MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – The most honest map of Somalia’s war is four years old. A new International Crisis Group briefing concludes that the front lines of mid-2026 have settled back roughly where they stood before the government’s celebrated 2022 offensive, and that the conflict has returned to a managed stalemate neither side can break. The finding lands hard in the south, where the Shabelle valley has absorbed most of the fighting, most of the dying, and nearly all of the reversals. Towns in Hiiraan and Middle Shabelle changed hands twice in three years and ended up back where they began. The stalemate is the product of two forces that have learned to survive each other, and of a government that keeps choosing other fights.
A Map Redrawn Back to 2022
The Crisis Group briefing, published this month, traces the full cycle. In 2022 and 2023, federal forces fighting alongside macawisley clan militias swept al-Shabaab from large stretches of Hiiraan and Middle Shabelle, and Mogadishu spoke openly of territorial collapse. Al-Shabaab then regrouped, recalibrated, and in early 2025 launched the counteroffensive that took most of it back. By the second half of 2025 both sides had stopped pushing and started consolidating. The result, in Crisis Group’s phrase, is a return to managed conflict, in which territorial shifts are temporary and reversible.
The Somali Guardian’s reading of the report on July 2 put it more sharply: neither the federal government nor al-Shabaab can secure a decisive advantage, and the exhausting cycle of gains and losses ultimately resets to near its starting point. Only one section of the map resisted the 2025 tide. Al-Shabaab’s push toward Lower Shabelle, the belt closest to Mogadishu, met African Union troops and American and Turkish airpower, and it stalled there. The stalemate, in other words, holds at exactly the point where foreign forces stand and nowhere else.
Why the Gains Never Held
Crisis Group’s account of why the 2022 offensive collapsed reads like an indictment of everything except the soldiers who fought it. The government could not consolidate what it seized. Trained recruits left the army faster than they could be replaced. The macawisley militias that carried the early victories were never integrated into a durable security structure, and corruption and logistical failure hollowed out the force that remained. Then came 2024, when the offensive’s political patrons in Mogadishu turned to constitutional changes and quarrels with the federal member states, and the campaign simply lost its owner. The stalemate began there, in the capital’s shifting attention, before it ever appeared on a map.
Readers of The Somali Digest will recognise that sequence. This publication has documented how the al-Shabaab offensive feeds on Mogadishu’s political chaos, and how President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s constitutional gambit consumed the attention and the alliances the war required. The clans that mobilised against al-Shabaab in 2022 needed a federal government that backed them; what they got was a president fighting his own regions. A stalemate assembled from those choices is a stalemate of squandered advantages.
An Insurgency That Adapts Instead of Wins
The report is equally clear-eyed about al-Shabaab. The group’s 2025 comeback demonstrated adaptability, not decisive strength. It reorganised its leadership, sharpened its intelligence work, and adjusted its governance to reduce local backlash, easing some restrictions and engaging clan structures and humanitarian access without loosening ideological control. That is the profile of an organisation planning to outlast its enemies rather than defeat them. Al-Shabaab does not need to take Mogadishu. It needs the stalemate to persist until the foreign props beneath the government give way.
Those props are now the variable. The African Union’s drawdown has begun, Washington has moved to block UN funding for the mission that remains, and Crisis Group warns that international partners are essential to the defensive lines that stopped al-Shabaab in Lower Shabelle. Every actor in the south can do the same arithmetic. If the line near the capital holds because of foreign troops and foreign aircraft, then the schedule of their departure, not any Somali offensive, is the most consequential military fact of the coming year.
A Stalemate Somalia Cannot Afford
Crisis Group’s prescription is familiar: stronger military institutions, real coordination with the regions, stable recruitment and funding, and a recognition that the war will not be resolved on the battlefield alone. The briefing’s most important sentence, though, is its quietest. Political fragmentation within the federal system continues to undermine the counterinsurgency. The stalemate in the Shabelle valley and the standoffs with Puntland, Jubaland, and the opposition are not separate stories; each feeds the other, and The Somali Digest has tracked how the federal rift deepened while the front lines froze.
For the people of Hiiraan, Middle Shabelle, and the towns along the Shabelle river, the stalemate is not an abstraction. It means living under whichever force arrived last, paying taxes to both, and knowing the next reversal is a season away. A war that resets to its starting point every three years consumes lives and money without purchasing anything. Both sides can live with that bargain. The country in between cannot, and the report offers no reason to expect the bargain to change before the foreign shield comes down.
