Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The key component in the eastern sector of the African Transition Zone is Somalia, where 11 million people, almost all of them Muslim, live at the mercy of a desert-dominated environment that requires cross-border migration into Ethiopia’s easternmost Ogaden zone in pursuit of seasonal pastures. As many as 5 million Somalis reside permanently on the Ethiopian side of the border, but this is hardly the only such division the Somali “nation” faces. Somalia’s cultural geography comprises an assemblage of five major ethnic groups fragmented into hundreds of clans—all engaged in an endless struggle for power as well as survival. In the early 2000s, Somalia fragmented into three major subdivisions. In the north, the sector known as Somaliland, which had proclaimed its independence in the 1990s and which remains by far the most stable of the three, essentially functions as a state even though the international community will not recognize it as such. . . . In 2006, the Islamic militias stormed into the capital and took control, ousting the warlords and proclaiming their determination to create an Islamic state." [Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, 17th Edition, p. 275-6]