Facebook Twitter (X) Instagram Somali Magazine - People's Magazine
For centuries, a massive brown boulder rested quietly in a Somali river valley. Villagers in El Ali, a settlement in central Somalia, knew it as Shiid-birood, or “the iron rock.” They used it as a whetstone, a landmark, and a source of folklore, with children climbing on it and families weaving stories around it. What they did not know was that this was no ordinary stone—it was a 13.6-metric-ton meteorite, formed from asteroid collisions billions of years ago before falling to Earth thousands of years back.
In 2019, opal miners rediscovered the boulder and alerted Kureym Mining and Rocks, a Mogadishu-based company. Tests in Nairobi confirmed its extraterrestrial origin, composed of iron and nickel. A 70-gram slice was sent to scientists in Canada, where Chris Herd from the University of Alberta and his colleague Andrew Locock made a groundbreaking discovery. Within days, they identified two minerals never before seen in nature, later named elaliite and elkinstantonite. A third mineral, olsenite, was later confirmed by Caltech researchers. The International Mineralogical Association approved these findings in 2022, giving the El Ali meteorite immense scientific importance as part of the rare IAB iron group, believed to come from the shattered cores of ancient planetary bodies.
But as the scientific world celebrated, the meteorite itself slipped away. In February 2020, it was removed from El Ali under murky circumstances. The area is controlled by al-Shabaab, and reports differ—some say militants oversaw the extraction and clashes with local militias left casualties, while others believe the accounts were exaggerated. What is certain is that the meteorite was sold to Kureym Mining for $264,000, briefly impounded by Somali authorities near Mogadishu’s airport, and later vanished into private hands. By 2021, the company was sending samples to international scientists, but the bulk of the rock had already left Somalia.
By late 2022, video evidence showed the meteorite in a shipping container at Mogadishu port. Months later, footage placed it in Yiwu, a trading hub in China’s Zhejiang province. Sellers were offering it in pieces for $200 per gram or $3.2 million for the entire boulder. Somali lawmakers condemned this as cultural looting disguised as legal trade. Dahir Jesow, El Ali’s representative in parliament, accused the mining company of stealing Somali heritage under the cover of paperwork.
The loss of the El Ali meteorite has sparked outrage in Somalia, with officials appealing to UNESCO to recognize it as part of the nation’s cultural heritage. Such recognition could complicate its sale and strengthen Somalia’s case for its return. Some geologists argue it should be placed in Mogadishu’s National Museum, reopened in 2020, where it could inspire students and researchers. Others fear it would remain unsafe in Somalia’s unstable security environment and suggest an international institution might be better suited to protect it until the country can safeguard its treasures.
The story of El Ali mirrors other historical cases where meteorites were taken from vulnerable communities. In Greenland, massive iron meteorites were removed by American explorers in the 1800s, while in Tibet, a meteorite-carved statue was taken by Nazi-backed expeditions in the 1930s. Today, the global demand for meteorites has surged, with wealthy collectors pushing prices higher and smugglers exploiting fragile states. China has become one of the largest markets.
For the people of El Ali, Shiid-birood was more than a rock—it was part of their lives, tied to folklore and daily use. Now, it sits in limbo thousands of miles away, its fate uncertain. From cosmic origins to contested commodity, the journey of the El Ali meteorite highlights how easily the heritage of vulnerable nations can vanish into the hands of the highest bidder.