Banaadir

Banaadir (Somali: Banaadir, Arabic: بنادر, Italian: Benadir) is an administrative region (gobol) in southeastern Somalia. It covers the same area as the city of Mogadishu, which serves as the capital. It is the only region in the country not belonging to any of the six states. It is bordered to the northwest by the Shabelle river, and to the southeast by the Indian Ocean. Although by far the smallest administrative region in Somalia, it has the largest population, estimated at 1,650,227 (including 369,288 internally displaced persons) in 2014.

The territorial extent and scope of the term Benaadir has varied in definition throughout its history, with medieval usage extending Benaadir to huge swaths of coast adjacent to Mogadishu stretching as far as hundreds of miles, from Hobyo in the north. The early modern period which extended the meaning of Benaadir to the interior midway towards the Hirshabelle region, to the contemporary period wherein sometimes the nonstandard misnomer of usage being interchangeable with the city of Mogadishu. This Banaadir municipality is bordered to the north by Hirshabelle and to the southwest by South West, and is the only Somali gobol (administrative region) which is both a municipality and a gobol known as a region.