How Puntland's Forces Are Dismantling the Islamic State's Global Command Center in Somalia

After the collapse of its caliphate in Iraq and Syria, the Islamic State movement dispersed across the globe, establishing covert operations in war-torn regions where detection seemed unlikely. For nearly a decade, the autonomous Somali state of Puntland became the unlikely nerve center of this reconstituted global network, with Islamic State in Somalia (ISS) fighters entrenched in the remote Cal Miskaad Mountains. From these highland strongholds, foreign operatives coordinated worldwide terror operations, managed international financing networks, and directed cells across multiple continents.

But in 2024, everything changed. Puntland’s security forces, backed by American airstrikes, launched Operation Hilaac—a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign that has brought the ISS to the brink of total defeat. What began as a force of up to seven hundred fighters has been reduced to perhaps one to two hundred besieged militants, their digital infrastructure dismantled and their global coordination capabilities severely compromised.

Puntland: An Autonomous Anomaly in Somalia’s Chaos

The autonomous state of Puntland occupies Somalia’s northeastern tip, positioned on the sharpest point of the Horn of Africa. Home to an estimated four to five million people, with the true number likely toward the upper end of that range, Puntland exists as a functionally independent region within federal Somalia. Located north of the capital Mogadishu and adjacent to Somalia’s other autonomous state, Somaliland, Puntland has managed to remain largely immune to the destabilizing influence of al-Shabaab, the powerful terrorist insurgency that threatens Somalia’s federal government.

Unlike Somaliland, Puntland does not actively seek independence from federal Somalia. Instead, it operates through its own government structure based in the capital city of Garowe, managing its affairs autonomously while maintaining nominal ties to Mogadishu. This arrangement carries distinct advantages: Puntland avoids the corruption and infighting that plague the federal government, and it preserves its fighting forces rather than committing them to the grinding conflict against al-Shabaab in southern Somalia.

However, this near-complete autonomy comes with a significant responsibility. As a functionally independent region, Puntland must address security threats within its territory essentially alone, without substantial support from the weak federal government in Mogadishu. This reality became particularly problematic when the Islamic State established its presence in the Cal Miskaad Mountains, a remote range within Puntland’s borders that would become the headquarters for a global terror network.

The Islamic State’s Mountain Sanctuary

The Islamic State in Somalia, referred to by the acronym ISS, first arrived in Puntland in late 2015. The organization briefly captured global attention a few months later when it took over a port city, but since 2016, the ISS adopted a dramatically different operational approach. Rather than attempting to capture population centers or conducting the intermittent terror attacks characteristic of Islamic State cells elsewhere, the ISS in Puntland maintained an unusually low profile.

This strategic restraint stemmed partly from jihadist politics. The ISS and al-Shabaab harbor deep mutual animosity, and any aggressive ISS expansion risked drawing the attention of al-Shabaab, which possessed sufficient strength to potentially eliminate the ISS presence entirely. By keeping to the Cal Miskaad Mountains and nearby ranges, avoiding operations that would provoke al-Shabaab, the ISS secured a measure of protection through obscurity.

But the primary reason for the ISS’s low profile was far more strategic. The organization had discovered a unique opportunity in Puntland’s isolated mountain ranges. Operating within a relatively weak autonomous state, itself part of a war-torn nation with an exceptionally weak federal government, the ISS could exist virtually unbothered as long as it avoided drawing unwanted attention. This situation stood in stark contrast to Islamic State cells elsewhere in the world, which faced active pursuit by national militaries, law enforcement agencies, and often found themselves in conflict with other non-state insurgencies.

This security allowed ISS territory in the mountains to evolve into something resembling a capital city for the global Islamic State movement. By some estimates, out of the roughly five hundred to seven hundred fighters the ISS maintained before 2024, as many as half were foreign fighters from across the globe. These weren’t merely foot soldiers—they included important leaders and coordinators, financiers, propagandists, leaders of online recruiting operations, and the masterminds who pulled the strings behind the global Islamic State network.

From their mountain strongholds, these operatives managed a sprawling digital financial network, laundering wealth through informal and poorly tracked local markets while issuing directives to Islamic State cells worldwide. Meanwhile, ISS fighters on the ground cultivated relationships with mountain villages, sometimes engaging peacefully, other times through extortion and intimidation, but always working to funnel local economic wealth directly into the coffers of the global movement. The group took control of gold mines, oversaw extraction operations, and sold the harvested gold for significant profits. For an organization like the Islamic State, which supports small cells of fighters globally, even the wealth generated from a small mountain range could substantially fund worldwide jihadist operations.

