What happens when your greatest vulnerability is not what you have done, but the clan you were born into?

It is a painful question for Somalia, but recent killings make it unavoidable. When individual responsibility is replaced by collective blame, a person can become a target simply because of their identity. 

On 9^th September 2026, the late Ahmed Shire Guudeey, a Somali National Army soldier, was travelling to Hiiraan on leave with two other soldiers when they were reportedly stopped and detained near Ceel-baraf. The men were questioned about their clan identities. The other two soldiers were released, while the late Ahmed, who identified himself as Hawadle, was held and later killed.

In footage recorded during his captivity, the late Ahmed pleaded, “Abtiyaal, ha i dilina”, “Uncles, please don’t kill me.” He spoke of his hunger and illness and pleaded for his life. His maternal clan was said to be connected to the clan of those holding him. Even that connection could not save him.

What a devastating reflection of where clan revenge can lead us.

A day earlier, on 8^th September 2026, Sheikh Ahmed Yusuf Haamey, a respected religious scholar, businessman and community elder, was shot in the early evening outside his shop in the Puntland-administered northern sector of Gaalkayo as he was prepared to leave for Maghrib prayer. Two armed assailants reportedly approached him, opened fire and fled the scene. No motive has been established and no perpetrator identified.

The two cases are not the same, and it would be wrong to treat them as one. In the first, clan identity was the stated reason a man was kept when his companions were let go. In the second, the motive remains unknown. What connects them is what tends to follow an unresolved killing in Somalia. An unanswered death becomes a grievance, and a grievance that no institution settles becomes an obligation that someone else is expected to discharge. That is the point at which individual responsibility gives way to collective blame, and it is where Somalia’s long-running cycle of aano qabiil, clan revenge, demands our attention.

The Cycle of Clan Revenge

In Somalia, Aano Qabiil is not a new phenomenon. It has existed alongside the country’s longstanding systems of kinship, xeer, diya and elder-led dispute resolution. For generations, these structures have helped communities settle disputes, negotiate compensation and prevent individual conflicts from becoming wider confrontations. But when a serious grievance remains unresolved, it can take a different path: one person’s crime becomes a group’s grievance, and one group’s grievance becomes another group’s obligation to retaliate. A killing that began between individuals can therefore expand across families and lineages, drawing in people who had no connection to the original offence. Somalia’s decades of conflict, displacement, fragmented authority and weak access to formal justice have made some of these grievances particularly difficult to resolve, allowing memories of past violence to remain alive within communities.

This is how the cycle sustains itself. One death creates a grievance, the grievance produces retaliation, retaliation creates another victim, and that victim becomes the grievance of tomorrow. With every round, the original crime becomes less important and the identity of the opposing group becomes more important. The question shifts from “Who committed the crime?” to “Who belongs to them?” That is the dangerous point at which individual responsibility gives way to collective punishment, and a person can become a target not because of what they have done, but because of the clan into which they were born. The grievance itself is what travels, passing from one victim to another, from one family to another, and ultimately from one generation to the one that follows.

The Cost to Somalia’s Social Stability and Statehood

The most disturbing consequence of this clan revenge is not only that people are killed.  It is that some people have learned to see those deaths as victories. When a killing is celebrated simply because the victim belongs to another clan, something deeper than security has broken down. Grief becomes selective. The death of “our own” is a tragedy, while the death of “the other” can be met with celebration, justification or silence. Not every Somali thinks this way, but the fact that such reactions exist and can find an audience is troubling. When clan identity becomes enough to make us celebrate another person’s death, the problem is no longer only clan conflict rather it is a crisis of our shared humanity.

And this is Somalia in 2026. At a time when the world is racing ahead with artificial intelligence, biotechnology, space exploration and new forms of global connectivity, we are still allowing old grievances to determine who deserves to live. The contrast should embarrass us. Somalia does not need to abandon its history, its elders or its social structures to move forward. But it must refuse to inherit their grievances as permanent obligations. A country cannot build modern institutions while its citizens remain trapped in ancient calculations of “ours” and “theirs.” When revenge becomes something to celebrate, we are not only losing lives; we are losing the possibility of trusting one another as fellow citizens.

That is where the cost becomes a question of statehood. If people believe that their safety depends first on their clan, then the state has not yet become the primary guarantor of their rights. If a citizen must calculate their lineage before travelling, working or passing through another community, then citizenship remains weaker than identity. Somalia’s challenge is therefore not simply to stop the next revenge killing. It is to build a country in which no death is celebrated because of who the victim was, no innocent person is punished for another person’s crime, and no Somali has to belong to a specific clan to feel protected by the law.

What the Response Must Look Like

1. Investigate killings promptly, independently and credibly. Families should not have to rely on rumour to understand how their relatives died. Investigations should establish perpetrators, motives and networks of involvement. Where the victim was a serving member of the security forces, the government also owes an account to its own ranks: who held the ground on which he was detained, under whose command, and what protection exists for soldiers travelling on leave.
2. Keep criminal responsibility individual. Clan membership should never constitute evidence of guilt. Where perpetrators are identified, they should be prosecuted on the basis of evidence concerning their own conduct, and no community should be treated as collectively liable for the acts of its members.
3. Prevent retaliation before another person becomes a victim. Federal and state institutions should work with elders, religious leaders, local authorities and civil society to identify rising tensions and intervene early. Prevention must become part of security policy rather than something attempted only once violence has already occurred.
4. End the impunity that keeps grievances alive. Every unresolved killing has the potential to become tomorrow’s revenge. When perpetrators remain unidentified or unpunished, families lose faith in formal justice and look elsewhere for redress. Credible prosecution, victim protection and meaningful reconciliation are not separate from peacebuilding. They are what prevents the next cycle from beginning.
5. Let formal justice and customary law reinforce one another. Customary law is not the obstacle here. Xeer, diya and elder-led mediation have contained escalation for generations, and across much of the country they carry a legitimacy the formal courts have yet to earn. The danger arises when the two systems compete rather than connect: when a family that has accepted compensation sees the perpetrator left untouched by the courts, or when a prosecution proceeds in a manner the community regards as illegitimate. The state should set out plainly which offences must reach the courts, what role elders hold in reconciliation once criminal responsibility has been established, and how compensation and prosecution work together rather than substitute for one another.
6. Make citizenship stronger than clan protection. Ultimately, the state must make every Somali citizen feel that protection comes from the law and not only from the clan standing behind them. A soldier on leave, a trader travelling between towns, a student, a religious leader or an ordinary civilian should be able to move through Somalia without their lineage becoming a security calculation. The measure of statehood is whether the law can protect a person even when their clan cannot.