Documentation Archive · Compiled for advocacy & public record

The Isaaq Genocide Documentation and Somaliland's Recognition Issues

A working reference on the 1987–91 campaign against Isaaq-populated areas of northern Somalia, the accountability and international-response threads that followed, and the ongoing geopolitics of Somaliland's pursuit of international recognition.

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Read before using: this page compiles publicly available sources for documentation and advocacy purposes. It distinguishes between events with strong independent corroboration and claims resting on a single source. It is not a court finding, and naming an individual here is not an assertion of criminal guilt.

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The Mass Graves — From Accidental Discovery to Ongoing Exhumation

Somaliland · 1997–present · over 200 reported sites, 11+ professionally excavated

Discovered1997, by accident, after heavy rains
Reported sites200+ (suspected/alleged)
Actually excavated11+ sites, 318 skeletons documented (as of 2018)
Best-documented siteMalko Durduro, Hargeisa

Nobody set out to document this. In 1997, heavy rains and flooding in Hargeisa washed away topsoil and simply exposed what had been buried underneath — bones, ropes, broken skulls, torn clothing. Everything that has happened since, from the first forensic mission to today's ongoing exhumations, has been a response to ground that kept giving up evidence on its own.

What the first forensic team found

At the request of the UN's Independent Expert on Somalia, Mona Rishmawi, Physicians for Human Rights sent forensic anthropologists William D. Haglund and Owen B. Beattie to Hargeisa in December 1997. They examined roughly 100 alleged sites across three areas of the city — known locally as Malko Durduro, Badhka, and the Milk Factory site — and identified 92 to 116 probable mass-grave features. Two were confirmed with certainty: Malko Durduro, near the former headquarters of the Somali National Army's 26th Division, and Badhka, already documented elsewhere in this archive as a Hargeisa execution ground. The forensic detail is specific and disturbing: victims' remains were "tightly grouped and bound to each other by rope, binding their wrists together behind their back," and grave floors showed "patterned impressions... consistent with the grave having been dug by an earth-moving machine" — evidence of organized, equipment-assisted killing rather than chaos. This became a formal UN document (E/CN.4/1999/103/Add.1). The same 1997 assessment recorded unconfirmed reports of further alleged sites in Las Anod, Erigavo, Burao, Berbera, Bireme, and Zeila, none of which had been assessed at that time.

A body created to look, then largely left to look alone

Somaliland's first president, Mohamed Haji Ibrahim Egal, established a Technical Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes in the mid-1990s, which became the War Crimes Investigation Commission (WCIC) and is known today as the War Crimes and Genocide Investigation Committee. For over a decade its work was largely unfunded internationally. That changed in 2011, when a Somaliland diaspora contact working with the Center for Justice & Accountability (CJA) — already central to this archive's accountability record — connected the WCIC with Jose Pablo Baraybar, director of Peru's forensic anthropology team, EPAF. Formal exhumation began on 24 September 2012.

What's actually been excavated, versus what's been reported

This distinction matters, and sources routinely blur it. "More than 200 mass graves" is the figure most often cited — but this counts locations reported by residents after rain exposure or local tip-offs, not sites that have been professionally excavated. The Commission's own confirmed record, tracked year by year in independent reporting:

Estimates of total deaths across all suspected sites range from 50,000–60,000 up to 200,000, depending on the source — genuinely disputed, not settled, and distinct from the specific, physically documented remains above.

A named massacre behind one of the graves: Lag Barako

Most mass grave reporting describes the sites themselves without naming a specific killing event behind them. One exception: Saxafi Media's account of the EPAF/WCIC excavations near Gabiley and Arabsiyo names a specific incident directly — in March 1988, a "Colonel Ali" is reported to have led the killing of 18 civilians near Gabiley at Lag Barako hill, the victims tied together in pairs before being buried in what became the makeshift mass grave later discovered there. This archive has not confirmed which "Colonel Ali" this refers to — it is a common name shared by several officers already documented elsewhere in this archive, including Yusuf Abdi Ali ("Tukeh"), and this reference should not be read as identifying him or any other specific individual without further corroboration.

Why the Commission keeps digging

"If governments aren't held responsible for mass killings, then killings will continue... It is about getting the perpetrators in court." Kadar Ahmed, Chairman, Somaliland War Crimes Investigation Commission

Ahmed has said one general believed to have ordered the killings is dead; another lives abroad. A more recent account (2025) names Mahmoud Abdi as the Committee's current head, describing its purpose plainly: "Apart from documenting the evidence of crimes, we also wanted to give them a proper Islamic burial." The Commission has consistently operated without international funding or support.

Documented on film

The exhumation work, and the community living alongside it, is the subject of Al Jazeera's Kill All But the Crows, already catalogued on this archive's Media & Documentaries page.

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