Somali

Somalis have come to Egypt since their state collapsed in 1991, making theirs one of Cairo's oldest African refugee communities. Most live in Hay el-Ashr, the Tenth District of Nasr City, where a half-square-mile cluster of Somali cafes, tailors, a grocery, a barber and a community centre gives the streets around Swissry A and B a Somali face. Alongside refugees waiting years for resettlement live students at Al-Azhar and Egyptian universities and families who spent years in Europe or North America and moved to Cairo, often settling in 6th of October City. Men work for hawala money-transfer firms and in cafes, and the community centre teaches children Somali so they do not lose their language in Arabic-medium schools. They are Shafi'i Sunni Muslims, and no Somali church is known in Egypt.

About 1,600 Somalis are in Libya, mostly young men, with some women, who crossed Ethiopia and Sudan on the smuggling route Somalis call tahriib, hoping to reach Italy. Nearly two-thirds stay around Tripoli, in the southern suburb of Swani Bin Adam and in Hai al-Andalus, and most of the rest in Benghazi, with a few at Zuwara on the western coast, a departure point for boats. Many spend months in detention or in the hands of kidnappers who demand ransoms from relatives abroad, and Somalia's government now flies home several hundred a year from Libyan detention with European Union and International Organization for Migration support. They are Shafi'i Sunni Muslims, held together in Libya by clan ties and money sent through hawala from relatives in the diaspora.

Somalis in Saudi Arabia live mostly in Jeddah and Mecca, across the Red Sea from their homeland, linked to it by pilgrimage, by trade and by the sheep, goats and camels shipped from Berbera and Bosaso for the kingdom's Hajj sacrifices. Some families came as workers in the oil-boom years and stayed, others fled the civil war after 1991, and many young men and women crossed the Gulf of Aden and Yemen without papers to find work washing cars, carrying baggage, cleaning homes or trading. Most are ethnic Somalis, with smaller numbers of Somalia's minorities, Somali Bantu, Benadiri and Bajuni. Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, they share the faith of their hosts but organise their lives through clan networks that collect money for weddings, funerals and the cost of sending a deported relative home. Since 2013 Saudi Arabia has deported tens of thousands of Somalis without residence papers, all flown to Mogadishu whatever part of Somalia they came from.

Somalis have come to the Emirates since the 1960s, and after Somalia's state collapsed in 1991 Dubai became the commercial capital of the Somali world: the money-transfer firms that carry remittances home, several Somali airlines and hundreds of traders shipping rice, cloth, electronics and cars to Berbera, Bosaso and Mogadishu are based here. Behind Deira's gold souk the Al Ras quarter is known as the Somali market, with Somali cafes, cargo agents and dozens of small gold and fabric shops, many run by women who rebuilt their lives here after the civil war. They come from every region and clan, from Mogadishu to Somaliland, and many hold British, Canadian or Scandinavian passports. Their stay depends on visas the UAE has suspended for Somalis several times, most recently in 2025.

Somalis are Yemen's oldest and largest African community, numbering roughly 200,000. Somali merchants traded at Aden for centuries, but most of today's community descends from refugees who crossed the Gulf of Aden after Somalia's state collapsed in 1991, and new boats from Bossaso still land on the Shabwa coast. Their heart is al-Basateen in Aden, known as Yemen's Mogadishu, where more than 40,000 people of Somali origin live in one-room block and tin-sheet homes; others live in Sana'a, al-Mukalla and the desert camp of Kharaz. Men wait at dawn for day labour, wash cars or carry loads, while women clean Yemeni homes and sell Yemeni-Somali breads and snacks, especially in Ramadan. Children born in Aden speak the local Arabic and know Somalia only from family stories, yet remain refugees with no Yemeni citizenship.