Reporting Is the Crime

How Somalia Silences the Journalists Who Document Power

In ten weeks this summer, at least ten journalists were arrested, beaten, abducted, or imprisoned across six Somali cities — each for reporting on something those in power did not want seen.

This report was first published in May 2026 and updated in July 2026 with additional cases documented through mid-July, including the detentions in Garowe and Bosaso.

In the span of ten weeks this summer, at least ten Somali journalists across six cities were arrested, detained, raided, beaten, abducted, or forced into exile — each time for the same underlying offense: reporting on what authorities would rather the public not see, whether inside a courtroom, behind a prison wall, on a city street, or in a contested town.

The crackdown began in May, when NISA officers abducted and beat journalist Mohamed Bulbul in Mogadishu and threatened him with death for covering protests against a controversial constitutional amendment extending presidential and parliamentary terms. It accelerated through June and into July: in Baidoa, a reporter was jailed for publishing complaints of women khat traders robbed by federal forces; in Las Anod, police raided journalists’ homes at gunpoint for covering the testimonies of families whose relatives remain locked in Somaliland’s prisons; in Mogadishu, a journalist was blindfolded and dragged from the courthouse steps, a second was beaten in custody for reporting on a police officer’s salary complaint; in Qardho, a journalist was released only after clan elders guaranteed he would stop reporting on insecurity; in Garowe, a woman journalist was arrested at her door and transferred directly to prison, where she now faces up to three years under a 1962 penal code for a 15-second video; and in Bosaso, Puntland’s intelligence service detained a journalist for reporting on a business strike over a port tax increase.

These are not isolated incidents. Somalia already ranks 126th out of 180 countries in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index. What this summer’s cases show is the architecture beneath that ranking: Somali authorities — federal, state, NISA, and breakaway and contested administrations alike — treating ordinary journalism as a security threat to be neutralized, through arrest, abduction, physical violence, or the threat of each.

The first documented arrest in this sequence predates all others by weeks and sets the political context for what followed. On 8 May 2026, NISA officers and Mobile Vehicle Checkpoint Unit officers abducted journalist Mohamed Ibrahim Osman — known as Mohamed Bulbul — along with two colleagues, in Mogadishu. All three had been reporting on planned opposition protests against a new constitutional amendment passed in May that extended the office terms of the president and parliament. While in custody, Bulbul was beaten and interrogated specifically about an article he had co-authored on the case of Sadia Moalin Ali — the same activist whose trial would later trigger a separate wave of journalist arrests in June. Before being released just before midnight, the journalists were threatened with death if they continued to cover the protests.

The threats did not stop after release. The NISA officer who abducted Bulbul sent him repeated threatening messages via WhatsApp, including a warning that he had “crossed a red line” by photographing the officer as part of his reporting on NISA’s repression. Bulbul was eventually forced to flee Somalia. His case illustrates what the arrests of June and July confirm: the crackdown on journalists this summer did not begin with a court case or a Facebook post. It began with the state’s decision that coverage of political opposition was itself a threat — and that journalists who provided it would be made to pay.

On the morning of 25 June 2026, journalist Abdukadir Abukar Ali — known to colleagues as Diirshe — arrived at the Banadir Regional Court to cover the sentencing of Sadia Moalin Ali, a women’s rights activist handed three years in prison for participating in a peaceful protest. He never made it inside. Armed officers led by Abdi Ali, a former Al-Shabaab member turned police officer, seized him at the entrance, blindfolded him, and forced him into a vehicle in front of eyewitnesses.

Diirshe’s abduction did not happen in a vacuum. He had spent weeks reporting critically on insecurity, on protests, and on flooding disrupting movement across Mogadishu — work that had already drawn threats from police. Just before his arrest, he posted a video publicly questioning the fairness of Sadia’s trial, which had unfolded under two charges — “disrespecting government institutions” and “instigation to commit a crime” — drawn from penal code provisions long criticized by rights monitors as vague, overbroad, and routinely weaponized against journalists and activists.

