Somalia

Somalia, officially the Federal Republic of Somalia, is the easternmost country in continental Africa, stretching across the Horn of Africa and bordered by Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya with the longest coastline on Africa's mainland, an estimated population of more than 18 million, 2.7 million of them in the capital and largest city, Mogadishu, and around 85 percent ethnic Somalis speaking the official Somali language, overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. Powerful Somali empires including the Ajuran Sultanate, Adal Sultanate and Sultanate of the Geledi dominated regional trade through the Middle Ages before Italian and British colonization in the late nineteenth century divided the territory into Italian and British Somaliland; the two united as the independent Somali Republic in 1960 under civilian government until Siad Barre seized power in 1969 and established the Somali Democratic Republic. The Supreme Revolutionary Council collapsed in 1991 with the onset of the Somali Civil War, and a 2006 Ethiopian invasion overthrew the Islamic Courts Union, whose fragments included the militant group al-Shabaab; a new provisional constitution passed in August 2012 reformed Somalia as a federation, though insurgents still control much of central and southern Somalia. Among the world's least developed countries by GDP per capita and Human Development Index, Somalia maintains an informal economy based on livestock, remittances and telecommunications, and in 2026 the United Nations and World Food Programme warned that six million people, a third of the population, faced food crises amid severe drought and cuts in aid.