For passengers travelling via Aden Adde International Airport in Somalia, the Sahal company or ‘checkpoint’ is all but unavoidable.
The Sahal security system can be seen as part of Mogadishu’s long history of checkpoints. Seen as efficient and convenient by some, for others, as a checkpoint that represents another example of the powerful profiting at their expense.
Here, Nisar Majid and Abdirahman I. Adan discuss the implications of this ‘checkpoint’ and the problematic lack of transparency around it.

Mogadishu and the AAIA Checkpoint – Securitisation and Monopolisation in the Everyday...
Checkpoints in Somalia are typically evoked in relation to the transportation of goods and the tax revenue that accrues to whichever form of public authority is in control of them, whether government, Al Shabaab or local militias. However, the movement of people – as passengers – moving between towns and cities, between urban and rural areas and within urban or rural areas is also part of checkpoint dynamics.
Recently one of our PeaceRep researchers, Abdirahman Adan, based in Mogadishu, brought our attention to perhaps the most lucrative ‘checkpoint’ concerning the movement of people, in Somalia, that is the movement of Somali citizens via Aden Adde International Airport (AAIA).
Abdirahman was assisting a close relative’s family who were travelling domestically from Mogadishu to Baidoa by air. The family included his relative’s wife and their two young children. They were all on their way to the airport by taxi and reached the major checkpoint at K4 (kilometre 4). He was told to go the Sahal office or pay a larger ‘fee’ at the checkpoint where he was stopped. As an experienced traveller, Abdirahman tried other routes to the airport but found that they all directed him back to Sahal.

The Sahal office, located only a few hundred metres from the AAIA, refers to the Sahal company that runs a minibus service between its main base and the airport. Anyone who has used the airport in Mogadishu will be familiar with the hustle and bustle of passengers getting on or off these minibuses, as they are brightly coloured in the green and white logo of the Hormud Telecommunications Company.
At the Sahal office or ‘checkpoint’ as it is commonly referred, all passenger luggage is screened and tickets can be printed if needed. All of these services – security checks, printing and transport to/from the airport – inevitably carry a charge, the main cost of which is $8 per adult, plus several dollars for each child, and a small tax.
One of the observations of Abdirahman was that, while this system has been running for over ten years, and is widely known to be connected to political elites in the capital, the coordination between Sahal and all of the checkpoints that enable access to the AAIA has intensified in recent years; all checkpoints are reportedly paid by Sahal in return for them re-directing travelling passengers and their luggage to their office. Only passengers with suitcases are checked; those with laptop bags or without bags who are visiting offices in the large AAIA compound (in which many offices and guest houses are located) do not have to go through the Sahal system.
Mogadishu is a transport hub for many tens of thousands of journeys that are made by Somalis into and out of the country as well as within the country (most domestic flights operate around the main Mogadishu AAIA hub), whether travelling for work, business or for personal reasons. International, regional and national airlines are all part of this mobility, particularly where insecurity and poor roads limits road-based movement for people.
As Dr Faduma Abukar pointed out in a previous blogpost for PeaceRep, based on her ethnographic fieldwork in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital has a long history of checkpoints and other securitisation measures. She notes that, since the re-establishment of an internationally recognised government, ‘checkpoints, fortified blocks and barricades, are placed at ever more and mundane areas of everyday life: beaches, restaurants, sports halls, book fairs, gardens, and supermarkets that typically animate main streets, and are privatized, fortified and guarded spaces.’ She also points out that checkpoints are justified as part of counterinsurgency strategies.
Travel-related websites such as Reddit have posts where people share their advice to fellow travellers, especially useful for those travelling in for the first time. Many of these comments are in fact complimentary about the Sahal service, pointing out that it is an efficient system while, at the same time acknowledging it is also a monopoly benefiting certain groups.
In another previous PeaceRep blogpost, we highlighted that the clustering of checkpoints had developed as a recent practice, organised by transport brokers and a transport committee, probably in order to improve efficiency for transporters. The Sahal system mimics this clustering to some extent, by bringing all other checkpoints to/from the airport into its orbit.
To conclude, we note how the securitisation of Mogadishu provides monopoly profit-making opportunities for some, not unusual in other securitised contexts around the world. For those in the diaspora, the costs are probably incidental and of little concern, while many observers also recognise that this system reduces pressure on the airport and improves security.
However, to other regular travellers the Sahal system is also problematic and is seen as no different to the numerous other checkpoints dotted throughout the country, where the powerful profit at their expense, and to whom the cost is more significant.
Perhaps the most important point is that the lack of transparency around the ownership and benefits of the Sahal company and ‘checkpoint’ opens up the government to accusations of corruption. When Somalia’s government is attempting to demonstrate its own domestic legitimacy and value, improving transparency around major revenue generating hubs used by the public would be a positive public relations initiative.
Read our previous blogpost: ‘Main roads and checkpoints in Mogadishu’
Explore all PeaceRep Somalia research here.