In October 2022, Abdalle Ahmed Mumin — Secretary-General of the Somali Journalists Syndicate (SJS), the organisation that documents what happens to journalists in Somalia — arrived at Aden Adde International Airport in Mogadishu carrying a ticket to Nairobi. He was travelling to seek medical care for injuries he had sustained during a previous detention.

He did not make his flight. According to documentation by the SJS and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), NISA officers detained him at the departure gate without a warrant, without stated charges, and without notifying his family or his organisation of where he was being taken. His apparent offence: he had issued a press statement ten days earlier expressing concern that a new government media directive was worded so broadly it would suppress legitimate journalism — and he had refused to retract it.

This was his first arrest. He was released, then arrested again when he attempted to travel for medical care. In February 2023, according to the SJS and RFK Human Rights, NISA officers detained him a third time. In his own public statements, as documented by the CPJ, he has said officers told him they would kill him if he resisted. According to the SJS and his own public account, he was held for thirty-three days and subjected to treatment that he has publicly described as torture. He was eventually released. Days later, as recounted by the SJS and IPI, a court order froze the SJS bank accounts, but no NISA officer involved in any of the three detentions was investigated, disciplined, or prosecuted.

Abdalle Ahmed Mumin returned to his desk.

“If I stop, they have won. If enough of us stop, there is no press left.”

— Abdalle Ahmed Mumin, Secretary-General, Somali Journalists Syndicate

That return — that refusal to stop — captures something about Somalia’s press freedom crisis that the international community is not fully seeing. The dominant narrative focuses on the journalists killed: seventy-three since the civil war began, according to the CPJ, with not one killing producing a conviction, according to CPJ records. That story is real and must be told. But alongside it, and increasingly supplanting it, runs a different and in some ways more calculated story: Somalia’s security apparatus has learned that arresting journalists is cheap, quiet, and equally effective.

Between 2007 and 2013, Al-Shabaab’s campaign against Somalia’s press was built on murder. Eighteen journalists were killed in 2012 alone — the highest single-year figure recorded in any country since. The killings generated international condemnation, press freedom resources, and diplomatic pressure. They were visible. Visibility, as those responsible eventually discovered, has costs.

The arrest figures tell the rest of the story. The SJS documented six journalist arrests by state security forces in 2015. By 2019, that figure had reached thirty-eight — a record, with thirty-seven journalists also beaten or threatened at gunpoint that year, predominantly by state forces rather than Al-Shabaab, according to the SJS. Between March and May 2025, the SJS and CPJ documented forty-one journalists arrested, assaulted, or harassed in sixty days. The International Press Institute (IPI) documented at least eighteen press freedom violations in Somalia in the second half of 2025 — among the highest totals recorded on the continent that period.

An overnight detention rarely makes international news. Confiscating footage, forcing a retraction, or freezing an organisation’s bank accounts achieves the same silencing effect as a death threat — at a fraction of the diplomatic cost. The journalist is silenced. The world does not notice. The officer who conducted the arrest faces no consequence.

Working as a human rights practitioner based in Mogadishu, I have observed alongside how detention is used as press suppression in Somalia, as has also been documented extensively by the SJS, the CPJ, and the US State Department. The patterns are consistent: arrest after publication to punish specific reporting; detention as leverage to force retraction; prolonged incommunicado holds designed to extract sources; newsroom raids to seize footage; and, most devastatingly, the targeting of the organizations that support journalists rather than only the journalists themselves.

The Abdalle Mumin case illustrates the last of these most clearly. According to the SJS and RFK Human Rights, his three documented detentions were …