Somaliland and Israel Should Build a Joint Media-Resilience Initiative Against Extremism and Disinformation
Somaliland’s growing strategic partnership with Israel should not be limited to diplomacy, investment or conventional security.
It should also extend to the information battlefield.
Israel’s recognition of Somaliland in December 2025 fundamentally changed Hargeisa’s international position.
The relationship has since deepened: Somaliland appointed its first ambassador to Israel, opened an embassy in Jerusalem, President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi Irro made an official state visit, and Israeli officials have publicly described cooperation with Somaliland as strategic.
President Isaac Herzog has explicitly said the two countries face the threat of radical extremism and share interests in security, stability and freedom of navigation. Israel is already training Somaliland police and military personnel, according to Somaliland’s defense minister.
The next logical step should be a Somaliland–Israel Strategic Media Resilience Initiative.
This should not become a government propaganda operation.
It should be a professional, transparent and politically independent program designed to strengthen Somaliland’s journalists, universities, researchers and media institutions against extremist propaganda, fabricated information, coordinated influence campaigns and increasingly sophisticated digital manipulation.
The threat is real.
A UN monitoring report describes propaganda as a central strategic pillar of Al-Shabaab’s operations. The organization produces material across social media, radio and other platforms, adapts narratives to political events and publishes recruitment material in multiple languages. UN experts have also documented terrorist organizations increasingly experimenting with artificial intelligence to translate, amplify and improve propaganda.
Somaliland cannot respond to that environment with security forces alone.
A terrorist organization does not need to capture territory to damage national security. It can manufacture distrust, exploit clan tensions, circulate fabricated videos, impersonate public institutions, manipulate genuine grievances and attempt to turn political disputes into social confrontation.
The answer is not censorship.
The answer is better journalism, faster verification and stronger public resilience.
A Somaliland–Israel program could train experienced journalists, journalism students, academics and independent media specialists in digital verification, open-source intelligence, geolocation, image and video authentication, identifying manipulated media, mapping coordinated networks, analyzing extremist narratives and constructing evidence-based counter-narratives.
Similar capacity-building is already being promoted internationally. UNESCO programs across Africa have trained journalists in OSINT, fact-checking, media literacy and digital verification specifically to strengthen resilience against misinformation and disinformation.
Israel could contribute technical expertise, cyber knowledge, training methodologies and institutional support.
Somaliland should contribute something equally important: local knowledge.
Somali-language propaganda cannot be understood properly from Jerusalem, Washington or Brussels alone. Effective analysis requires journalists who understand Somaliland’s communities, political vocabulary, religious discourse, clan dynamics and rapidly changing online environment.
Selection therefore matters.
Participants should not be chosen according to family relationships, clan affiliation or political loyalty. Somaliland already possesses senior journalists and media professionals with decades of experience.
A credible initiative should recruit through transparent professional criteria and include media houses, universities, independent journalists, women, young digital researchers and specialists from different regions of Somaliland.
Political diversity should be protected rather than feared.
A counter-disinformation institution loses credibility the moment criticism of government is automatically classified as misinformation.
That boundary must be explicit.
Criticizing President Irro, Israel, an opposition party or government policy is legitimate political speech. Fabricating documents, impersonating institutions, deliberately circulating manipulated footage or distributing terrorist recruitment material is something different.
Independent oversight, published methodology and transparent corrections should therefore be built into the program from its creation.
The initiative could establish a small Somaliland Digital Verification and Media Resilience Centre rather than another government information ministry.
Its purpose would be to detect—not suppress.
Verify—not dictate.
Expose—not secretly manipulate.
It could produce rapid fact-checks during national emergencies, publish research into coordinated information campaigns, provide verification assistance to newsrooms, train journalists outside Hargeisa and maintain a publicly accessible archive of debunked photographs, videos, accounts and recurring false narratives.
Another pillar should be public education.
Journalists cannot counter every false claim individually. Citizens themselves need the ability to recognize manipulated video, suspicious accounts, emotionally engineered content and unverified claims.
That makes media literacy a national-security investment.
Why WARYATV Should Launch the Debate
WARYATV is an appropriate platform for raising this proposal precisely because Somaliland’s information battle is increasingly international.
Israel’s recognition generated strong opposition from Somalia and several regional and international actors, including the African Union.
That political opposition is legitimate diplomacy.
But alongside legitimate criticism comes a wider digital environment in which false information, extremist rhetoric, manipulated narratives and organized harassment can spread rapidly.
Somaliland must learn to distinguish between the two.
A democratic state should answer political criticism with evidence.
It should answer disinformation with verification.
And it should answer extremist propaganda with credible journalism rather than counter-propaganda that citizens cannot trust.
WARYATV can help place that principle at the center of the national conversation while connecting Somaliland journalists with Israeli, American, European and African expertise.
WARYATV ASSESSMENT
Israel’s recognition created opportunity for Somaliland.
It also created new exposure.
As Somaliland enters stronger international partnerships, it will attract more diplomatic competition, more hostile messaging and potentially more sophisticated influence operations.
That is the price of becoming strategically relevant.
Somaliland therefore needs to expand its definition of national security.
A coastline must be protected.
An airport must be protected.
Government networks must be protected.
The national information environment must be protected as well.
But the strongest defense is not censorship and it is not political propaganda.
It is a professional media sector capable of proving what is true before hostile actors succeed in establishing what is false.
Israel and Somaliland already cooperate in security.
They should now create a transparent partnership that helps Somaliland build the journalists, researchers and digital institutions required for the next battlefield:
the battle for credibility.
