No ideology can justify the slaughter of the innocent. — Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary-General.
By Dahir Abshir Farah (Jeer)
1. Introduction
Africa’s Tora Bora is deployed here to evoke a deliberate strategic and symbolic parallel between the Cal Miskad mountain range in Somalia’s Puntland State and the notorious Tora Bora massif in eastern Afghanistan. Deriving its name from Pashto, translating to “Black Cave” or “Dark Dust, —Tora Bora entered the global security lexicon in 2001 as the site of a dramatic U.S.-led military offensive aimed at capturing Osama bin Laden. This treacherous terrain, riddled with caves and fortified hideouts, offered sanctuary to al-Qaeda operatives and underscored the challenges of asymmetrical warfare in inaccessible geographies. In invoking this comparison, the article highlights Cal Miskad’s similarly forbidding topography and its emerging significance as a crucible in Somalia’s counterterrorism struggle, where Puntland’s security forces confront deeply entrenched ISIS militants operating from remote, natural strongholds in the Bari region of Puntland state.
For decades, Somalia has endured a theater of chronic insurgency and a battleground for deeply entrenched terrorist networks. This tumultuous milieu culminated in 2006, when Al-Shabaab emanated from the fragmented vestiges and remnants of Somalia’s Islamic Courts Union, heralding the rise of a virulent jihadist insurgency (Smith, 2013 ). Yet, amid this enduring volatility, the people of Puntland have demonstrated extraordinary resilience. For over thirty years, they have withstood unrelenting internal and external threats to their self-determination, political stability, and control of natural resources. Anchored in a rich historical legacy and fortified by a mature political consciousness, Puntland has repelled successive waves of ideological radicalism and militant incursions with unwavering resolve. Since the fierce confrontations with the Muslim Brotherhood in Garowe and the rugged Saliid Mountains in 1992 —where resistance was mounted against Islamist expansionism—to the sustained counterinsurgency campaigns in the Cal Madow Mountains against Al-Shabaab between 2010 and 2014, Puntland’s security forces have consistently served as a frontline bulwark against violent extremism.
These encounters reflect not only strategic endurance but also a profound and enduring commitment to defending territorial integrity and the principles of self-governance. In 2016, Al-Shabaab orchestrated a major offensive aimed at capturing territory along Puntland’s coastline, launching an amphibious incursion via the Indian Ocean. The group sought to establish operational footholds in Suuj, Garmaal, and Garacad. However, Puntland’s security forces mounted a swift and decisive response, repelling the assault, inflicting heavy losses on the militants, and capturing several combatants.
Meanwhile, in 2015, ISIS-affiliated fighters established military outposts in the strategically vital Cal Miskad mountain range in the Bari region. Their entrenchment posed a sustained threat to local communities and disrupted economic activity across Puntland, particularly affecting trade routes and regional commerce. In December 2024, as a countermeasure to the growing threat posed by ISIS in the Cal Miskad Massifs, Puntland launched Hilac Operation—a comprehensive and surgically coordinated military campaign aimed at dismantling entrenched jihadist networks and reasserting state control over the region. These were not isolated military engagements but rather defining moments in Puntland’s broader struggle to preserve its territorial authority and protect its people from the destabilizing reach of Global jihadist networks. Through unwavering sacrifice, operational acumen, and an unyielding national ethos, the people of Puntland have continually demonstrated their role as a vanguard in the fight against terrorism, serving as a critical bulwark against the expansion of violent ideologies in the Horn of Africa.