The pattern of obstruction around Sadia’s case extended well beyond Diirshe. On 1 June, journalists who came to cover her trial were blocked, barred from bringing cameras, and told not to conduct interviews; her lawyers were forced to brief the media from a different location entirely. On 23 June, as the trial concluded, reporters from more than a dozen outlets faced the same restrictions — even as the court’s own chairman brought a personal cameraman to film proceedings, footage that defense lawyers say was later edited to omit key parts before being posted to a court-affiliated Facebook page.

The message was unambiguous: the court would control the narrative of its own proceedings, by force if necessary, while denying that same access to the independent press. When Mogadishu police commander Mahdi Omar Mumin — himself a former Al-Shabaab defector — publicly confirmed Diirshe’s arrest, he accused the journalist of “insulting the country’s judicial institutions” and “disseminating false information.” No evidence was offered. None was required.

A week before the raids on Las Anod’s journalists over the prisoners’ documentary, the same city offered a preview of how thin the line had become between routine reporting and arrestable offense. On 28 May, police in the Northeastern Regional Administration arrested journalist Khadar Mohamed Abdi — known as Khadar Tarabi — in Kalabaydh town, where he had traveled for the Eid holidays. His offense was a Facebook post describing a visit by Puntland’s Minister of Justice, Abdirashid Barkhadle Warsame, who had come to celebrate Eid with local elders and youth representatives and encouraged residents to work toward the district’s development. There was no allegation in the post, no accusation, nothing resembling incitement — only a factual account of who came, and what they said.

Khadar was taken from Kalabaydh to Las Anod and held without charge. Police publicly released a photograph of him handcuffed in custody. When pressed for a justification, the Northeastern administration did not point to anything in the post itself. Instead, authorities accused him of “activities that undermined security and disrupted public order” — language as untethered from the facts as the accusations later leveled at Diirshe in Mogadishu.

The real offense, journalists in the region have said, was geographic and political rather than journalistic. Kalabaydh sits in the Sool region, territory claimed simultaneously by the Northeastern administration, by Puntland — which does not recognize the Las Anod-based authority as a legitimate federal member state — and by Somaliland. A visit by a Puntland official into that contested space was itself a politically charged event, and reporting on it neutrally, without taking a side, was apparently enough to be read as taking one. Local journalists have also described being blocked from independently covering clan clashes near Las Anod in the same period, including fighting over a disputed grazing area that left two people dead. The chilling effect is the same whether the contested ground is a courtroom, a prison roster, or a map.

Roughly two weeks later, the same dynamic played out in Las Anod around a different set of detainees. On 9 June, local journalist Abdalle Qaalib published a documentary featuring testimony from seven Las Anod families whose relatives have been held in Somaliland prisons since the 2023 conflict — detentions that, by the International Committee of the Red Cross’s own estimate, now number in the hundreds, with only a single limited prisoner exchange having taken place since fighting ended.

The families’ grievance was not abstract. Some say their relatives were captured during the fighting; others say they were civilians detained because of their identity. They wanted, simply, for someone in authority to acknowledge them. Instead, the response came at 2:00 a.m. on 9 June, when armed police under Sool Regional Police Commander Khadar Mohamed Farah raided the homes of two journalists — Mukhtar Abdi Jama and Abdiqani Abdirahman Mohamed — terrorizing their families. Abdiqani was taken in for an hour of interrogation about his role in the families’ interviews before being released. Qaalib himself, the documentary’s creator, went into hiding after receiving direct threats from police.

The substance of what these journalists reported was never in dispute — Somaliland-based outlets soon ran their own interviews with families of Las Anod-held prisoners making the same appeal in reverse. The problem, evidently, was not the story. It was who was allowed to tell it, and which detainees were allowed to be named.

