Millennia in the past a chunk of the sky fell towards East Africa, streaking overhead, born of an historical collision of asteroids. The meteorite landed, most likely with extra of a thud than a growth, in a river valley the place camels now forage close to the village of El Ali in Somalia.
Recognized regionally as Shiid-birood (“the iron rock”), the El Ali meteorite is 13.6 metric tons of iron and nickel. For generations it rested within the floor some 24 kilometers (15 miles) outdoors the village, turning into a landmark that was featured in folklore, lullabies and poems. In accordance with one story, the area had been a inexperienced paradise till its inhabitants stopped believing in Waaq, the native god, who punished them with volcanic stones, forsaking the El Ali meteorite as a reminder of their folly. Over the centuries individuals hammered the brown rock from the heavens with stones, banging off flakes of chilly iron, or used it as a whetstone. Youngsters pretended to trip it like a horse.
Now, although, the El Ali meteorite is gone. Shaky cell-phone movies counsel the rock is being saved in China, the place sellers hope to hock it for hundreds of thousands, both entire or in items. How did it get there? The journey of the ninth-largest meteorite on the earth includes lies, smuggling and presumably demise. Thriller surrounds its departure from its touchdown web site, a lawless area of Somalia, one of many poorest and most contested locations on the planet. In August, a Somali cultural minister requested the UNESCO World Heritage Heart to acknowledge the meteorite as a part of the nation’s patrimony, calling for its return in a press release. The destiny of the cosmic cannonball is now anybody’s guess.
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For hundreds of years the El Ali meteorite, a brownish, pitted boulder some two meters extensive and one meter tall, went unnoticed by anybody however locals. Village elders say that about 80 years in the past, throughout World Conflict II, the Italian military urged eradicating it for examine. Later, United Nations peacekeeping forces eyed it, and so did militias after the 1991 collapse of Somalia’s authorities. They had been all drawn by the thriller of Shiid-birood, seeing the curious iron rock sitting on the outskirts of a Somali camel-herder village as an object of analysis—or not less than scrap steel. However locals stopped all these extraction makes an attempt. Then, in September 2019, opal hunters scouring the encircling desert reported the meteorite to a close-by mining outfit—the Kureym Mining and Rocks Firm, a Somalia-based agency led by 5 merchants and businessmen in Mogadishu, the nation’s capital. Utilizing a hammer, prospectors chiseled a 90-gram pattern from the house rock they renamed “Dusk” and despatched it off to Nairobi for evaluation. These samples confirmed for the primary time that the meteorite was certainly extraterrestrial, comprising some 44 % iron and 45 % nickel.
That is the place the story of the El Ali meteorite turns murky—and grim.
We all know from information reviews and human rights teams that someday in February 2020, the stone was faraway from the village El Ali. The realm is basically managed by al-Shabaab, or “the Youth,” a militant affiliate of al-Qaeda that has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. authorities. Al-Shabaab dominated Mogadishu into the late 2000s however was then dislodged by African Union forces. The group is liable for quite a few bombings and killings, together with the bloodbath of 148 individuals at Kenya’s Garissa College in 2015, in addition to an “intensive racketeering operation” in Somalia, in keeping with the Council on Overseas Relations. Given the group’s authority within the area, it appears possible that it orchestrated the looting of the meteorite or not less than assisted in it.
Nobody is aware of precisely what occurred after the meteorite was carted out of El Ali, although. Information reviews from the time say the rock was “forcibly taken” by al-Shabaab. They describe giant cranes excavating the stone amid gunfights that reportedly left a number of individuals lifeless, together with civilians. Some accounts put the toll even larger, with native leaders describing in information reviews two full-scale firefights—one in the course of the dig and one because the meteorite was trucked away—between al-Shabaab and fighters from the clan-based Ma’awisley militia. Some leaders say the combating included beheadings. However Abdulkadir Abiikar Hussein, a geologist at Almaas College in Mogadishu, calls the reviews of bloodshed “exaggerations.”
Whichever approach the extraction went down, most accounts agree on what occurred subsequent. Militia members drove the meteorite to the close by city of Buq Aqable, then reportedly offered it to the Kureym mining firm for $264,000.
From there the truck carrying the stolen house rock began to make its approach towards Mogadishu, but it surely was detained on the drive. Somalian authorities officers impounded the car for inspection, Hussein says, after safety forces on the street into town grew suspicious of the large steel boulder at the back of a truck and arrested the lone driver. They despatched the meteorite to a warehouse close to the native airport. At that time, in late February 2020, the federal government’s mining ministry referred to as in Hussein. He measured, sampled and examined the meteorite within the warehouse, making the primary characterizations of the cosmic rock, which would seem later in scholarly descriptions.
