President Mustafa Omer Faces Multilingual Attacks From Detractors

By Mohamed OladThursday April 23, 2026

With Ethiopia’s 7th National Elections just days away, the political temperature in the Somali Regional State is rising fast. In that charged atmosphere, old networks tied to the Abdi Iley era — including some of his former close advisers — and a diaspora faction of the ONLF have turned to smear politics as their chosen weapon. Their campaign against President Mustafa Omer has grown increasingly loud, multilingual, and contradictory, revealing more about the tactics of its authors than about its target.

What is unfolding is less a debate over policy than a sustained attempt to bury Mustafa under layers of manufactured allegations. For months, Abdi Iley loyalists, with backing from the TPLF, have repeated the claim that Mustafa Omer serves as an agent for Somalia’s President Farmaajo and Intelligence Chief Fahad Yasin. According to that narrative, he was trained, financed, and sent to infiltrate Ethiopian politics with the goal of pushing the Somali Region toward secession — a line pushed repeatedly by pro-TPLF outlets.

The script changes depending on the audience. In Amharic, Mustafa is cast as an extremist champion of the 1960s “Greater Somalia” project, someone who merely hides behind Ethiopian patriotism. Supporters of that line point to his role in changing the regional flag and name, presenting those moves as evidence of separatist intent. Yet the same critics tell a very different story in Somali-language spaces. This week, they used a website reportedly owned by Fahad Yasin to portray President Mustafa as a notorious traitor to the Somali cause and a man allegedly consumed by hostility toward Somalia’s people.

On Somali Stream — a site operated by Abdinur Mohamed, a former aide to Farmaajo and cousin of Fahad Yasin — the pseudonymous Abdi Sheikh, identified in reality as Gurey Fidar, a close adviser to Abdi Iley, claims 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 that telling, aimed at Somali intellectuals, Mustafa is depicted as a former TPLF ally and an enemy of Somalia. In Amharic propaganda directed at Ethiopian audiences, by contrast, he is portrayed as a lifelong opponent of Ethiopia who authored numerous articles against the country’s previous political order.

Whether the allegation has any merit is not the central issue here. There will be time enough to challenge it with testimony and evidence, especially given how far it departs from reality. The immediate point is the blatant inconsistency: in Somali-language attacks, the story flips again, with the same camp insisting Mustafa resisted 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.”

The contradiction is impossible to miss. A man cannot, in one language, be the architect of symbolic change and, in another, its fiercest opponent. That is not a nuance; it is the sign of a propaganda machine trying to tailor its message to each audience’s anxieties, even when the claims collapse under their own weight. In Amharic, critics say Mustafa adopted a flag with a blue Somali symbol because it was designed by his uncle, a Somali army general. In Somali, they say he erected a monument at Karamara for Ethiopian soldiers killed in the 1977 war with Somalia. The point is not to litigate every fabrication, but to show how quickly the story shifts.

The identity games are even more extreme. In Somali spaces, he is called “Mesfin,” an Amhara name, and accused of being neither Somali nor Muslim. In Amharic spaces, his opponents link him by clan association to former Somali generals in order to cast doubt on his loyalty to Ethiopia.

A single man cannot credibly be all of these things at once: a Somali nationalist plotting with Mogadishu, a hater of Somalia and its people, an Amhara sympathizer, and a Pan-Somali extremist disguised as an Ethiopian patriot bent on undermining the state. Nor can he be denounced in Amharic for changing the flag and name while being attacked in Somali for refusing to do so.

The confusion points to a propaganda operation in distress, one trying to satisfy different audiences at once. Last week, its authors believed they had damaged the President among Ethiopian readers through fabricated stories about leaked audio. But they also feared losing Somali supporters who back his position on the flag and the name.

Faced with that backlash, the article by former Abdi Iley adviser Abdi Fidar, also known as Gurey Fidar, reads like a hurried counteroffensive. As the camp sensed support slipping among Somali-speaking audiences, it responded with fresh inventions and recycled lies. It also appeared to recognize that Mustafa had already punctured the Amharic version of the smear simply by demanding proof of the leaked audios and the statements allegedly made in them.

The pattern is familiar. It echoes the same method long used by the TPLF and its outlets, including Ethio-Forum: translate a core accusation, adjust it for the audience, and watch it split into contradictions. After the latest attacks failed to gain traction with non-Somali readers, the campaign pivoted inward, leaning on clan tensions and trying to brand the President as an enemy of Somalis.

But the contradiction remains unavoidable. A man cannot be described in Amharic as Fahad Yasin’s secessionist agent and then be portrayed through Fahad Yasin’s own platform as someone who hates Somalis — Fahad Yasin’s own people.

He cannot be accused in one language of changing the flag and in another of opposing that same change. And he cannot be attacked through anonymous bylines by figures whose own political history is tied to Abdi Iley’s rule.

That is where the matter becomes even more telling. Abdi Fidar — a close adviser to Abdi Iley, a man widely associated with ethnic cleansing and mass displacement — now hides behind rotating pseudonyms to attack a sitting official. That is not a coincidence or a curiosity. It is the latest stage of a network that has long normalized division while trying to mask its own record. The deception is beginning to consume itself, and the only thing it is stripping away is its remaining credibility.

The accusations may keep changing, but Mustafa Omer’s political record does not. His positions and work, his supporters argue, are reflected in the peace, ethnic and religious harmony, major development gains, and respect for human rights delivered by his administration on the ground. The panic among Abdi Iley loyalists and diaspora-based ONLF factions seems, if anything, to be matched only by the speed with which they keep recycling their claims. The old saying that action speaks louder than words may be the most useful response to their noise.

In the end, President Mustafa Omer’s legacy will be measured by what he leaves behind in the Somali Region and in Ethiopian politics, not by desperate attempts at character assassination packaged in different languages for different audiences.

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.