Arlaadi Media Editorial
Mogadishu – In October 2021, the world witnessed one of the darkest chapters of internal displacement in Somalia’s modern history. The Digil and Mirifle communities – families who had lived and worked in Laascaanood and the wider Sool region for decades – were subjected to a campaign of painful expulsion that bore all the marks of cruelty, humiliation, inhumanity and systemic discrimination. Thousands of families, whose only “crime” was belonging to Digil and Mirifle clans, were uprooted overnight in a manner unworthy of any society that claims to uphold the rule of law.
According to Civicus Monitor, Somaliland security forces carried out “Mass roundups and arbitrary arrests”, raiding homes at night and detaining people “en masse”. As The EastAfrican reported, women, children, the elderly, and traders were forcefully collected from the roads and expelled without notice or due process, under the pretext of “security.” Families were herded to a stadium, kept there in harsh conditions without adequate food, forced onto trucks, and dumped at Puntland’s borders. UN OCHA documented how people were made to flee “immediately and without their belongings,” with around 30% of parents and kids of the displaced families separated in the chaos, including unaccompanied children as young as 2 years. Properties were confiscated, livelihoods destroyed, and those who had spent decades building businesses were left dispossessed.
Humanitarian agencies counted more than 7,250 people forcibly displaced between 2–14 October 2021 (ReliefWeb, IFRC). Among them, preventable diseases spread quickly; COVID-19 alone claimed lives, while urgent needs for food, shelter, and medical care went unmet. To add insult to injury, journalists who tried to document the abuses were harassed; one reporter was detained and his footage deleted. This was not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but collective punishment also deliberately targeted at a single community, the Digil and Mirifle.
The Painful Continuity of Exclusion
Nearly four years later, the same Digil and Mirifle community faces another injustice, this time not at the hands of Somaliland authorities, but within Somalia’s own federal experiment. The recently formed Northeast Somalia State (formerly SSC-Khatumo), which was widely hailed as a victory for grassroots resistance and local self-determination, has shockingly chosen to exclude Digil and Mirifle from representation in its new parliament.
This deliberate omission is both indefensible and dangerous. Other Somali clans, including some with little or no visible presence in Sool, Sanaag, and Cayn, were allocated seats in the state’s parliament. Yet the Digil and Mirifle – a community of tens of thousands of families who have for decades sustained the lifeline of these regions – were denied any representation. This exclusion is not an oversight; it is by design. And in its design, it signals a terrifying continuity: a community that has already endured the pain of the forced displacement is now stripped of political voice, leaving it vulnerable to future abuses including the risk of a new phase of mass deportations.
Builders of the Region, Victims of Injustice
The Digil and Mirifle families across the north are not outsiders. They are the teachers in local schools, the Qur’an instructors in madrassas, the imams in the mosques, the traders in markets, the masons who construct homes, and the artisans who produce furniture. They carry out much of the region’s hardest and most essential work. Their economic and social footprint in Sool, Sanaag, and Cayn is undeniable, and yet their political rights have been deliberately erased.
This exclusion is especially bitter given the silence of Digil and Mirifle leaders at the federal and state levels. Somalia’s Speaker of Parliament, the President of Southwest State, 69 members of the two houses of parliament, and dozens of ministers in the federal cabinet all hail from Digil and Mirifle. Yet none have meaningfully lobbied to secure representation for their victimized communities in the Northeast State. That silence has effectively sanctioned their community’s marginalization, emboldening local authorities to dismiss Digil and Mirifle as politically expendable.
The Dangerous Precedent
What is at stake is not just the dignity of a single community, but the fragile social fabric of Somalia itself. When a community is expelled in thousands in 2021 and then deliberately excluded from representation in 2025, it sends a dangerous message: that some Somalis can continually be treated as second-class citizens without consequence. It normalizes the politics of exclusion and collective punishment, the very politics that tore Somalia apart in the 1990s.
The new Northeast Somalia State, born out of a struggle for justice and autonomy, has chosen to replicate this injustice. Such double standards risk sowing new seeds of resentment and conflict. If a community is denied representation, it is denied protection. And if it is denied protection, nothing prevents a repeat of the humiliating expulsions and segregations of Laascaanood.
A Call to Conscience
This is a moment that calls for moral clarity and political courage. The exclusion of Digil and Mirifle from the Northeast Somalia parliament is not a technical flaw; it is a grave injustice by design. It is a continuation of the same structural marginalization that has plagued Somalia’s politics for decades. It must be confronted by Somali leaders, by the civil society, and by international partners, before it metastasizes into another cycle of violence.
The new administration under President Firdhiye, who once expressed sympathy for the community during their darkest hour, bears a historic responsibility. To ignore their plight now is to legitimize their past suffering and to deny them representation is to sanction their future vulnerability.
Somalia cannot afford to build a new state on the foundations of old injustices. The Digil and Mirifle community must not be treated as expendable. Their rights, their contributions, and their dignity demand recognition. If Somalia is ever to break the cycle of exclusion and violence, it must start here now, by ensuring that no community, however silenced, is left voiceless in its own country.
