History of Galmudug

For centuries the interior belonged to pastoral society — herds, wells, seasonal migration, and the oral law (xeer) and poetry that governed and recorded it — while the coast traded with Arabia, Persia, and India. In 1878 Yusuf Ali Kenadid, breaking away from the Majeerteen Sultanate to the north, founded the Sultanate of Hobyo, which came to control much of the Mudug coast and its hinterland. The sultanate kept a small fleet and an army, minted its influence through trade, and dealt directly with the imperial powers scrambling for the region.

Italy declared a protectorate over Hobyo in 1888. The arrangement — nominal Italian suzerainty over a functioning Somali state — lasted until 1925, when Italy deposed the sultanate outright and absorbed the territory into Italian Somaliland. Resistance, notably by Omar Samatar, who twice took the fort at El Buur in 1925–26, is still remembered in song and verse.

Under Italian rule the central regions remained a pastoral periphery, administered lightly from the coast. After the Second World War and a decade of UN trusteeship, Italian Somaliland united with British Somaliland at independence on 1 July 1960 to form the Somali Republic. Galkayo and the central towns grew as administrative and trading centres in the new state, and later under the military government of Siad Barre, which invested in wells, townships, and the cooperative herding schemes of the 1970s.

The same decades planted the seeds of crisis: drought (notably the daba-dheer drought of 1974–75), the 1977–78 Ogaden war with Ethiopia, and a deepening authoritarianism that turned clan against clan. By the late 1980s the state was dissolving.

After the state collapsed in 1991, central Somalia became a contested frontier between armed factions, and Galkayo a divided city — an outcome stabilised, imperfectly but durably, by the Mudug Peace Agreement of 1993, which still underlies the city's north–south arrangement. In the vacuum, communities improvised: local administrations such as Himan and Heeb (2008, based in Adado) kept a measure of order, while the Sufi movement Ahlu Sunna Wal Jama'a took up arms after 2008 to defend the central regions against Al-Shabaab, holding Dhusamareb and much of Galgaduud.

A first 'Galmudug' administration was declared in south Galkayo in 2006. The decisive step came in 2015, when a conference in Adado merged the existing administrations into the Galmudug Interim Administration, a federal member state under Somalia's provisional constitution. After years of friction between the state and Ahlu Sunna, a 2020 electoral process in Dhusamareb produced a single administration under President Ahmed Abdi Karie 'Qoorqoor', and the state capital settled in Dhusamareb.

Since 2022 Galmudug has been the main theatre of the government's offensive — fought alongside local 'Ma'awisley' community forces — that pushed Al-Shabaab out of long-held districts including Harardhere and much of El Buur and El Dher. Consolidating those gains, and rebuilding what conflict unbuilt, is the state's present chapter.