1. The Cal Miskad Massifs: A Strategic Epicenter of ISIS-Jihadist Entrenchment in the Horn of Africa
The Islamic State’s [ISIS] outpost in Somalia was established in 2015 when a faction of al-Shabaab deserted and pledged allegiance to ISIS, attaining formal designation as an official provincial affiliate of the Islamic State. (NCTC, 2018). This group follows a strict extremist interpretation of Islamic law and strives to expand its caliphate across Africa. The Cal Miskad mountains in Puntland have become a key stronghold for ISIS-Somalia, serving as a strategic base for regional destabilization. Prior to ISIS’s emergence, al-Shabaab had already established significant militant control over parts of Puntland (Hansen, 2025). ISIS-Somalia manifested as a radical offshoot of al-Shabaab, Somalia’s most Ingrained jihadist entity, which exerts formidable control over vast swathes of the country’s southern and central territories (Group, 2024 ). The Islamic State in Somalia is deemed to wield a formidable contingent of 700 to 1,500 battle-hardened militants deeply embedded within Puntland’s austere mountain terrain, where the group has ensconced a fortified bastion of insurgent power and strategic fortitude (Reuters, 2025).
A confluence of strategic imperatives drove ISIS to embed its presence within the Cal Miskad mountain redoubt profoundly. The region’s rugged mountainous terrain offers a natural defensive barrier, rendering aerial bombardment and ground offensives exceptionally challenging. Additionally, the area’s access to water resources enhances its strategic value. Finally, the proximity to the Gulf of Aden facilitates the influx of fighters and supplies from conflict zones in Asia, notably Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. The group’s leadership, predominantly originating from the Cal Miskad geological bulwarks, benefits from intimate local knowledge and community ties. ISIS’s localized leadership—rooted in consanguineous and clan-based affiliations—confers distinct strategic advantages in recruitment, concealment, and legitimacy. ISIS exploited the region’s weak state presence and the local population’s limited access to government services, enabling them to entrench their influence. Yet ISIS’s entrenchment in the Cal Miskad Massifs cannot be explained by geography alone. It is underpinned by a deeper architecture of structural fragility: entrenched socio-economic marginalization, pervasive institutional neglect, and a near-total absence of state authority.
2. State-Society Convergence and the Military Surge to Annihilate ISIS Jihadists in Puntland
The Puntland government initiated an intensive and well-coordinated military mobilization at the start of 2024, aimed at building a formidable combat force and a robust logistical infrastructure to decisively dismantle ISIS strongholds entrenched in the rugged Cal Miskad mountain range of the Bari region. Framed as a strategic military surge, this campaign—codenamed Operation Hilaac—was not solely a state-driven effort, but a comprehensive, whole-of-society endeavor that galvanized the heterogeneous strata of society across Puntland and the wider Puntland diaspora. Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni, clad in full military regalia, issued a critical and unequivocal call to action, declaring the region to be in a state of existential threat. He appealed to the citizenry to unconditionally rally behind the state and its armed forces in a decisive campaign to safeguard Puntland’s territorial integrity and internal stability. Beyond its military apparatus, Puntland mobilized its societal foundations. Diaspora communities across North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia played a critical role by orchestrating high-impact fundraising campaigns that financially empowered the government’s counterterrorism operations. The business community, meanwhile, provided vital logistical support by supplying cash, food rations, drinking water, fuel, and other essential resources to frontline troops.
Nomadic communities contributed in culturally significant ways, offering livestock—including camels, goats, sheep, and cattle—to sustain the operation’s logistical backbone. Women’s groups, often the unsung pillars of wartime resilience in Somalia, prepared and delivered ready-to-eat and dry foods that maintained troop endurance in the harsh terrains of the Bari region in Puntland. Religious leaders actively shaped the moral narrative by preaching in mosques that the anti-ISIS campaign was a just and defensive jihad, one through which the people of Puntland must protect their Peace, stability, and rally behind their security forces. Crucially, traditional elders and political opposition elites, often sidelined in centralized security decisions, lent public legitimacy and moral endorsement to the campaign, framing it as a necessary struggle for communal survival and regional stability. This unprecedented level of political unity and civic-military solidarity underscored that the war against ISIS was not merely a tactical battle but a defining moment of societal convergence in Puntland’s modern history.
