It has now been almost a year and a half since Azerbaijan invaded Nagorno-Karabakh and expelled its indigenous 120,000 Armenian Christians, a community that had inhabited the region for more than 1,700 years. While US Acting Assistant Secretary of State Yuri Kim had declared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “We will not tolerate any military action. We will not tolerate any attack on the people of Nagorno-Karabakh. That is very clear,” the State Department did nothing when, just five days later, President Ilham Aliyev ordered the region’s ethnic cleansing. Not only did the United States take no meaningful action, but Mark Libby, the US ambassador to Azerbaijan, subsequently participated in a stage-managed Azerbaijani propaganda visit to Shushi, an ancient Armenian city Azerbaijani forces captured in 2020 and where they subsequently vandalized and destroyed churches and Christian artifacts.
For Azerbaijan, the conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh was a success: The Aliyev dictatorship literally got away with murder and ethnic cleansing; Ilham Aliyev faced no consequence for his unilateralism either diplomatically, militarily, or economically. Quite the contrary, by exposing the United States as a paper tiger and bragging about the advantage of military unilateralism over diplomacy, Aliyev believes he has found a model for other to follow.
Enter Somalia: On February 12, 2025, Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and his defense and foreign ministers traveled to Baku. They met their counterparts and signed agreements. The Somali Defense Ministry said a “key agreement in the fields of defense and defense industry cooperation… paves the way for enhanced technical support and military knowledge-sharing to bolster Somalia’s defense capabilities.”
The danger the agreement represents is the likelihood that Somalia now seeks to replicate the Azerbaijan model to resolve militarily what it cannot achieve diplomatically or morally: Forcing Somaliland back into union with Somalia.
There are certain parallels to modern Armenian and Somali history. Just as Heydar Aliyev and his son Ilham were Soviet elites, so too was Somalia a Soviet ally through the 1960s and most of the 1970s. Both countries then switched sides: Heydar Aliyev went from Azerbaijan KGB chief and Soviet Politburo member to a supposed US ally overnight, an ideological chameleon interested primarily in personal power. So too did Somali dictator Siad Barre, who switched sides in the Cold War in a fit of pique over Soviet refusal to accept his territorial ambitions.
Both Azerbaijanis and Somalis have long held irredentist dreams of expanding their country’s borders and territories, partly driven by a tendentious reading of history and more recently by their governments’ desire to distract the populace from regime corruption and poor financial stewardship. Somalia, though, has never been a single entity as some Somali nationalists claim. The five-pointed star on the Somali flag represents the five historic regions Somalis claim as their own: Djibouti, Ethiopia’s Ogaden, Somaliland, the Federal Republic of Somalia, and Kenya’s North Eastern’s province.
