As of 2024. UNHCR reported close to 3 million internally displaced in Somalia in 2024, with over 550,000 newly displaced that year by conflict and drought; other counts including protracted and repeat displacement run higher, and the figure moves with each drought and offensive.
Somalia's modern displacement crisis has roots in the 1977-78 Ogaden War, in which Somalia unsuccessfully attempted to seize Ethiopia's ethnic-Somali Ogaden region, a defeat that sent up to 1-2 million ethnic Somali refugees into Somalia itself. The collapse of Siad Barre's government in 1991 triggered a prolonged civil war among rival clan militias, followed from the mid-2000s by conflict involving the Islamist insurgent group al-Shabaab, producing repeated waves of famine, displacement, and flight. Kenya's Dadaab camp complex, established in 1991-92, grew into one of the world's largest refugee settlements, at times sheltering several hundred thousand Somalis. As of the mid-2020s, UNHCR and IDMC estimates put internal displacement in Somalia at roughly 2.9-3.8 million people, with several hundred thousand more registered as refugees in Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and elsewhere, making it one of the world's longest-running displacement crises.
The Ogaden War (1977-78) between Ethiopia and Somalia was followed by the 1991 collapse of Somalia's central government and decades of clan-based civil war and, later, conflict with al-Shabaab
There has been no census since 1975, which counted about 3.3 million; all current figures are projections, and UN estimates for the mid-2020s run from roughly 17 to 19 million. The 2014 Population Estimation Survey, a sample-based exercise, gave 12.3 million.
No single authoritative aggregate exists for this half-century span; the range is a sum of separately estimated episodes. The best-documented component is the FAO/FEWS NET mortality study, which estimated 258,000 deaths in southern and central Somalia between October 2010 and April 2012, including 133,000 children under five, with excess deaths peaking around 30,000 a month in mid-2011. The 1991-92 famine and faction war is widely put at 200,000-300,000, the 1988 Hargeisa offensive against the Isaaq at up to 200,000 civilians, and ACLED recorded roughly 3,000-3,300 conflict deaths a year in the early 2010s. The frequently quoted '500,000 killed since 1991' comes from the Necrometrics compilation rather than any study, and mixes famine mortality with violent death.
The FAO/FEWS NET mortality study documented famine deaths aggravated both by al-Shabaab's bans on aid agencies and by Western donor restrictions intended to weaken the group, and standard accounts of the 1988 Hargeisa offensive record the aerial bombardment and destruction of the city and mass killing of Isaaq civilians.
Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya