[38] Throughout the early to mid 1980s SNM launched a guerrilla war against the Barre regime through incursions and hit and run operations on army positions within Isaaq territories, especially into the Waqooyi Galbeed and Togdheer regions.

[75] This has caused great deal of burden on both the local Isaaqs and state apparatus, especially coming off a costly war with Ethiopia, Somali studies scholar I. M. Lewis noted that "the stark fact remained that the economy of the country simply did not possess the resources to absorb so many uprooted people.

The WSLF was ostensibly being trained to fight Ethiopia to regain the Ogaden [Western Somalia], but, in fact, terrorized the Isaak [Isaaq] civilian population living in the border region, which came to fear them more than the Ethiopian army.

The armed Ogaden refugees, together with members of the Marehan and Dhulbahanta soldiers (whom were provoked and encouraged by the Barre regime) started a campaign of terror against the local Isaaqs[84] as they raped women, murdered unarmed civilians, and prevented families from conducting proper burials.

The Isaaq tell hilarious, but pathetic stories about Ogadenis who stole modern household appliances from homes in Hargeisa, Borama and Burao, then retreated with their "trophies" to use them in the remote pasture lands devoid of electricity.

[105][50] From here the SNM successfully launched a guerrilla war against the Barre regime through incursions and hit and run operations on army positions within Isaaq territories, especially into the Waqooyi Galbeed and Togdheer regions,[50] before returning to Ethiopia,[77] including an attack on Somalian government forces in Wajale on 25 October 1982, killing 10 soldiers.

[106] The SNM continued this pattern of attacks from 1982 and throughout the 1980s, at a time the Ogaden Somalis (some of whom were recruited refugees) made up the bulk of Barre's armed forces who were committing acts of genocide against the Isaaq people of the north.

A report by Africa Watch stated that the policy was "the outcome of a specific conception of how the war against the insurgents should be fought," with the logic being to "punish civilians for their presumed support for the SNM attacks and to discourage them from further assistance".

[109] A growing number of northern civilian recruits and defectors from the Somali army, drawn almost exclusively from the Isaaq clan, were shaped into a guerrilla force and trained to produce a hard-core of disciplined fighters.

[116] The goal was to exhibit a demoralized and battered Abdullahi Askar, bleeding and half-naked in front of an audience, presenting him as "the defeated SNM", to dispel rumors that he had escaped military custody and to ensure that he was not missing, and that if he were absent there was little he could do.

[117][12] The day before that was due to happen, on 11 April, an SNM rescue mission consist of five armed men in a landcruiser, led by Ibrahim Ismail Mohamed (nicknamed Koodbuur), arrived at the building where he was held and after a short firefight managed to free Abdullahi from custody.

[117][12] On 24 November 1984, a group of three armed SNM fighters led by Awil Adami Burhani boarded and seized a Somali Airlines Boeing 707 carrying 130 people (118 passengers and 12 crew members) on a flight from Mogadishu to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

One of them was Jean Metenier, a French hospital technician in Hargeisa, who told reporters upon arrival at Nairobi airport that "at least two dozen people were executed by firing squad against the wall of his house and the corpses subsequently dumped on the streets to serve "as an example.

[152]The Guardian reported the scale of destruction as follows:The civil war left Hargeisa in ruins: 80 percent of the building in the town were destroyed, many of them by the aerial bombardment of General Siad Barre's Zimbabwean mercenary pilots.

The exposed pale green and blue plaster walls reflect the sunlight.Many of the houses are boarded up because of the small anti-personnel mines scattered by Gen Siad Barre's forces when tens of thousands of Hargeisa residents fled.

[155] The Congressional General Accounting Office team noted the extent to which residential districts were especially targeted by the army:Hargeisa, the second largest city in Somalia, has suffered extensive damage from artillery and aerial shelling.

[157] Moreover, external assistance to the Somalian regime including mercenary pilots from South Africa and Libya in addition to economic and military aid from the UAE and Italy played a large role in recapturing the cities.

[11] Although this operation was not viewed as successful, and the campaign had been enormously costly, claiming close to half of their fighters, it was seen as the death knell of Barre's regime and consequently a point of no return in Northern Somalia's (present day Somaliland) move towards independence.

[47] According to Alex de Waal, Jens Meierhenrich and Bridget Conley-Zilkic: What began as a counterinsurgency against the Somali National Movement rebels and their sympathizers, and escalated into genocidal onslaught against the Isaaq clan family, turned into the disintegration of both government and rebellion and the replacement of institutionalized armed forces with fragmented clan-based militia.

One incident following a brief capture of the town in 1989 saw 60 Isaaq elders, who could not escape the city due to the difficult mountainous terrain, get taken out of their homes by government forces and were "shot by a firing squad against a wall of the public relations office".

It published a report "to draw attention to recent events in Somalia which have resulted in civil war, a huge refugee problem, persecution of a large section of the population along tribal lines and widespread human rights violations".

Project staff were frequently harassed by the military even when attending medical emergencies and on one occasion shots were fired.Whilst human right have been deteriorating for some years in Somalia...we believe that the government must bear a particularly heavy responsibility for events over the last six months.

Mass graves have since been found as well as corpses which were left to rot in the streets where they fell.The people now living in the three towns are believed to be totally non-Issaqi or military personnel who have been deputed to guard what has been retaken from the SNM.

An emblematic aspect of Siad Barre's government's "policy of genocide towards the Issak group of clans" was the laying of "over one-million unmarked mines, booby traps and other lethal devices in the Northern Region..."[208] over the duration of the conflict.

[213] A report commissioned by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation describes the ramifications of this tactic as follows:The Siad Barre government also mined rural areas to disrupt the economy and the nomadic population, who were seen as the base of support of the SNM.

Some families were said to be squatting outside their houses because they were afraid to enter.... Siad Barre's forces deliberately mined wells and grazing lands in an effort to kill and terrorize nomadic herders whom the army viewed as protectors of the SNM.

[226] At any rate, talks between the Dhulbahante and SNM continued in Oog after the fall of the regime at the start of 1991, and both parties agreed to take part in a ceasefire conference in the latter half of February 1991, in the port town of Berbera, to which all the main northern clans would be invited.

[246][245] The Issa component sought safety in Djibouti, while the former Siad Barre soldiers, who were primarily from the Majerteen and Ogaden clans of the Darod, were transported by sea to Bosaso, where they joined the newly resurgent Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF).

[254] Abdirahman Ahmed Ali Tuur became the newly established Somaliland polity's first president, but subsequently renounced the separatist platform in 1994 and began instead to publicly seek and advocate reconciliation with the rest of Somalia under a power-sharing federal system of governance.

[255] Muhammad Haji Ibrahim Egal was elected as Tuur's successor in 1993 by the Grand Conference of National Reconciliation in Borama, which met for four months, leading to a gradual improvement in security, as well as a consolidation of the new territory.