He was long time companion and a childhood friend of Mohamed Abdullah Hassan and notable weapons smuggler.

[5] Shihiri joined the Ahmadiyya (Idrisiyya) sufi Tariqa order about the same time as the young Mullah in Berbera in the early 1890's.

Due to his long experience as a trader and popularity in these ports he became the foreign organizer of the movement and its gunrunner during the campaign years.

Shihiri is noted to have conducted caravans from the interior of Somali region to Bosaso to obtain smuggled weapons and ammunition for the Dervish and in 1903 procured many illicit French arms.

[11] In August 1904; and from Aden, embarking on the royal ship Volturno, Pestalozza went to Bender Cassem, on the northern Somali coast, to feel the ground, and to send a courier to Mullah, who was in Upper Nogal, benefiting from these practices, as an intermediary, certainly Abdallah Sceri, a trusted man of Mullah himself, who had employed him in various missions.

Councilor Abdallah Sheri was kept on board the Volturno, in a state of arrest, not allowed by the British Authorities to have relations with the natives in Aden and on the coast.

The Italians assigned the Nogal and Hawd in the Italian sphere of influence as a territory accessible to the dervish, in the English sphere the dervish were only granted grazing for their cattle in British Somaliland Nogal in the area limited by the wells of Halin, Hodin, Tifafale and Damot.

In 1906 Eugenio Cappello the Italian council in Aden went with the usual Abdallah Sceri, to the Mullah who told him, openly, that Italy had failed in all the promises made to him by Pestalozza.

[18] He remained one of Mad Mullah’s closest advisors until he defected in 1906, criticising the Dervishes' senseless takfir, raiding and killing of innocent people.