The President of the Federal Republic of Somalia, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud is on Monday set to meet Somali troops who were trained in Eritrea.
The head of the state is scheduled to arrive at the headquarters of the Ministry of Defense of Somalia, where he will have a meeting with troops recently brought from Eritrea. These forces are said they will take part of the war against al-Shabaab in the regions of the country.
The president has already said that during the month of January 2023, all the troops that were being brought to the country will be completed.
Most of the over 5,000 Somali cadets who were sent to Eritrea for a three-year military training have returned home.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who promised to bring the soldiers home in his election campaign, has visited them in their training camps in Eritrea twice this year.
News of the secret training mission was first out in late May when Mohamud’s predecessor, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, better known as Farmajo, announced his government had sent around 5,000 soldiers to train in Eritrea.
Soon after that, rumors started to swivel in Somali politics in the run-up to the election that the soldiers may have been deployed to neighboring Ethiopia’s embattled Tigray region, where Eritrean forces were fighting alongside Ethiopian government forces against TPLF rebels.
Although their training has ended last year, President Farmajo had decided to delay their return to avoid influencing the outcome of the parliamentary and presidential elections.
Somalia’s government denied its troops had ever been used in the Tigray war and no evidence whatsoever has been found to corroborate those allegations yet.