For nearly eight years, the Islamic State—Somalia branch operated as the nexus of a global terror campaign. It successfully dodged the attention of al-Shabaab, Puntland authorities, and federal forces from Mogadishu. Small local cells occasionally captured by Puntland proved either inconsequential or easily replaced, while the group’s leadership remained well-insulated in the deepest parts of the Somali mountains.

The ISS had built a sustainable status quo, found an effective means of navigating Somalia’s complex internal dynamics, and operated essentially as it saw fit. This arrangement persisted until late 2024, when the carefully constructed equilibrium began to collapse.

Early Warning Signs: The Death of Bilal al-Sudani

The first indication of serious trouble for the ISS came in January 2023, when a Navy SEAL raid conducted by the United States killed a senior ISS leader named Bilal al-Sudani. Despite shifting focus toward other emergent threats, the United States and its global allies had never stopped tracking the Islamic State, and American intelligence was well aware of the ISS’s activities in Puntland.

Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin described al-Sudani as “an ISIS leader in Somalia and a key facilitator for the group’s global network […] responsible for fostering the growing presence of ISIS in Africa and funding the group’s operations worldwide, including in Afghanistan.” While al-Sudani’s death represented a significant blow, it proved not immediately crippling for the organization. Leadership continued under Abdul Qadir Mumin, a long-time Islamic State leader whose current status remains uncertain following a later airstrike that the United States claimed as successful but couldn’t conclusively confirm as fatal.

The elimination of al-Sudani, however, may have triggered internal strategic debates within the ISS leadership about the organization’s future direction, debates that would have profound consequences for the group’s survival in Puntland.

Expansion and Exposure: The ISS Overreaches

The real crisis for the ISS began more than a year after al-Sudani’s death. After several years of building local force strength, the insurgents began taking more direct control of towns and villages throughout Puntland. Multiple factors appear to have motivated this strategic shift. Al-Shabaab forces were moving closer to the ISS’s base of operations, Mogadishu faced further destabilization, and tensions between the federal government and Puntland made counterinsurgent cooperation increasingly unlikely.

The change may also have resulted from al-Sudani’s absence. His death potentially empowered ISS leaders who favored more active local operations over the indefinite hiding strategy al-Sudani had advocated. Regardless of the precise motivations, the consequences were clear: the ISS began spreading outward from its mountain strongholds, moving into towns controlled by friendly clans that harbored their own grievances against Mogadishu and al-Shabaab. The organization stationed fighter groups in these towns, eventually drawing a line all the way across the coast to the very tip of Puntland’s territory.

By the later months of 2024, the commander of U.S. forces in Africa claimed that the ISS had doubled in size within a single year. By allying with local armed groups and avoiding conflicts over differing interpretations of Islam that might alienate potential allies, the ISS greatly expanded its reach—and consequently, the amount of capital it could control and funnel into global Islamic State operations. The group even carried out an attack against Western targets abroad, specifically targeting Israel’s embassy in Sweden.

But this expansion, which seemed to represent the ISS’s greatest period of growth and influence, would prove to be a fatal overreach. By emerging from the shadows and establishing a more visible presence across Puntland’s territory, the ISS had violated the fundamental principle that had ensured its survival for eight years: remaining too obscure to warrant a concerted response.

Operation Hilaac: Puntland Strikes Back

The momentum of ISS expansion came to an abrupt halt when Puntland’s forces launched Operation Hilaac, a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign that would fundamentally alter the balance of power in the region. The initiative brought together several elements of Puntland’s internal security apparatus: the Puntland Security Force, regional anti-terrorism fighters; the Puntland Dervish Force, the official regional military; and the Puntland Maritime Police Force, focused on disrupting the Somali pirates who had become allies of the Islamic State movement.

These combined forces pushed directly into the Cal Miskaad mountain range, backed by a powerful ally. First under President Joe Biden, then under President Donald Trump, the United States dedicated its air power to the offensive, providing crucial support that would prove decisive in the campaign’s success.

Anticipating the coming assault, the ISS dispatched suicide bombers to attack a growing force of Dervish fighters preparing for the initial assault. This represented the ISS’s first attack of that scale in its entire history, and numerous Dervish fighters were believed to have been killed. However, the Islamic State had severely miscalculated.

