Islamic counter terrorism coalition to run projects across ten Somali institutions until 2027

MOGADISHU (SONNA): The Secretary-General of the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition, Maj. Gen. Mohammed bin Saeed al-Moghedi, has arrived in Mogadishu with a delegation ahead of a conference launching a programme of projects the coalition is to carry out across Somali government institutions until 2027.

He was received at Aden Adde International Airport by the Deputy Chief of the Somali National Army, General Madey Nureey Ufurow, and the Director General for Defence at the Ministry of Defence, Abdulkadir Abukar Mohamed, together with Somalia’s Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Ambassador to Somalia, and Somalia’s Ambassador to the coalition, General Abdirahman Mohamed Turyare.

Speaking at the airport, Ambassador Turyare said the first project to be launched concerns media and peace, and takes the form of a workshop examining how the media of a country emerging from civil war operates while facing terrorism, political division and threats to its security. Forty participants are to take part, drawn from government media, the media of the federal member states, private television and radio stations, and social media influencers.

He said the programme extends to more than ten government institutions, each receiving a project of its own concerned with national security, covering capacity building, training and equipment. Among them are the ministries of Defence, Internal Security, Information, Finance and Endowments, the Tubsan agency, the Stabilisation Fund, the National Security Office, Immigration and Communications. Further work is to cover the training and equipping of the armed forces, rehabilitation programmes, economic security, and the judicial handling of terrorism cases and money laundering, involving the Military Court and the Ministry of Justice.

The coalition was established at Saudi Arabia’s initiative and announced in December 2015, with the aim of consolidating the counter terrorism efforts of Muslim countries. It is headquartered in Riyadh and now comprises 43 member states. Its work is organised across four domains, being ideology, communications, counter terrorist financing and the military, and it holds memoranda of understanding with the United States, the United Kingdom and France as supporting countries, and with the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism.

The structure of the programme in Somalia follows that division. A media workshop, financial and judicial work on terrorist financing and prosecution, rehabilitation programmes addressing ideology, and training and equipment for the armed forces correspond to the coalition’s four domains, applied to a single member state at once rather than through separate initiatives.

The conference at which the projects are to be launched is expected to draw the embassies of 43 member states along with the European Union, the African Union, IGAD, the League of Arab States and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and the embassies of the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, China and Türkiye, together with defence representatives accredited to Somalia.

The visit follows a widening of Somalia’s security cooperation with Saudi Arabia. The Ministry of Defence signed a memorandum of understanding on military cooperation with the Saudi Ministry of Defence in Riyadh in February, and the Saudi Ambassador called on the Speaker of the House of the People in Mogadishu earlier this week.

What has been announced so far is a programme rather than its content. No budget has been published for any of the projects, and no detail has been given on how participants in the media workshop are selected or by whom. The institutions named will be the measure of it, and the first of them begins work within days.