Who ruled Mogadishu?

Mogadishu lies on the Benadir coast of the Horn of Africa, facing the Indian Ocean a little north of the equator. The monsoon winds that blow towards Arabia and India for half the year and back towards Africa for the other half made this shore a natural stop for merchant ships, and Mogadishu grew rich exporting cloth, ivory and livestock products. Its history has two great themes: a long medieval age as one of the leading Muslim trading cities of East Africa, and a modern century of colonial rule, independence and, from 1991, a devastating civil war.

The origins of the town are obscure, but by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was a prosperous Muslim port where Somali inhabitants lived alongside merchants of Arab and Persian descent. An inscription in the Fakhr ad-Din mosque dates it to 1269, and the city's rulers minted their own copper coins. When the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta stopped there in 1331 he described a large and wealthy city ruled by a sultan, whose weavers produced fine cloth that was shipped to Egypt and beyond. Mogadishu traded with Arabia, Persia, India and the gold-exporting ports further south, sharing in the commercial world of the Swahili coast, and fleets of the Chinese admiral Zheng He called there in the early fifteenth century.

From the late medieval period the city was linked to powers in the interior, including the Ajuran state, which controlled the Shabelle valley and much of southern Somalia. The Portuguese arrival in the Indian Ocean after 1498 disrupted older trade routes, though the city itself was never conquered by them. Later centuries saw Mogadishu under shifting local authorities, among them the Hiraab Imamate and the Geledi Sultanate of the interior, while in the nineteenth century the Omani sultans of Zanzibar claimed the coast and kept a governor and customs post in the town, with limited real power.

In the Scramble for Africa Italy leased the Benadir ports from Zanzibar in 1892 and bought them outright in 1905, making Mogadishu the capital of Italian Somaliland. Under Fascist rule in the 1920s and 1930s the Italians built a cathedral, government buildings and a growing settler quarter. British forces captured the city in 1941 during the Second World War, and in 1950 the territory returned to Italian administration as a United Nations trusteeship, on the condition that it be prepared for independence within ten years.

On 1 July 1960 the former Italian and British territories united as the Somali Republic, with Mogadishu as its capital, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa. After a military coup in 1969 Siad Barre ruled for over two decades. His regime fell in January 1991, and fighting between clan militias wrecked much of the city. A UN and US intervention began in 1992, and the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993 led to the withdrawal of foreign troops. In the 2000s the Islamic Courts Union briefly took control, followed by Ethiopian intervention and the rise of the militant group al-Shabaab, which was pushed out of the city by African Union and government forces in 2011. Its bombings continued, including a truck bomb in October 2017 that killed more than 500 people.

Despite insecurity, Mogadishu has grown quickly through migration and rebuilding, and estimates of its population now run to well over 2 million. It is the capital of Somalia and the seat of the federal government.