3. With No Backing, No Buffer: Puntland Confronts Global Terrorism on Rugged Mountain Bastions
Puntland’s confrontation—on its jagged massifs—with battle-hardened international jihadist organization [ISIS] underscores a stark and under-acknowledged reality: this is a regional force standing alone against militants whose military proficiency was forged in the crucible of protracted Middle Eastern wars against NATO and Russian troops. The fight unfolds across unforgiving terrain—rugged mountain bastions—where neither Somali nor broader African military contingents have historically succeeded in conducting effective counterinsurgency operations. During Operation Hilaac, the Federal Government of Somalia played no operational role—instead, it politicized the threat, dismissing credible intelligence and denying the presence of international jihadists in Puntland.
On 29 December 2024, ISIS executed a plotted assault involving nearly 30 foreign fighters—predominantly Arabs and Africans—employing suicide bombings and armed raids on a military base in Dharjaale, Bari region. The identities of the assailants were later flaunted across ISIS propaganda networks. This attack exposed the federal government’s dangerous complacency and information manipulation. Crucially, it was the United States and the United Arab Emirates that supplied vital intelligence and facilitated precision airstrikes, proving decisive in degrading ISIS positions. Puntland’s resilience thwarted ISIS’s expansionist agenda.
4. A Watershed Moment in Counterterrorism: How the Triumph of Puntland over ISIS Reshapes the Future Stability of Somalia and Recasts Deni’s Wartime Leadership Legacy
Ravaged by decades of protracted civil strife, Somalia has, over the past two decades, remained mired in chronic instability, exacerbated by the embedded and uncompromising presence of terrorist groups such as Al-Shabaab and ISIS. Amid the prevailing milieu of pervasive insecurity and drawn-out conflict, the most pressing and existential necessity remains the attainment of genuine security and protection from extremist violence. Lamentably, the Somali people— principally those dwelling in the South and Central regions—have been persistently deprived of competent leadership and an operational and legitimate state apparatus capable of extricating them from the entrenched grip of Al-Shabaab. This failure persists despite the sustained deployment of over 22,000 foreign troops and the infusion of approximately one billion dollars into the security sector and international peacekeeping operations annually since 2007 (Kandie et al., 2025).
Successive Somali federal administrations have consistently failed to dismantle the deeply entrenched structural impediments obstructing the defeat of Al-Shabaab in South-Central Somalia. Chronic corruption, institutional fragility, and fragmented governance have persistently paralyzed unified counterinsurgency operations. Despite the deployment of over 22,000 foreign troops under a peacekeeping mandate and the injection of nearly one billion dollars in international support per year since 2007, federal leadership has proven incapable of neutralizing insurgent strongholds or restoring national cohesion. Foreign forces remain operationally constrained, while unresolved clan entanglements and local complicity continue to embolden militant deep-rooted. The politicization of counterterrorism has further eroded public trust and fractured the legitimacy of the state’s security agenda. In the absence of a coherent and executable national security doctrine, Somalia remains acutely vulnerable to insurgent resurgence and territorial regression.
In stark contrast, Puntland—under the wartime leadership of President Said Abdullahi Deni—achieved what successive federal presidents have demonstrably failed to deliver for nearly two decades: the strategic defeat of an international terrorist network profoundly embedded within the unforgiving and inhospitable terrain of the Cal Miskad mountains. Without international troops or massive external financing, Puntland mobilized domestic resources, unified societal actors, and mounted a disciplined, high-impact military campaign that reclaimed its existential preservation and stability from extremist occupation. This victory not only redefines Somalia’s counterterrorism paradigm but also cements Deni’s historical legacy as a decisive and capable wartime leader in a context where federal inertia has long prevailed. While Puntland has unequivocally demonstrated to the international community—particularly to those nations supporting Somalia’s security architecture—that the Somali people possess the inherent capacity to defend themselves against terrorism and can, moreover, attain tangible and strategic gains in the broader campaign against violent extremism.
5. What Paramount Strategic Exigencies Now Confront Puntland in the Wake of its Decisive and Conclusive Dismantling of ISIS?