The Baidoa case strips the pattern down to its rawest form. On 25 May, federal government forces deployed in Baidoa allegedly opened fire in the city’s central market and looted khat and mobile phones from women traders. Journalist Abdirahman Hassan Mohamed interviewed the women and published their complaints on Gacal Media. The following day, he was summoned to the Baidoa police station and arrested — not the soldiers accused of the robbery, but the journalist who reported it. He was held without charge for three days before his release, with police never publicly explaining the basis for his detention beyond an order attributed to Bay Regional Police Commander Sadiq Doodishe.

The arrest landed amid an active armed conflict between the federal-backed administration in Baidoa and forces loyal to former South West State leader Abdiaziz Laftagareen, and against the backdrop of a UN warning of a real and credible risk of famine in the region’s Buurhakaba district. In a city where civilians are already absorbing the costs of conflict and hunger, local authorities chose to spend their police capacity silencing the one channel through which residents’ grievances were reaching the public.

The same week Diirshe was abducted outside the Banadir Regional Court, two more cases emerged — one in Mogadishu, one in Puntland — that extended the pattern beyond courts and prisons into the most basic terrain of public-interest reporting: police conduct and street crime.

In Mogadishu, journalist Mohamed Ali Mohamud — known as Qadaaye — had in mid-June interviewed a police officer from the minority Bantu community whose salary had been suspended by senior officers, leaving him to work as a construction laborer to feed his family. Days after the interview aired on Iftiimiye TV, the officer was arrested alongside his daughters. On 26 June, four armed police officers arrested Qadaaye near his home in Kaaraan district, where he was beaten during his arrest and again in detention. He was held for two days — his family denied access to visit him — before being released without charge. Prior to his arrest, he had received explicit warnings from officers to stop reporting on the complaint.

In Qardho, Puntland, journalist Mohamed Abdinasir Hussein — known as Nagashe — was arrested on 14 June, six days after publishing a report about local business owners who had begun closing their shops early out of fear of youth gangs attacking at night. Four officers detained him at a café and transferred him to Qardho’s main prison, where he remained for four days. He was released only after clan elders negotiated on his behalf — and guaranteed that he would refrain from reporting on insecurity in the city. That guarantee — the price of his freedom — is itself a measure of how comprehensively the arrest had achieved its purpose.

On the night of 30 June 2026, NISA officers abducted Mascuud Warsame, founder of the Mogadishu-based online platform Xogbile, from outside his office on Maka Al-Mukarama Road. He was driven away in an unmarked vehicle to an undisclosed location. His phone went dark. His family received no communication. When his wife went to the nearest police station the next morning, she was told he was not there.

Security sources later confirmed that Mascuud was being held at a NISA detention facility, though no reason was offered. NISA officials did not respond to requests for information. What his colleagues did know was this: days before his abduction, Salah Abdi Nur — known as Moalin Salah, a NISA officer responsible for Southwest State and a former Al-Shabaab defector — had called Mascuud to accuse him of being critical of Southwest State’s new leadership, and to allege that he may have had knowledge of the removal of content from the official Facebook page of the Southwest State presidency, which had briefly displayed material associated with the ousted president Laftagareen, including an Independence Day message. Sources subsequently indicated that Southwest State authorities in Baidoa had been involved in his detention and that NISA had received a request to transfer the journalist to the administration there — the same administration whose predecessor’s forces had been the subject of the robbery reported on by Abdirahman Hassan Mohamed in May.

Colleagues believe Mascuud was targeted because of his origins from Baidoa, not because of any verifiable wrongdoing. No charges had been filed. No legal representative had been granted access. He remained incommunicado.

On 2 July 2026, Puntland police officers waited outside the home of journalist Suways Jama Mohamud — known as Suways Gacayte — and arrested her as she stepped out. She was transferred the same day to Garowe Central Prison. The trigger was a 15-second video published on 29 June on her platform Suways Media, showing armed men in uniform alongside a caption stating that soldiers had informed nearby residents they had to evacuate. The video was published amid heightened political and military tensions between the federal government and Puntland authorities disputing Mogadishu’s appointment of a general to command an army unit in the region.

