[2] It is largely a semi-arid region[3] and encompasses the plains between the border of Somalia and Ethiopia, extending towards the southeastern highlands, where larger cities like Harar and Dire Dawa are located near.

[10] An alternative (possibly folk) etymology analyses the name as a combination of the Harari word ūga ("road")[11] and Aden, a city in Yemen, supposedly deriving from an ancient caravan route through the region connecting Harar to the Arabian Peninsula.

Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, the Imam of Adal, launched a jihad against Abyssinia in response to escalating Abyssinian incursions into Muslim territories.

[24] Repeated military expeditions from the highlands into the southeast over several decades prior significantly unified the Somali and other Muslim communities in the region, who then joined Imam Ahmed's jihad.

[24] The regional successor of Ifat and Adal, the Ajuran Sultanate,[26] governed its territories from Qalafo along the upper Shabelle River in eastern Ogaden until its decline in the 17th century.

[28] Independent historical accounts are unanimous that previous to the penetration into the region in the late 1880s, Somali clans were free of Ethiopian and Shewan control.

Sir Richard Francis Burton's famous 1856 exploration book First Footsteps in East Africa, makes no mention of an Ethiopian presence while describing his time in the Ogaden.

[30] In 1887, Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II conquered the city of Harar during his efforts to expand the empire and in 1891, announced a programme of ambitious colonialism to the European powers.

[32] Imperial military expeditions dispatched into the Ogaden engaged in the torching of Somali settlements, and foreign travelers in the region widely reported countless stories of suffering at the hands of the Abyssinian invaders.

A British hunter Colonel Swayne, who visited Imi in February 1893, was shown "the remains of the bivouac of an enormous Abyssinian army which had been defeated some two or three years before.

When European colonial powers began to exert influence in the Horn of Africa, the Brussels Conference Act of 1890 imposed an arms embargo on the Somali population.

During the same period Ethiopian Emperor Menelik, who was legally armed with rifles by European powers through the port cities of Djibouti and Massawa, began expanding into Somali inhabited territories.

[37] British colonial administrator Francis Barrow Pearce writes the following concerning the Ethiopian raids into the Ogaden:The Somalis, although good and brave fighting men, cannot help themselves.

They have no weapons except the hide shield and spear, while their oppressors are, as has already been recorded, armed with modern rifles, and they are by no means scrupulous concerning the use of them in asserting their authority...The Abyssinians themselves have no more claim (except that of might) to dominate the wells than a Fiji Islander would have to interfere with a London waterworks company.

[38]In 1897 in order to appease Menelik's expansionist policy Britain ceded almost half of the British Somaliland protectorate to Ethiopia in the Anglo-Ethiopian Treaty of 1897.

In fact, the British had committed to protecting Somali territory, the primary reason for the Protectorate, and in attempting to transfer the land to Ethiopia, they were acting without competence, exceeding their jurisdiction, and concluding an agreement without the participation of the central party.

The escalating frequency and violence of the raids resulted in Somalis consolidating behind the Dervish Movement under the lead of Sayyid Mohamed Abdullah Hassan.

[42] Subsequently, the anti-colonial Dervish Movement led by Sayid Mohamed Abdullah Hassan had its first major battle when it attacked the Ethiopian forces occupying Jigjiga to free livestock that had been looted from the local population.

[45][46] It was only after 1934 when the Anglo-Ethiopian boundary commission attempted to demarcate the border, did the Somalis who had been transferred to the Ethiopian Empire during the 1897 treaty realize what had happened.

This long period of ignorance about the transfer of their regions was facilitated by the lack of 'any semblance' of effective control by the Somalis to indicate that they were being annexed by Ethiopia.

[52] In the town of Jijiga, incoming Ethiopian authorities instructed the Somali Youth League (SYL) to remove their flag, as they had declared both the party and its emblem as unlawful.

Tens of thousands of Somalis fled the Ethiopian military in the Ogaden during this period, and were recognized by Britain and Italy as political refugees.

[44] Following Somalia's independence in 1960, the Ogaden was rocked by waves of popular revolts which were brutally repressed by Emperor Haile Selassie's government - resulting in deep animosity developed towards the Amharas by the Somalis.

[53] In a bid to control the population of the region during the 1963 Ogaden revolt, an Ethiopian Imperial Army division based out of Harar torched Somali villages and carried out mass killings of livestock.

[55] Throughout the late 1970s, internal unrest in the Ogaden region continued as the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) waged a guerrilla war against the Ethiopian government.

[57] At the end of 1978 the first major outflow of refugees numbering in the hundreds of thousands headed for Somalia, and were bombed and strafed during the exodus by the Ethiopian military.

[58] In the early 1980s the Ethiopian government rendered the region a vast military zone, engaging in indiscriminate aerial bombardments and forced resettlement programs.

[62] Since 1992, the Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) dominated EPRDF government sought to curb Somali demands for self-determination by influencing politics in the region.

[65][14] The 1995 general elections were boycotted by the majority of the ONLF, Al-Itihaad and large segments of the Ogaden population due to governments heavy handed interference in the political process.

[68] However, testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs revealed massive brutality and killings by the ONLF rebels, which the Ethiopian government labels "terrorists.