Ogaden War

Between July 1977 and March 1978 Somalia and Ethiopia fought a conventional war for the Ogaden, a dry plateau in eastern Ethiopia whose people are overwhelmingly ethnic Somali. Somalia's army, supporting a local insurgency, overran most of the region within weeks, but a dramatic switch in Soviet policy, a huge airlift of arms and the arrival of Cuban troops turned the tide. The defeat crippled Somalia's military and helped set off the internal revolts that later led to the collapse of the Somali state.

Somali clans in the Ogaden were outside Ethiopian control until the late nineteenth century, when Emperor Menelik II expanded into the area; an 1897 treaty with Britain recognised Ethiopian claims. Ethiopian rule there remained thin for decades, and after the Second World War, when the region was under British military administration, the British handed it back to Ethiopia in stages, with the last areas transferred in 1955. Many Ogaden Somalis regarded Ethiopian rule as foreign occupation, and the newly independent Somali Republic sought to unite all Somali-inhabited lands. A rebellion in 1963 was suppressed with great harshness.

In 1969 Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in Somalia, and the country drew close to the Soviet Union, which supplied its army. In 1974 Ethiopia's emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown by a military council, the Derg, led by Mengistu Haile Mariam, and the country slid into turmoil and civil war. Somalia backed the Western Somali Liberation Front, which by mid-1977 had driven Ethiopian troops out of much of the Ogaden countryside. In March 1977 Fidel Castro tried to reconcile the two now-socialist regimes at a meeting in Aden, without success.

The Somali National Army invaded in July 1977; Ethiopian records give 12 July, though other sources give 13 or 23 July. With around 31,000 to 39,000 men and far more tanks and artillery than the thinly spread Ethiopian forces, it took perhaps 70 per cent of the Ogaden within a month. An attack on the city of Dire Dawa in August was repulsed, but Jijiga fell on 12 September and the Marda Pass the next day. Ethiopia admitted it held only about a tenth of the region. From late September into January, Somali forces tried and failed to take the city of Harar.

Moscow, allied to both sides, tried to mediate, then chose Ethiopia. Soviet arms deliveries to Somalia stopped, and from late September a massive airlift brought tanks, rocket launchers and MiG fighters to Addis Ababa, along with about 1,500 Soviet advisers. Between 12,000 and 18,000 Cuban soldiers followed, together with South Yemeni troops. Somalia broke with the Soviet bloc, but its remaining friends, among them China, gave little beyond diplomatic backing and token aid.

A joint Ethiopian, Soviet and Cuban command under the Soviet general Vasily Petrov planned the counter-attack, which began on 1 February 1978. Cuban armour and paratroops, and helicopter landings behind Somali lines, outflanked the defenders of the Marda Pass, and Jijiga was retaken on 5 March. On 9 March Barre ordered his army home, and on 23 March Ethiopia declared that its last border post had been recovered.

Estimates put deaths at roughly 5,000 to 6,000 soldiers on each side. Somalia lost almost a third of its regular soldiers and half its air force, and Barre's dream of a Greater Somalia faded. Discontent spawned armed opposition movements, the first formed in 1979, beginning the long slide into the Somali Civil War. The WSLF insurgency continued, and Ethiopian counter-insurgency operations, including attacks on wells and herds, drove hundreds of thousands of refugees into Somalia, which reported 1.3 million refugees by 1979.

Our 1960 and 1985 maps show the Ogaden within Ethiopia before and after the war; the border did not change.