Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma’s pick to be the first Amer­i­can am­bas­sador to So­ma­lia in nearly 25 years has with­drawn her nom­i­na­tion, the White House told law­mak­ers on Mon­day, an un­ex­pected sus­pen­sion in U.S. plans to deepen ties with the African na­tion plagued by vi­o­lence and in­sta­bil­ity.

An administration official said Katherine Simonds Dhanani, a career diplomat with experience serving across Africa, turned down the nomination for personal reasons and that Obama will have to find another candidate. The official spoke on a condition of anonymity without authorization to speak on the record.

The U.S. Em­bassy closed in 1991 when So­ma­li­a’s gov­ern­ment col­lapsed in civil war, prompt­ing the de­ploy­ment of a U.S.-led U.N. peace­keep­ing mis­sion. Amer­i­can troops with­drew from So­ma­lia in 1994, months af­ter the hu­mil­i­at­ing “Black Hawk Down” de­ba­cle when So­mali mili­ti­a­men shot down two U.S. he­li­copters. Eigh­teen U.S. sol­diers were killed in the bat­tle, which marked the be­gin­ning of the end of that U.S. mil­i­tary mis­sion to bring sta­bil­ity.

Last week, John Kerry be­came the first sec­re­tary of state to visit So­ma­lia. He cast the move to­ward restor­ing the am­bas­sador­ship as “recog­ni­tion of the progress made and the promise to come.”

“I look for­ward, as does the pres­i­dent, to the day when both the United States and So­ma­lia have full-fledged mis­sions in each oth­er’s cap­i­tal city,” Kerry said in a video mes­sage to the So­mali peo­ple in con­nec­tion with his his­toric, al­beit brief, stopover in the coun­try.

So­ma­lia has been with­out a truly func­tion­ing, na­tion­wide gov­ern­ment for two-and-a-half decades and has be­come in­fa­mous for its high rates of vi­o­lence and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of pi­rates op­er­at­ing off its coasts. The cur­rent gov­ern­ment con­tin­ues to bat­tle the al-Qaida af­fil­i­ated al-Shabab mil­i­tant group, which has staged at­tacks around east Africa and re­cently threat­ened shop­ping malls in the United States and other West­ern na­tions.

Se­cu­rity be­gan im­prov­ing ear­lier this decade as in­ter­na­tional ef­forts against al-Shabab gained ground, and the U.S. has been work­ing to help So­ma­lia move to­ward democ­racy and eco­nomic de­vel­op­ment. Still, al-Shabab con­tin­ues to wage a deadly in­sur­gency against So­ma­li­a’s gov­ern­ment and re­mains a threat in So­ma­lia and the East African re­gion.

The State De­part­ment had planned to post Dhanani, who was await­ing Sen­ate con­fir­ma­tion af­ter be­ing nom­i­nated in Feb­ru­ary, in neigh­bor­ing Kenya un­til se­cu­rity con­di­tions would per­mit the em­bassy in the So­mali cap­i­tal of Mo­gadishu to re­open.