Rather than convincing Puntland to back down, the attack allowed many of Puntland’s leaders to witness firsthand the damage and destruction wrought by an organization they had previously found ways to ignore. If anything, the suicide bombing hardened Puntland’s resolve to see the operation through to completion.

The Grinding Campaign: Tactics and Technology

Over the first half of 2025, Puntland forces methodically worked their way through the mountain foothills, reclaiming control of villages and pushing the ISS out of vulnerable lowland areas. The fighting revealed that the ISS had absorbed lessons from global modern warfare, regularly deploying consumer-grade drones fitted with explosives—a tactic that had proven effective for insurgent groups worldwide. However, Puntland countered this threat through the use of jamming technology, a rare and sophisticated asset for a non-state actor of its size.

The United States conducted several rounds of airstrikes across the mountains and engaged in occasional special-forces raids. One particularly significant operation occurred in July, when American forces raided a cave complex on Puntland’s territory and captured Abdiweli Muhammad Yusuf. Yusuf had served as a key financial facilitator, overseeing the transfer of funds across Africa and managing the Islamic State’s largest global fundraising operation. His capture dealt a severe blow to the organization’s financial infrastructure.

As the months progressed, Puntland’s tactics evolved and became increasingly sophisticated. Forces squeezed the ISS from multiple directions simultaneously whenever possible, slowly forcing the insurgents back into the highlands. This approach allowed Puntland to isolate individual cells within the cave networks of specific mountains, making them more straightforward to eliminate, even though the actual capture of these cave positions could prove costly in terms of casualties.

Puntland demonstrated an ability to match the ISS in digital space as well, tracking and deactivating their SIM cards and targeting their accounts wherever they were accessed. The counterinsurgency also took a heavy hand toward local propagandists and influencers attempting to drive a pro-ISS narrative, recognizing that the information war was as important as the physical conflict.

The cumulative effect of these operations proved devastating for the ISS. Out of a group estimated to include no more than seven hundred fighters before the start of 2024, Puntland eliminated several hundred over the course of those few months. The organization was eventually whittled down to what it is believed to be at the time of writing: one to two hundred surviving fighters, stranded and besieged in mountains with no obvious means of escape.

The Current State: ISS on the Brink

At the time of writing, the Islamic State in Somalia appears to have little chance of resurgence. Most fighters who comprised the group a year ago have since been killed, captured, incapacitated, or deported abroad. Those who remain lack the numbers to engage head-to-head with the forces hunting them. As their digital infrastructure has been systematically dismantled, they have lost much of their ability to coordinate between cells, making a coordinated breakout from the highland region an extremely difficult objective to realize.

Puntland stands on the brink of eradicating the Islamic State from its territory. The ISS will likely survive only in the form of a few tiny cells that inevitably escape into the rural countryside, but as an organized force capable of coordinating global operations, the group has been effectively destroyed in Somalia.

The Global Hydra: Where the Network Goes Next

While Puntland’s victory over the ISS appears nearly complete, the story of the global Islamic State is far from over. The critical question concerns the fate of the ISS’s international guests—the operatives who spent years coordinating finance, propaganda, and recruitment across the globe from their Somali mountain sanctuary.

These individuals, the true architects of the global network, likely did not remain in the mountains long enough to be caught in the siege. Just as they had relocated to Somalia after previous defeats elsewhere, they have almost certainly escaped once again, taking their expertise, connections, and global mission with them. Some, like the financier Abdiweli Yusuf, died in the fighting or were captured. But others have undoubtedly slipped away.

Where they went remains difficult to determine with certainty, but the Islamic State leadership currently has multiple viable options. A few thousand kilometers away, the Islamic State—Sahel Province regularly achieves victories against the military regimes of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. In Nigeria, the Islamic State—West Africa Province operates in much of the same territory as Boko Haram.

In the Congo, a vicious Islamic State affiliate moves rapidly throughout the jungles, slaughtering civilians in their path. In Syria, still destabilized after the fall of Assad and experiencing massacres of minority communities, the Islamic State is believed to be on the verge of reconstituting itself.

The Islamic State movement currently faces a leadership vacuum, but in all likelihood, one of these regional sub-groups will assume control of the global network before long. Puntland has severed one head of this global hydra, but many more remain active and dangerous.

