The president of Somalia, Hassan Sheikh Mohamoud, announced on Monday that soldiers who have been training in Eritrea for months will start coming home soon.
There have been rumors going around in Somalia for months that these soldiers were moved to the war-torn Tigray area of Ethiopia.
“Before the end of this December they will start to return and in January they will be back,” Mohamoud assured a forum organised by the Somali diaspora during his visit to the United States. “We have settled everything on this issue and God willing, we will not have any delay after that.”
In July, Mohamoud paid a visit to the soldiers at training facilities in Eritrea after promising to bring them home during his election campaign in the spring.
Without hearing from their loved ones, the soldiers’ families staged repeated protests this year when Mohamoud’s predecessor, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, sometimes known as “Farmajo,” was in office, demanding information on their whereabouts.
Last year, Mohamed Abdelsalam Babiker, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Eritrea, cited “reports that Somali soldiers have been moved from military training camps in Eritrea to the front line in Tigray, where they were accompanying Eritrean soldiers” in support of federal Ethiopian forces fighting the rebels.
Farmajo reported that his government had dispatched roughly 5,000 soldiers to train in Eritrea at the end of May. He continued by saying that although their training was finished last year, he had chosen to delay their return in order to prevent any interference with the parliamentary and presidential elections.
On November 2, in South Africa, the Tigrayan rebels and the federal government of Ethiopia signed a peace accord to put an end to the murderous two-year battle that has caused a dire humanitarian situation in northern Ethiopia.