Since November 10, 2025, Somalia and Somaliland have issued conflicting instructions to the same aircraft on the same day. Somaliland’s Civil Aviation and Airports Authority requires prior permission for any overflight of its territory; Somalia’s Civil Aviation Authority has reaffirmed through an Aeronautical Information Circular that it controls the entire Mogadishu Flight Information Region, 850,000 square miles of sovereign and international airspace across the western Indian Ocean, and has warned airlines of safety and legal consequences for noncompliance. The Flight Information Region is already under restriction: International carriers have not been able to fly below 26,000 feet across Somalia since 2015, a security-driven floor that predates the current jurisdictional fight.
In July 2013, Turkey brokered the fourth round of Somalia-Somaliland talks in Istanbul, producing an agreement to run a joint Air Traffic Control Board out of Hargeisa.
The standoff has a history that Mogadishu would rather not revisit. In July 2013, Turkey brokered the fourth round of Somalia-Somaliland talks in Istanbul, producing an agreement to run a joint Air Traffic Control Board out of Hargeisa, with an even four-member technical committee and shared revenue. It was the only time the two sides treated the airspace as something to administer together rather than seize outright. Ankara had positioned itself as the mediator of choice after London’s 2012 conference on Somalia failed to settle the north-south question, and airspace revenue was one of the few issues both delegations could imagine sharing without either side conceding statehood. A follow-on round in Djibouti in December 2014 restated the same terms; a fifth, scheduled for Istanbul in March 2015, collapsed before it opened, and talks went dormant for five years.
Mogadishu did not wait for talks to resume. On December 28, 2017, two days after Somaliland had signed its own Civil Aviation Authority into law, Somalia’s government announced it had regained full operational control of its airspace after 27 years of International Civil Aviation Organization caretaker administration from Nairobi, bypassing the Hargeisa-based board Istanbul had promised. While Hargeisa legislated its own civil aviation authority into being around the arrangement it had reached with Mogadishu, Somalia’s move abandoned that precedent.
The reclassification of the Mogadishu Flight Information Region to Class A airspace on January 26, 2023, gave Somalia’s regulator full instrument-flight-rules authority for the first time since before the 1991. Somalia’s status as the internationally recognized state is not in dispute—not even Somaliland contests it; Hargeisa’s case rests on operational control. Mogadishu has nonetheless treated the 2023 upgrade as proof its airspace sovereignty is settled in full. Somaliland’s response has been financial: In February 2024, its aviation authority accused Mogadishu of misusing or diverting more than $60 million earmarked for air traffic management and airport development, a figure it repeated in January 2025 while pushing to reclaim operational control. Mogadishu has not issued a public response to the specific figure, no tribunal has ruled on it, and it has not returned any funds.
The informal arrangement that let the two regulators split duties after 2017 was itself scrapped in 2024, removing the last practical buffer between the two sides’ competing legal positions. What followed was the November 2025 permit standoff, and then, in March 2026, Somaliland’s Civil Aviation Minister Fuad Ahmed Nur told local media Hargeisa had “taken legal steps” against Mogadishu over airspace management, without disclosing where the case was filed or what it claims. No forum has confirmed the proceeding since.
Somalia has increasingly used its airspace claims to force anyone flying to Hargeisa to first get a Somali e-visa, even though Somalia has no control over the region.
Somalia has increasingly used its airspace claims to force anyone flying to Hargeisa to first get a Somali e-visa, even though Somalia has no control over the region and Somaliland requires its own visa. At issue is not only sovereignty but also diplomacy: Somalia will not issue the e-visa to anyone flying to Hargeisa who is Israeli, Taiwanese, or an American not born in Somalia.
International carriers have adapted. Carriers must now track conflicting climb and descent instructions from two separate control authorities. Somalia holds the internationally recognized legal claim, but Somaliland holds the 2017 Civil Aviation Authority law, operational control in the north, and a 2013 agreement. The ball is now in the court of airliners. Both Ethiopian Airlines and FlyDubai fly into Hargeisa. They ultimately determine if they will require the Somali e-Visa or Somaliland visa for passengers. Their decision might determine whether Somaliland falls back into isolation or continues its march to re-recognition.
