Map of Somalia

Somalia

The official name for Somalia is the Federal Republic of Somalia. Situated on the 'Horn of Africa', the country has the longest coastline in Africa, on the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. It is home to some of the oldest Paleolithic cave paintings in the world. It has the oldest evidence of burial customs among early humans. Camels were first domesticated here. Muhammad, the sacred prophet of Islam, is said to have fled to Somalia at one point in his life.
After the 1884 Berlin conference, European nations began 'The Scramble for Africa' and every country wanted to claim as much as they could of the continent. This led Muhammad Abdullah Hassan to lead the longest revolutionary war ever. All Somalis unwilling to fight for freedom were condemned and punished at this time. He became an acclaimed leader and symbol against invading Christian nations. This made Muhammad very popular in the eyes of the Ottomans, and the empire supplied him with weapons. However, Muhammad's Dervish state fell to the superior power of British aerial bombardments. After Britain claimed the country, Italy invaded in 1923. Most of the country was retaken by Britain in 1940. In 1945, the UN made Italy turn its colony into a heavily-supervised trusteeship and later granted independence to their part. Britain held its claim until 1960, when that part of what was to be Somalia was granted independence.
When Somalia became its own country, Djibouti voted on joining it. However, the vote was rigged by Djibouti's elite, who still held loyalty to its former European rulers. Soon after gaining independence, Somalia was under harsh communist rule that banned protests and created food and fuel shortages, which in turn lead to an extremely strong and aggressive black market. When the country's communist president Mohamed Siad Barre was ousted in 1991, the country fell into civil war until 2006. As a consequence of this, piracy on Somalia's seas became rampant and uncontrolled. Somalia is considered a 'failed state', as it has no effective central government The majority of the population is Sunni Muslim.