Someway, nevertheless, the meteorite was launched. By December 2020 Shiid-birood was again within the palms of Kureym, though the main points of the transaction are unclear (Hussein and others say it was corrupt). Kureym representatives declined to touch upon the report for this text.
The El Ali meteorite’s authentic touchdown web site in Somalia is a dry valley with out a lot vegetation.
From “El Ali Meteorite: From Whetstone to Fame and to the Tragedy of Native Folks’s Heritage,” by Ali H. Egeh, in Meteoritics and Planetary Science; June 12, 2025
Scientists outdoors Somalia first realized in regards to the meteorite from representatives of the mining firm late that 12 months. After Kureym took possession of the stone, Nicholas Gessler, a now retired researcher of anthropology, archaeology and meteorites, acquired an e-mail about a big meteorite. The sender supplied Gessler an opportunity to check it, saying they had been on the lookout for consumers. Piqued by a longtime curiosity in iron meteorites utilized by Indigenous individuals, he agreed to get it analyzed for publication within the Meteoritical Bulletin, a necessity to confirm its provenance as a meteorite. Investigating the El Ali meteorite has since referred to as on each one among his areas of experience, he says, and have become an obsession main him to compile an intensive web site monitoring the item and what he can piece collectively of its sordid historical past. “Nothing is evident,” Gessler says. “Folks have repeatedly requested for readability and documentation. None has been offered.”
In January 2021, after Gessler agreed to assist register the meteorite, a consultant of Kureym despatched him a pattern. A lump of iron rock, one aspect weathered brown, the opposite shining dully from the noticed’s incision, arrived in a FedEx package deal. Across the identical time, the corporate additionally shipped two sliced chunks of iron rock totaling 70 grams to geologist Chris Herd, curator of the meteorite assortment on the College of Alberta.
Each researchers say they need they’d recognized the total story of the meteorite and its contested possession on the time. As much as that time, rumors of any violence throughout its excavation had been confined to Somalian information reviews. Solely 4 years later, in June 2025, did a Meteoritics & Planetary Science report by geoscientist Ali H. Egeh of the Somali Nationwide College first talk to the scientific neighborhood the “secrecy and uncertainty” surrounding the meteorite and its elimination from its house nation.
“After I first did the work, I had no data of what had occurred, the tragic circumstances,” Herd says. “We had been, on reflection, getting fairly biased data” about each the elimination of the El Ali meteorite and its export to China. Canadian regulation, Herd provides, could be very strict in regards to the export of meteorites. Non permanent loans of samples for examine are permitted, however everlasting ones are way more delicate. “For Somalia, this could qualify as having excellent significance and nationwide significance,” he says. “It’s a actual disgrace it has been wholesale exported.”
On the time, Herd and Gessler had been merely excited in regards to the alternative to analyze a meteorite—one that will grow to be scientifically thrilling in a number of methods. Herd first analyzed his pattern with a scanning electron microscope, which shoots a beam of low-energy electrons at stable samples, to view its floor in wonderful element. He additionally used a spectrometer to disclose its elemental make-up. A colleague on the California Institute of Expertise employed an electron microscope that used a slender electron beam with ultrafine 30-nanometer decision to additional analyze the item’s chemistry. Gessler despatched a part of his pattern to A. J. Timothy Jull of the College of Arizona, an professional on relationship meteorites, who estimated that it had landed in Somalia 2,000 to three,000 years in the past, based mostly on radiocarbon relationship. (Jull cautions that this “very tough estimate” is unsure and says that different preliminary radionuclide information present that it will need to have landed 60,000 to 30,000 years in the past on the earliest.) Later in 2021 Gessler offered the El Ali meteorite to the Meteoritical Society, recognizing it because the third-largest meteorite found in Africa.
In the meantime, by means of his correspondence with Kureym, Gessler realized the corporate hoped to promote the meteorite to a museum for round $30 million. In additional than a dozen e-mails, Gessler warned the gross sales representatives that this plan was unrealistic. However in August 2021 the corporate’s representatives reduce off contact. They complained about his collaboration on the Meteoritical Bulletin entry for the El Ali meteorite with Hussein, the Almaas College geologist who had first measured the meteorite for Somalia’s mining ministry and who was advocating that it’s positioned in the Nationwide Museum of Somalia, not offered.
Nonetheless, Gessler and Herd continued to research their samples. In 2023 Herd and his colleagues reported that they’d found three new iron phosphate minerals within the El Ali meteorite that had by no means been recognized as naturally occurring on Earth. “It’s massively important scientifically,” says Herd, who categorised the meteorite within the sort IAB household. Meteorites on this group are prone to have originated in smashups within the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, which created an “virtually hard-to-imagine” sea of molten steel magma, Herd says. Born of collisions in house hundreds of thousands of years in the past, these cauldrons baked their elements collectively in uncommon methods, producing phosphate minerals akin to elaliite, elkinstantonite and olsenite (the final two are named after revered meteoritic scientists).
On condition that the El Ali samples are solely small slivers of a meteorite weighing greater than 10 metric tons, “there may very well be quite a few different new minerals inside completely different areas of it,” says Diane Johnson of Cranfield College in England, an professional in historical iron meteorites. These minerals lace the El Ali meteorite, residing inside tiny inclusions roughly the width of a human hair. “I by no means thought I’d be a part of a examine discovering new minerals, a lot much less three of them,” Herd says. “The actually cool factor is while you do discover them, individuals begin to ask whether or not they exist in different meteorites.” Finding out these deposits may reveal new secrets and techniques in regards to the chemistry of the early photo voltaic system.
The outcomes made a splash within the information and had been reported by the BBC, amongst different shops. Gessler, at that time invested within the destiny of Shiid-birood each professionally and personally, contacted scientists in Somalia. It was then that he first realized in regards to the accounts of bloodshed throughout its elimination. He tried to piece collectively as a lot of the story as he may, gathering pictures and movies of the meteorite and posting them on a sprawling web site dedicated to it. Official representatives of Kureym had stopped speaking with him, however he started to obtain textual content messages from individuals related to the sellers, who typically despatched updates on the meteorite’s gross sales prospects and even movies exhibiting its transfer to China. Their latest messages, which he posted on the prime of his web site in September, have featured bickering between two sellers over costs.
In addition to its worth for photo voltaic system science, the meteorite may inform us about human historical past. Gessler is interested in its historic position as a supply of chilly iron for individuals in Somalia. The pitted brown lump “has been intensively and extensively hammered,” Gessler says, pounded by generations of people that extracted bits of iron from the rock, most likely to make instruments akin to arrowheads or handles. “It’s a actually fascinating instance of Indigenous use of meteorites as a useful resource by a neighborhood,” he says.
The Iron Age in Somalia, he suggests, may need began with the El Ali meteorite.
Folks internationally have lengthy exploited meteoritic steel. A knife discovered within the tomb of 14th-century B.C.E. Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen was product of meteoritic nickel, iron and cobalt. Within the eleventh century C.E., followers of the pre-Buddhist Bon faith in Tibet long-established a statue, considered of the Buddhist god Vaiśravana, from a metal-rich meteorite that had landed on the border between modern-day Mongolia and Siberia. A Nazi-backed expedition looted the statue round 1939, and now it’s privately owned by somebody in Vienna. The Cape York meteorites are eight giant rocks and different fragments weighing about 60 metric tons whole that landed on Greenland’s western coast. The Inuit individuals of Greenland used these rocks to make instruments and harpoons. They’re the best-known instance of Indigenous individuals exploiting meteoritic stones for iron.
These circumstances additionally additional show how generally meteorites are looted from their authentic communities. The most important recognized items of the Cape York meteorites, as an example, are lengthy gone from Greenland. U.S. Navy explorer Robert Peary took two of the heaviest ones, the “Canine” and the “Girl,” in 1895, and in 1897 he carried off the most important one, the “Tent,” which weighed 31 metric tons and was greater than three meters throughout. He offered all three meteorite items to the American Museum of Pure Historical past, the place they are nonetheless displayed, for $40,000—a fortune then—in a Victorian-era instance of meteorite treasure looking and exploitation of Native assets. Peary additionally satisfied six Inuit individuals to return to New York Metropolis with him, the place 4 died of tuberculosis. One other 20-metric-ton fragment of the meteorite was found in 1963 and taken to Copenhagen 4 years later.
An analogous story could also be enjoying out with the El Ali meteorite. Its precise location and standing now are hazy. In December 2022 the boulder was inside a transport container on a ship docked at Mogadishu, in keeping with a cell-phone video handed alongside to Gessler throughout his sporadic communications with the sellers. After that, it was subsequent recorded in a shaky Might 2023 video verifying the meteorite had arrived in China, nonetheless below mysterious circumstances. In that video, a speaker talks in Somali, and somebody holds up a telephone bearing Chinese language writing in entrance of the meteorite. The newest reviews from the sellers and from scientists following the marketplace for meteorites counsel the El Ali object is being held in storage in Yiwu, a midsize metropolis within the Chinese language province of Zhejiang, and is being supplied on the market in items at $200 a gram or at $3.2 million for your complete factor, Gessler says.
“This was a cultural looting operation, not a authorized commerce,” Dahir Jesow, El Ali’s consultant within the Somalian parliament, advised the Horn Afrik Information Company for Human Rights in June. The Kureym mining firm’s rights to the meteorite had been “swiftly legalized advert hoc by means of a murky administrative course of—primarily put up factum to cowl the theft,” he stated.
