Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi, the president of Somaliland, has confirmed that he plans to travel to Israel soon in the hope of striking a trade deal with the Jewish state.
The breakaway state on the Horn of Africa is hopeful of securing an agreement with Jerusalem in the near future and could offer access to its valuable natural resources in return, according to Reuters.
Speaking from the World Government Summit in Dubai, Abdullahi told the outlet: “At the moment, there is no trade, and there is no investment from Israel. But we are hoping 100% [for] their investment, their trade, and hopefully we will engage with the business people and the government of Israel soon.
"Somaliland is a very rich country in resources — minerals, oil, gas, marine, in agriculture, energy and other sectors...
"We have meat, we have fish, we have minerals and they [Israel] need them. So trade can start from these main sectors. The sky is the limit.”
He added that the main goal is to secure access to the Israeli tech and innovation sector, which could help his country to construct a sustainable and developed economy.
The trade push comes after Israel became the first UN member to recognise Somaliland’s independence from neighbouring Somalia.
Announcing the move in December, Prime Minister Netanyahu said: "The State of Israel plans to immediately expand its relations with the Republic of Somaliland through extensive cooperation in the fields of agriculture, health, technology, and economy.”
Expanding on this in his own statement, Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar added on X that the two states would establish “full diplomatic ties, which will include the appointment of ambassadors and the opening of embassies”.
Defence and trade cooperation will also be a key sector as the Horn of Africa is at the epicentre of the ongoing jockeying for position in the region between Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Somaliland sits in a strategically significant position on one side of the Gulf of Aden (with Yemen just on the other side). The Gulf represents a bottleneck into the southern part of the Red Sea, which connects Middle Eastern trade routes to Europe through the Suez Canal at its northern end.
Somaliland was first established in 1960 after the Somaliland Protectorate was granted independence from the British Empire.
However, shortly after independence, Somaliland entered into a voluntary union with the neighbouring Italian Somaliland to form the Somali Republic.
Somaliland unilaterally declared independence from what is now Somalia in 1991 as the Somali Democratic Republic (SDR) collapsed, following the attempted genocide of the former’s influential Ishaaq clan by the SDR leadership.
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