Thursday 26, March  2026 {HMC} Somalia continues to shape global conversations on the Horn of Africa, as H.E. Ali Mohamed Omar, State Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, delivered a lecture at the Diplomatic School of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation in Madrid.

The lecture, titled “The Political Dynamics of the Horn of Africa: Stability, Competition, and Opportunity,” brought together diplomats, academics, and international relations students.

“The Horn of Africa is no longer a story of crisis alone, but of opportunity, connectivity, and shared responsibility,” the State Minister noted, highlighting Somalia’s progress in state-building, its commitment to regional cooperation, and its growing international engagement.

The lecture forms part of the Ministry’s broader public diplomacy efforts, reinforcing Somalia’s role as a credible partner in advancing regional stability and shared prosperity.

Wednesday 25 Mar 2026 {HMC} The Trump administration has been fast-tracking the legal proceedings of Somali immigrants, effectively denying them the right to a fair hearing and potentially expediting their removal from the United States, two Minnesota-based legal providers alleged in a federal lawsuit on Tuesday.

The lawsuit claims that since late January, the Justice Department has placed Somali nationals on a separate docket and scheduled hearings with little notice, making it difficult for lawyers to represent their clients. The filing was made in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

Hines Immigration Law, a private firm in Roseville, Minn., and the Advocates for Human Rights, a nonprofit legal services provider based in Minneapolis, asked the court to immediately halt the policy, calling it unconstitutional.
“This is not about efficiency or docket management,” Kelsey Hines, who owns Hines Immigration Law, said in a statement. “This is an undeniably targeted policy that singles out one nationality, designed to rob them of the due process they are legally guaranteed and to strip their legal teams of the ability to adequately and ethically prepare their cases for hearing.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The lawsuit follows a surge in immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, which is home to 80,000 Somalis, the largest population of the group in the United States. The measures included a targeted effort against Somali nationals, whom President Trump has repeatedly disparaged.

Beginning in December, the Trump administration deployed thousands of federal immigration agents to the Minneapolis area, saying it was targeting fraud, which had implicated a pocket of Minnesota Somalis.

That group has come under considerable fire from Mr. Trump, who in December called Somalis “garbage,” adding that “we don’t want them in our country.” He has repeatedly denigrated Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia, with racist attacks.

The administration is also seeking to end deportation protections for more than 2,000 migrants from Somalia who are able to live and work in the United States through a program called Temporary Protected Status. On March 13, a federal judge blocked the administration’s effort to end those protections because the government had not been prepared to defend it in court. The administration has appealed that decision.

In the legal filing Tuesday, the plaintiffs described what they claimed was the new policy against Somalis as an escalation of the administration’s “hateful rhetoric.” The policy has not been confirmed to The New York Times by Trump administration officials, but several immigration lawyers have reported a blitz in hearings scheduled specifically for their Somali clients.

Immigration cases usually take years to resolve and involve multiple hearings, including master calendar hearings that are procedural and individual merits hearings that include testimony and evidence supporting the person’s request for relief. Merits hearings are usually scheduled a year in advance, the filing said, giving lawyers ample time to prepare.

Lately, though, individual hearings for Somalis that were scheduled to take place in late 2026, 2027 or 2028 have been scheduled with as little as one month’s notice, the plaintiffs said. The legal groups also said that the cases had been scheduled with a small set of immigration judges who have higher than average rates of removal.

Ms. Hines said in a statement that 97 percent of her Somali clients’ cases had been rapidly advanced under the policy. Even if she were to work 12-hour days, seven days a week, she said, she would be 7,000 hours short of the time needed to prepare their cases.

The legal filing states that of the 3.3 million pending cases in immigration court, roughly 3,200 involve Somali nationals, according to the latest data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data collection center at Syracuse University.

Pooja Salhotra covers breaking news across the United States.

Wednesday 25 Mar 2026 {HMC} United States President Donald Trump is insistent that “productive” negotiations have taken place with Iran to end the war he launched with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu almost a month ago. The major problem with that narrative is that Iran’s top officials have repeatedly denied it.

Amid the fog of war and the propaganda being pushed by all sides, it is hard to know who to believe. But an analysis of what each side has to gain from any negotiations – and a potential end to the conflict – could bring more clarity.

