By Mohamed Olad
Thursday April 23, 2026
We are on the eve of Ethiopia’s 7th National Elections, and political noise is reaching a fever pitch in the Somali Regional State. Remnants of the Abdi Iley era—including his close advisors—and a diaspora-based faction of the ONLF have adopted smear campaigns and multilingual duplicity as their strategy for regime change. This machinery of disinformation surrounding President Mustafa Omer operates with a brazen, multilingual duplicity that exposes its own bad faith.
The recent propaganda ignores policy and performance. It is a sustained smear against Mustafa personally, built on concocted lies, each tailored to a specific audience. For months, Abdi Iley loyalists, backed by the TPLF, hammered the claim that Mustafa Omer was an agent of Somalia’s President Farmaajo and Intelligence Chief Fahad Yasin. The story: he was groomed, funded, and dispatched by hostile foreign actors to infiltrate Ethiopian politics, with the ultimate aim of seceding the Somali Region—so goes the puerile propaganda aired on pro-TPLF outlets.
To Amharic-speaking audiences, he is portrayed as a fanatical promoter of the 1960s “Greater Somalia” agenda, hiding behind a thin veneer of Ethiopian patriotism. To back up this claim, they accuse him of changing the regional flag and name, framing these as steps toward secession. Yet, in a striking irony, the same critics turn to Somali platforms to make the opposite claim. Just this week, they weaponized a website allegedly owned by Fahad Yasin himself to label President Mustafa a well-known traitor to the Somali cause and a man with a documented history of hatred toward Somalia’s people.
On Somali Stream—a site run by Abdinur Mohamed, ex-Farmaajo aide and cousin of Fahad Yasin—the pseudonymous Abdi Sheikh (in reality Gurey Fidar, a close Abdi Iley advisor) alleges that “in 2001 I met an angry Mustafa at Jijiga’s Edom Hotel, who drafted an article that led to his appointment on a committee purging officials educated in Somalia and Sudan for not being ‘Ethiopian enough’. Mustafa later boasted of persuading Abay Tsehaye to launch the purge, excluding hundreds of capable citizens.”
In this article, aimed at Somali intellectuals, Mustafa is presented as a former TPLF ally and a hater of Somalia. In Amharic propaganda for Ethiopian audiences, he is painted as a lifelong Ethiopia-hater who authored many articles against the country’s past political systems.
The merits of the allegation—or lack thereof—are not the focus here. There will be ample time and testimony to debunk this lie, which is the exact opposite of what transpired. The point right now is the stark contradiction: in Somali-language spaces, the narrative flips. There, they insist Mustafa opposed the flag and name change. Abdi Fidar writes: “When the Somali Regional Alliance for Justice pushed for the return of the old flag, Mustafa was never fully sold… Then came the Medemer book auction. While other regional leaders pledged proceeds to schools and clinics, Mustafa chose instead to build a monument to Ethiopian soldiers at Karamara—a site Somalis remember as a massacre of their elders and brightest young men. The gesture was deliberate.”
Here again, one man cannot be both the architect of symbolic change in Amharic and its fierce opponent in Somali. This contradiction is not accidental; it is the hallmark of a campaign that tailors its venom to the fears of each audience, with no regard for internal logic. In Amharic, the panicking detractors say Mustafa adopted the flag with the blue symbol of Somalia because it was designed by his uncle, a Somalia army general. In Somali, they say Mustafa built a monument at Karamara for Ethiopian soldiers who died in the 1977 war with Somalia. Again, the focus is not on the lies themselves but on their inconsistency.
This rhetorical acrobatics grows more unhinged when it descends into identity erasure. In Somali spaces, they call him “Mesfin”—an Amhara name—and go so far as to claim he is neither Somali nor Muslim. In Amharic spaces, they tie him to former Somali generals through clan association to suggest disloyalty to Ethiopia.
One man cannot simultaneously be a Somali nationalist conspiring with Mogadishu, a hater of Somalia and its people, an Amhara supporter, and a Pan-Somali extremist cloaked in Ethiopian garb to dismantle Ethiopia. One cannot be attacked in Amharic for changing the flag and name, and simultaneously vilified in Somali for refusing to change them.
This incoherent mess is the product of a propaganda system in panic, desperate to win over different audiences. Last week, it thought it had wounded the President among Ethiopian audiences with fake leaked audio stories, but then feared losing Somalis who support his stance on the flag and name.
Seeing the Somali backlash, the article by former Abdi Iley advisor Abdi Fidar (aka Gurey Fidar) was a hasty attempt to regroup. Sensing they were losing the Somali-speaking political base, they resorted to fresh inventions and lies. They also realized the President had dismantled their core Amharic smears simply by asking for evidence of the leaked audios and the statements they alleged he made.
The fingerprints on this smear campaign are familiar. It is the same playbook used by the TPLF and its mouthpieces like Ethio-Forum: repackage and translate a core smear, and the message fractures into contradictions depending on the audience. After their recent smear campaigns aimed at non-Somali viewers failed to gain traction, they have now turned their focus inward, trying to stoke clan divisions and portray the president as an enemy of Somalis.
But the pattern is revealing. You cannot accuse a man of being Fahad Yasin’s secessionist agent in Amharic and then use Fahad Yasin’s own platform to charge him with hating Somalis—Fahad Yasin’s own people.
You cannot claim he changed the flag in one language and insist he opposed it in another. And you cannot credibly attack a leader through a nameless byline when that shadowy hand once helped steer Abdi Iley’s regime.
Here the web tightens: the fact that Abdi Fidar—a close advisor to Abdi Iley, a figure synonymous with ethnic cleansing and mass displacement—now hides behind shifting pseudonyms to smear a sitting official is not irony; it is the natural progression of a network that launders atrocities by day and manufactures division by night. The machinery of deception is overheating, and the only thing it is successfully dismantling is its own credibility.
The stories change; the President’s political positions do not. His beliefs and work are tangibly demonstrated through the peace, ethnic and religious harmony, massive development, and respect for human rights he and his team have delivered on the ground. The hateful, panicking mishmash of Abdi Iley loyalists and diaspora-based ONLF factions seems to overrate its own impact, judging by the frantic frequency of its peddling. Perhaps the old adage “actions speak louder than words” might tame their hysteria.
President Mustafa Omer’s true character will be judged by the legacy he leaves behind in the Somali Region and in Ethiopian politics—not by desperate character assassination campaigns delivered through multilingual duplicity.
Editor’s Note: Mohamed Olad is a former Somali Regional State official, journalist, and political analyst. He can be reached at [email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Hiiraan Online’s editorial stance.