Puntland’s Unlikely Victory

Despite the continued threat posed by the global Islamic State network, Puntland emerges from this conflict with a significant victory. A small, underpowered, functionally independent region managed to band together and bring down what had been the operational headquarters of the world’s most notorious terrorist organization. This achievement is particularly remarkable given that far more powerful militaries have struggled to deal with Islamic State affiliates in their own territories.

Puntland has gained American backing that will serve it well on the global stage, demonstrating its value as a reliable counterterrorism partner. The region’s forces have proven their tactical and technological prowess on the modern battlefield, employing sophisticated jamming technology, coordinated multi-directional assaults, and effective digital warfare capabilities that would be impressive for a national military, let alone a regional autonomous force.

The campaign has shown that the Islamic State, despite its fearsome reputation and global reach, remains vulnerable to determined, well-coordinated counterinsurgency operations. While the ISS was not completely eliminated—and the global Islamic State certainly was not—the organization was dealt a mortal blow at a time when victories in the global battle against insurgent terrorism are few and far between.

Puntland’s success offers important lessons for counterterrorism operations worldwide. The combination of local knowledge, regional forces with direct stakes in the outcome, technological sophistication, and strategic international support proved far more effective than large-scale foreign military interventions have often been. The operation demonstrated that insurgent networks, even those as adaptable and resilient as the Islamic State, require physical safe havens to coordinate global operations, and that eliminating these safe havens can significantly degrade their capabilities.

For Puntland itself, the victory strengthens its position within Somalia’s complex political landscape. Having demonstrated both its capability and its commitment to combating international terrorism, the region has established itself as a serious actor deserving of international support and recognition. Whether this translates into greater autonomy, increased resources, or simply the security to continue developing without the threat of a global terrorist network operating from its mountains, remains to be seen. But for now, Puntland can claim what few can: a decisive victory against the Islamic State.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is Puntland and why did the Islamic State choose it as a global headquarters?

Puntland is an autonomous state in northeastern Somalia, home to approximately 4-5 million people, operating through its own government based in Garowe while maintaining nominal ties to Mogadishu. The ISS established its base in Puntland’s Cal Miskaad Mountains because the region’s isolation, weak governance, and distance from al-Shabaab’s reach allowed the group to operate unbothered. That security let the ISS coordinate global terror operations, manage international financing networks, and direct cells across multiple continents for nearly eight years.

How did the ISS fund its global operations from Somalia?

The ISS funded global operations through multiple revenue streams. The group seized control of gold mines in the mountains, oversaw extraction, and sold the gold for significant profit. Foreign operatives also managed a sprawling digital financial network, laundering wealth through informal local markets. Key facilitators like Abdiweli Muhammad Yusuf oversaw fund transfers across Africa and managed the Islamic State’s largest global fundraising operation before his capture in a U.S. special-forces raid in July.

What was Operation Hilaac and how did it succeed?

Operation Hilaac was a comprehensive counterinsurgency campaign launched in late 2024 that combined Puntland’s Security Force, Dervish Force, and Maritime Police Force with U.S. airstrikes. The operation succeeded by squeezing ISS from multiple directions simultaneously, using jamming technology to counter drone attacks, conducting digital warfare to deactivate SIM cards and accounts, and systematically pushing fighters from lowland villages into isolated highland positions. Over several months the campaign reduced the ISS from 500-700 fighters to approximately 100-200 besieged militants.

What triggered the ISS expansion that invited the crackdown?

After years of maintaining a deliberately low profile, the ISS began taking direct control of towns and villages across Puntland in late 2024. Multiple factors drove the shift: al-Shabaab forces moving closer to ISS bases, further destabilization in Mogadishu, and possibly the 2023 death of senior leader Bilal al-Sudani empowering factions that favored active operations. By allying with local clans and drawing a line across the coast to Puntland’s tip, the ISS violated the fundamental principle of obscurity that had ensured its survival, prompting the coordinated response.

What does Puntland’s victory mean for the broader global Islamic State network?

Puntland has effectively destroyed the ISS as an organized force capable of coordinating global operations, but the foreign operatives who managed financing, propaganda, and recruitment likely escaped before the siege closed. The global Islamic State currently has viable havens in the Sahel, West Africa, the Congo, and potentially post-Assad Syria. Puntland severed one head of a decentralized hydra — a significant blow, but the network’s leadership vacuum will likely be filled by one of these remaining regional affiliates.

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