Trump’s comments that there were “major points of agreement” after “very good” talks with an unnamed “top” Iranian figure came as stock markets opened in the US for the start of the trading week. The five-day deadline he gave for a positive response from Iran also happens to coincide with the end of the trading week.
Many have cynically noted that timing, especially as it comes after a two-week period in which oil prices have fluctuated in line with events in the Middle East, leading to a high of about $120 a barrel last week.

Trump’s talk of negotiations may also give time for more US troops to arrive in the Middle East, if Washington decides to conduct some form of ground invasion of Iranian territory.

Among those questioning Trump’s motives was the man believed by some to be the senior Iranian official Trump was referencing: the Iranian parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

“No negotiations have been held with the US, and fakenews is used to manipulate the financial and oil markets and escape the quagmire in which the US and Israel are trapped,” Ghalibaf wrote on social media.

The impact on stock markets and oil prices is not just relevant to the US and Trump, but also to Iran. However, for Tehran, the benefit comes in the damage the war is doing to the US and global economies.

The Iranian state wants the US to feel economic pain from the war, as a means of deterrence for any future Israeli or US attack on Iran.

Therefore, as much as it is in the US interest to play up talk of negotiations in order to calm the markets, it is also in Iran’s interest to downplay any talk to do the exact opposite, and not give the Trump administration any breathing space.

US benefits?

Consequently, both sides have their own narratives on negotiations, and public comments will do little to inform us as to whether those negotiations are really taking place, or in what form they may be.

That instead leads us into what each side has to gain from negotiations, and an actual end to the war at the current stage.

Trump appears to have underestimated the consequences of the conflict that he launched with Netanyahu on February 28, and the ability of the Iranian state to withstand the attacks against it without collapsing.

“They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East … Nobody expected that,” he said last week, adding that even “the greatest experts” didn’t believe that.

Leaving aside that experts – including US intelligence officials – had repeatedly made those warnings, reality has now made Trump aware of the consequences he had previously ignored.

While some allies and supporters may continue to push him to plough on with the conflict, Trump has previously shown himself amenable to cutting deals to extricate himself from difficult situations, and it is not far-fetched to see the benefits of doing so in this instance.

The US president has already ordered his government to issue temporary sanctions waivers on some Iranian oil, in an effort to calm oil prices. This is the first time Iran has lifted sanctions on any Iranian oil since 2019, and it will not be lost on Iran that the waivers have come as a result of their policy to expand the conflict to the wider Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas transits.

The war was already unpopular in the US – and now even more so, as consumers see the impact on petrol prices and potentially other areas of the economy, all in the run-up to congressional elections later this year, in which Trump’s Republicans are likely to do poorly.

Trump, therefore, has the options of extending this war – and suffering the economic and political cost, or ending it – and facing the criticism that he was unable to finish what he termed as a “short-term excursion”.

The Iranian perspective

But whatever Trump wants to do, the decision is not totally in his hands. Iran, attacked for the second time in less than a year, now appears to have less of an incentive to end the war without the establishment of an effective deterrent to another in the future.

Gone are the days of the telegraphed attacks on US assets and the slow climb up the escalation ladder. From the outset of the current war, it was clear that Iran had changed its tactics and was not as interested in restraint.

It is now arguably in the Iranian state’s benefit to drag out the conflict and inflict more suffering on the region, if it wants to ensure its survival.

There may also be a belief that interceptor stocks in Israel are running low, allowing Iran to strike targets more effectively. The thinking – particularly among the hardliners who now appear to be in the ascendancy in Iran – will be that now is not the time to stop, and allow those interceptor stocks to replenish.

And yet, Iran is suffering. More than 1,500 people have been killed across the country, according to the government. Infrastructure has been heavily damaged, and the power grid could be next. Relations with Gulf neighbours have nosedived, and, after repeated Iranian attacks, are unlikely to return to their previous levels after the conflict.

More moderate voices in Iran will look at that and think that things could easily get worse. They can argue that some form of deterrence has been achieved, and that the time is now ripe to talk. And if they can get some concessions – such as a promise of no future attacks, or greater authority in the Strait of Hormuz – they may decide that the time is right to make a deal.

SOURCE Al-jaziira