NPR

Somaliland Wants To Make One Thing Clear: It Is NOT Somalia

The breakaway republic has not received international recognition. Its foreign minister says that's slowing down delivery of aid to the drought-stricken territory.
"The only thing that's missing is the sovereign recognition," says Saad Ali Shire, foreign minister of Somaliland.

Somaliland's Foreign Minister Saad Ali Shire is clearly frustrated.

Somaliland is being hit by a regional food crisis that the U.N. has described as one of the largest humanitarian emergencies since 1945. More than a million of Somaliland's four million people are at risk of starvation yet relief has been slow to come.

"We are being treated unfairly," Shire says seated in a conference room of a consulting firm in downtown Washington, D.C. He's in town lobbying American lawmakers for what has become his perpetual cause —

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