts genuine opposition, where leaders are challenged and criticized, yet endure. Its courts uphold law rather than tribal decree.
None of this is accidental. These are deliberate choices, made again and again by a people who had every reason to choose destruction but chose instead to build. In part, Somaliland has inherited something from British rule: a respect for civil service, civic decency, and the habit of representative councils.
Yes, Somaliland is dealing with numerous problems. Women face barriers, minorities remain vulnerable, and female genital mutilation continues. But those issues can be confronted through the institutions Somaliland has built. In Mogadishu’s chaos, they’ve no chance at all.
Progress requires stable institutions. Reform requires legitimate governance. Hope requires the possibility of change. Somaliland offers all three.
Its economic promise is no less striking. Beneath its soil lie oil reserves that could transform the nation’s future. Property rights are upheld. Girls’ education has expanded. Investors can find in Somaliland what’s almost impossible elsewhere in the Horn of Africa: a safe and stable environment.
Recognition isn’t only about markets or counterterrorism. It’s about what America claims to stand for. Do we support functioning democracies or cling to failed illusions? Do we reward self-reliance or subsidize corruption? Do we back partners who share our principles or abandon them to Beijing’s coercion?
The biblical truth is plain: we reap what we sow. Somaliland has sown democracy, discipline, and a durable partnership with the West. It deserves to reap legitimacy, lasting respect, and a rightful standing among nations.
I left Somalia as a child, carried by exile from a land where hope was hunted down. My journey to citizenship wound through many countries. Becoming an American was a solemn declaration—one of loyalty, of gratitude, of conviction. My embrace of the West does not erase sorrow for Somalia’s suffering. It sharpens it. It deepens my determination to see success where success is possible. And success is possible in Somaliland.
Senator Cruz sees this clearly. Somaliland is not seeking handouts. It is offering its hand in partnership. Its people have honored their commitments for 34 years. Now it is America’s turn. The choice is plain. The time has come to treat Somaliland for what it already is: a functioning state that has earned its place among nations. But it will not take that place until the greatest country on earth finds the courage to acknowledge it.
