President Mohamud meets ‘missing’ Somali soldiers in Eritrea

GOOBJOOG NEWS|ASMARA: President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, accompanied by his Eritrean counterpart Isaias Afwerki, on Sunday visited Somali National Army soldiers who have been undergoing clandestine military training in Eritrea for the last three years.

The President addressed the Somali soldiers and assured them that his number one prioriry at the moment was to ensure that thay are brought home as soon as possible.

Questions still abound as to why the soldiers were not brought back home months after completing the 3-year long training in Eritrea’s mountainous region, and if the soldiers seen by President Mohamud actually adds up to 5,000 soldiers said to have been sent to the country in 2019. 

Some sources intimate that the Eritrean government demanded an estimated $ 5 million it claimed spent on them since 2019.

In June 2021, a United Nations report alleged that thousands of Somalia National Army recruits participated alongside the Eritrean army during the war against TPLF, a claim that was vehemently denied by the Farmaajo administration.

Somalia’s former deputy director of the National Security and Intelligence Agency, Abdisalam Guled, was quoted last year saying that hundreds of Somali troops were killed in the Tigray war. 

“According to sources in Ethiopia, Somali soldiers were fighting alongside Eritreans,” he said. “The casualty is still not clear but I was told 370 on record and many more wounded. The soldiers were not Somalis in Ethiopia, they were Somalis who were taken from Somalia to training in Eritrea, some of them were there for almost a year and a half,” said the former deputy director of NISA, Abdisalam Guled.