Gross sales of meteorites by their authorized homeowners are authorized, after all, and information of such gross sales date way back to 1863, when one was documented in a catalog written by a German collector. Even well-known meteorites are recurrently purchased and offered; a slice of a Cape York meteorite was supplied on the market at Christie’s in 2019.
In July 2025 a Martian meteorite retrieved from the Sahara Desert in 2023—reportedly the largest piece of the Purple Planet on Earth, at 25 kilograms—offered for $5.3 million to an unknown purchaser at public sale by Sotheby’s. Niger’s authorities then introduced an investigation into the elimination of the meteorite, “which possible bears the hallmarks of illicit worldwide trafficking,” the Nigerian Council of Ministers stated in a press release issued the day after the sale. Sotheby’s, nevertheless, says it adopted all related worldwide procedures within the export of the meteorite, together with documentation. Just like the El Ali meteorite, the Martian rock was described by students in a Meteoritical Bulletin entry, this one printed in June 2025.
A patchwork of worldwide legal guidelines governs such gross sales. Within the U.S., meteorites are owned by whoever owns the land they’re found on, and these discovered on public land go to the Smithsonian. A 1970 UNESCO cultural-artifacts conference acknowledged by 148 nations, together with the U.S. and Canada however not Somalia, outlines a system for monitoring meteorites and returning them to their house nations if crucial. However Shiid-birood’s authorized standing is unsure: Sharia regulation at present governs the world it was taken from, however students aren’t certain how the regulation treats meteorites. If UNESCO declares the El Ali object to be a part of the cultural heritage of Somalia, as the federal government has requested, sale of the meteorite would turn into harder.
Throughout the previous 5 years the marketplace for meteorites has exploded, says criminologist Donna Yates of Maastricht College in Germany, following within the footsteps of the fossil and antiquities trades. “There’s a type of a profile to that purchaser, one which’s very all for science and house and deep time and so forth,” she says. “And people individuals go to the meteorite market.” The Meteoritical Society has an ethics code requiring researchers to “adhere to legal guidelines” of their investigations, but it surely affords little steering on exported finds.
China has turn into a vacation spot for smuggled meteorites in recent times. In 2019 customs authorities seized 857 kilograms of “dolomite” that turned out to be meteorites taken from Kenya, and in 2021 they captured 470 kilograms of iron meteorites listed as pyrite ore in customs declarations. The Kamil influence crater in Egypt was reportedly “strip-mined” for iron meteorites someday between 2020 and 2023. “There are museums stuffed with stolen stuff,” Jull says.
Both the authorized standing of the El Ali meteorite and the plans of its present custodians are unclear. “The fear is that it will likely be floor up a chunk at a time to make keychains,” Gessler says. Ideally it might be returned to Somalia. In mid-July, Hussein, the geologist in Mogadishu, heard from members of the Kureym mining firm who need to promote the meteorite again to Somalia’s authorities. The corporate’s lack of paperwork has stymied gross sales to worldwide establishments. Solely Somalia’s authorities could make it reputable, he says, making a return transaction the best approach for the sellers to show a revenue from the meteorite. The Nationwide Museum of Somalia, as soon as a trove of treasured antiquities, was closed for 30 years in the course of the nation’s civil conflict. Though lots of its artifacts had been broken or stolen, the museum reopened in 2020, with house for a meteorite show below a bolstered stand. “College college students and youngsters from even elementary colleges would come to see it,” Hussein says. He envisions worldwide researchers collaborating with native college college students to construct experience in geochemistry in Somalia. “Now we’ll have to lift the cash.”
Even when the meteorite does come house, its security isn’t assured. Dalmar Asad, a spokesperson for the Coalition of Somali Human Rights Defenders in Mogadishu, is skeptical that his nation can shield Shiid-birood if it returns to Somalia. Safety continues to be very unsure, he says, even in Mogadishu. He worries that native misunderstandings in regards to the meteorite—some early information reviews urged it was product of gold—would possibly immediate another person to aim to steal it, even from the museum. “I feel it might be higher for a global group to host the meteorite till the state of affairs right here is safer,” he says.
For now the El Ali meteorite stays in limbo very removed from house. Its final vacation spot is simply as unsure because it was when it was within the asteroid belt, bouncing throughout the sky. Wherever it finally ends up, although, this piece from the heavens could impart lasting classes on Earth. The meteorite’s story ought to educate students to ask tougher questions in regards to the provenance of newly reported discoveries, says planetary scientist Hasnaa Chennaoui Aoudjehane of the Hassan II College of Casablanca in Morocco. “This neighborhood is my neighborhood; many scientists are buddies of mine,” she says. “However in some circumstances, we’re simply closing our eyes. We don’t need to tackle the truth of the issue as a result of if we do, there might be a lot much less materials to check.”