Suways was released on bail on 15 July, but the case against her is not closed — it has only moved to a different arena. She now faces formal prosecution under Somalia’s 1962 Penal Code on charges of “spreading false information,” “defamation,” “insulting public authorities,” and “disturbing public order.” Her defence has challenged both the charges and the court’s jurisdiction, arguing that a journalist cannot be prosecuted under the Penal Code for acts connected to their profession, and has filed a motion to refer the case to Puntland’s media regulatory body. The court had not yet ruled as this article was published.

What makes this case particularly instructive is the documented history behind it. In March 2024, Suways was briefly detained and physically assaulted by a police officer who stopped her vehicle on the way home from work; when she filed a complaint, Puntland’s Military Court declined to investigate, stating that doing so would damage the reputation of the police. In September 2025, she was summoned by the Puntland Attorney General’s Office over politically sensitive reporting — a case later dropped without charge, though not before the Puntland Ministry of Information dismissed her from her position at the state broadcaster in apparent retaliation. Members of Parliament intervened and she was reinstated. The current prosecution is the fourth time Puntland’s institutions have moved against her. Her case does not fit the mold of a sudden crackdown on a single story. It fits the mold of an institution that has tried, repeatedly and through escalating means, to make journalism too costly for one woman to continue.

The most recent arrest as this article goes to press came on 14 July, when Puntland’s intelligence service, PISA, arrested journalist Mohamed Jama Mohamud in Bosaso. His reporting on his Facebook page had documented the second consecutive week of business closures in the city, as local traders kept their shops shut in protest against a new tax increase on goods entering through Bosaso Port, Puntland’s main commercial gateway. His interviews with labourers and residents described the human cost: lost income, declining employment, livelihoods collapsing under the weight of a policy imposed without consultation.

The use of an intelligence agency to arrest a journalist is itself worth pausing on. PISA is not legally mandated to carry out civilian arrests or detentions. Colleagues reported he was being held at a PISA-run facility, the location of which was not disclosed. He became the second journalist simultaneously in Puntland’s custody, alongside Suways Jama Mohamud — making Puntland, by mid-July, the region of Somalia with the highest concentration of journalists behind bars for their work.

A Pattern, Not a Coincidence

Six cities. Multiple administrations — federal, state, NISA, a breakaway authority not internationally recognized as sovereign, and Puntland deploying both its police and its intelligence service. At least ten journalists targeted across ten weeks for covering opposition protests, a contested trial, a disputed prison population, a market robbery, a minister’s visit, a police salary complaint, a youth crime wave, a community’s fear of a militia, a political transition, and a port tax. In each case, the institutional response was the same — arrest, raid, beating, abduction, exile, or formal prosecution under laws dating to 1962 — paired with accusations of insult, falsehood, disrespect, or “undermining security” that were never substantiated and never tested in any fair legal process.

What connects these cases is not geography or the identity of any single administration. It is the refusal of power, across Somalia’s fragmented political landscape, to tolerate documentation. A journalist who reports what a khat trader says is a threat. A journalist who reports what a prisoner’s family says is a threat. A journalist who reports what a police officer says about his own institution is a threat. A journalist who simply notes that a minister visited a town is a threat. A journalist who posts a 15-second video of soldiers near a residential area faces three years in prison. And a journalist who asks whether a trial was fair becomes a target for abduction before he even makes it through the courthouse door.

This is the throughline OPR has documented across its monitoring of Somalia’s detention practices: arbitrary deprivation of liberty is rarely confined to those formally charged with a crime. It extends to anyone — prisoner, family member, or journalist — whose account of detention conditions, judicial conduct, or political power threatens the state’s preferred version of events. As this summer’s cases show, the journalist has now joined the prisoner as a figure whose liberty depends, above all, on whether they can be made to stay quiet.

The cases documented in this article are drawn from publicly available reporting on incidents in Mogadishu, Las Anod, Baidoa, Qardho, Garowe, and Bosaso between May and July 2026. Somalia ranks 126th out of 180 countries in the 2026 RSF World Press Freedom Index.