As affirmed by preeminent counterterrorism scholars, terrorist organizations do not merely assert control through conventional territorial occupation; instead, they embed themselves insidiously within the socio-cultural substratum of local communities. Their strategic modus operandi is predicated on the co-option and manipulation of historically rooted residents in the region they usurp, facilitating not only geographic, deeply established, but also socio-political entanglement. Such symbiotic infiltration affords these groups a durable form of resilience: even when militarily degraded or tactically dislodged, they retreat into civilian ecosystems, recalibrate through covert networks, and subsequently reconstitute as renewed asymmetric threats. In light of this deeply entrenched threat architecture—and cognizant of the formidable operational and financial burden expended in neutralizing ISIS over an expansive 400 square kilometers of topographically inhospitable terrain—the Puntland administration must pivot toward a holistic and community-centric stabilization paradigm. Central to this approach is the immediate establishment and deployment of state-integrated, locally recruited stabilization forces, meticulously vetted, rigorously trained, and institutionally subordinated to the central security apparatus. These forces must be permanently stationed within post-liberation zones, thereby serving as embedded guardians of civic order and as a preventative bulwark against jihadist re-penetration.
Concurrently, the projection of state legitimacy through comprehensive public service delivery is of paramount importance. The rapid restoration and extension of essential social infrastructure—particularly in education, healthcare, access to water, internal security, and road connectivity—must not be perceived as ancillary but rather as a strategic imperative integral to conflict transformation. Without such developmental dividends, the insurgent narrative remains potent, and governance vacuums risk being re-appropriated by extremist actors. Moreover, Puntland’s intelligence apparatus must undertake a systematic and multi-dimensional forensic inquiry into the operational vectors and tactical assessment that enabled ISIS to embed itself within the Cal Miskad mountain redoubt. This requires the development of a comprehensive threat mapping framework that encompasses clandestine supply chains, arms trafficking routes, and transnational recruitment pipelines, particularly those facilitating the influx of foreign fighters and materiel through the Gulf of Aden littoral. Such intelligence fusion must inform a revised counterterrorism doctrine that incorporates the critical recognition that ISIS remains a strategically adaptive entity, capable of extrapolating battlefield lessons, recalibrating tactics, and initiating renewed offensives under altered operational parameters.
To that end, the Puntland government must undertake an urgent institutional recalibration of its intelligence and security architecture. This includes the establishment of a technologically enabled, intelligence-driven fusion center for real-time data synthesis and the formation of a specialized, permanently mandated counterterrorism strike force. Only through such strategic measures can Puntland ensure the long-term immunization of its territory against jihadist resurgence and reaffirm its status as a frontline bastion of counterterrorism in Somalia and the Horn of Africa.
7. Conclusion
The battle for the Cal Miskad Massifs marks a seminal inflection point in Somalia’s contemporary counterterrorism history. Far more than a tactical military victory, the successful expulsion of ISIS from this austere mountainous stronghold signifies the dismantlement of one of the most formidable jihadist sanctuaries in the world. It represents the convergence of state resolve, civic mobilization, and indigenous resilience in the face of an internationally networked insurgency. Yet, such a triumph—however decisive—must not be misconstrued as an end-state. Instead, it constitutes the prelude to a far more complex and enduring mandate: the construction of a durable counterinsurgency architecture that transcends episodic offensives. Without sustained intelligence reform, permanent local security deployments, and the rapid infusion of governance and services into post-conflict zones, the structural vulnerabilities that enabled ISIS entrenchment will remain dangerously unresolved.
The international community must therefore recalibrate its gaze. Puntland’s solitary campaign against ISIS—conducted without international boots on the ground or billion-dollar security umbrellas—demonstrates that locally anchored, strategically disciplined counterterrorism can yield transformative outcomes. In an era where global jihadism continues to mutate across fragile geographies, Puntland stands as a critical frontier whose security trajectory carries implications far beyond the Horn of Africa. Its fight is not parochial—it is paradigmatic, and the world would do well to pay heed.
Dahir Abshir Farah (Jeer)
Email:daahirjeer1@gmail.com
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Reference
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