MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – The Somali Future Council has stopped arguing with Villa Somalia and begun arguing about it. In an open letter dated 27 July the opposition bloc bypassed the federal government entirely, addressing itself to the heads of state, defence ministers and defence chiefs of Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Burundi and Egypt, the six countries whose soldiers and police hold up AUSSOM and, through AUSSOM, hold up the administration in Mogadishu. Those six convene in Kampala this week to decide what the mission becomes. The letter asks them to price Somalia’s legitimacy crisis into that decision, on the argument that no quantity of foreign firepower can secure a state whose own institutions nobody agrees on.
What the Somali Future Council Asked the Troop Contributors to Do
The asks are precise enough to test against whatever emerges from the summit. The Somali Future Council wants an inclusive transitional council to hold the constitutional and electoral file until Somalis can renew their national institutions by consent, and it wants any settlement to guarantee the neutrality of the Somali National Army. The second demand is the heavier one, and it aims squarely at the record. The opposition complaint since 2023 has never been that Hassan Sheikh Mohamud commands the army; it is that he has used the army as an instrument of factional politics, most nakedly in the removal of Southwest’s Abdiaziz Laftagareen in late March, an operation federal troops carried out against a sitting regional president. On top of both demands the bloc asks the six governments to attach conditions to their own continued engagement.
Conditionality is the entire strategy, and the recipients list shows how far the bloc intends to push it. The letter went to the six capitals on 27 July, with copies to the African Union Commission, the AU Peace and Security Council, IGAD, the United Nations, UNTMIS, the European Union and the American, British and Turkish missions in Mogadishu. Every institution on that list has spent a decade treating Somali politics as a domestic irritant to be managed around while the security file advanced on its own separate track. The Somali Future Council is asking them to concede that the two files were never separate, and that they have spent years underwriting one side of an unresolved constitutional dispute.
The bloc had reason to take the argument abroad rather than back to the National Consultative Council. Government and opposition talks collapsed in May without agreement, and the Mogadishu process that followed lost Puntland and Jubaland before it started. Domestic mediation has generated communiques and nothing enforceable, which leaves the Kampala room as the only forum this month capable of imposing a cost on either party.
The Mandate Gap the Somali Future Council Is Trading On
The legal claim underneath the letter is blunt and, so far, untested. The Somali Future Council holds that the president’s constitutional term expired on 15 May 2026 and that parliament’s mandate lapsed on 14 April 2026, leaving nothing agreed about who exercises federal authority or how a transition should be run. Villa Somalia rejects that reading outright, defending both the 2024 constitutional amendments and the one-person-one-vote model it insists it will deliver. No institution both sides recognise has adjudicated between them, and none is likely to, which is precisely the condition the opposition wants the troop contributors to register. Contested rule has become the standing weather of Somali politics rather than a passing quarrel over dates on a calendar.
What gives the claim its force is the pattern behind it. For three years the federal government has converted institutional disagreements into confrontations it can win by force or by procedure, from the Southwest takeover to the pressure it now applies in Galmudug, and the states that refuse to fold have watched the same sequence run each time. Puntland and Jubaland closed ranks against Villa Somalia long before this letter and founded the bloc together in October 2025. Their objection has not shifted since. Mogadishu asks them to accept an electoral architecture they had no hand in designing, and asks it on behalf of an administration whose mandate they no longer recognise.
That grievance carries operational weight, which is the part Kampala cannot easily wave away. Puntland has fought the Islamic State faction in the Cal Miskaad mountains for nineteen months, and Jubaland’s forces remain in the field against al-Shabaab in Lower Jubba, yet both administrations sit outside the national security decisions their campaigns feed. The Somali Future Council argues that the arrangement has degraded coordination between security actors, drained public confidence and opened ground that both insurgencies have since occupied. The past year offers little evidence against it.
Mogadishu Arrives in Kampala Without a Roadmap
The federal government reaches the summit carrying a more immediate problem than the opposition’s letter. Washington notified the African Union on 1 July that it will stop financing the UN Support Office in Somalia after December 2026, removing roughly a quarter of a budget running near 481 million dollars for the 2026-2027 cycle. UNSOS is not a donor line item that can be absorbed elsewhere; it is the logistical spine delivering fuel, rations, water, transport, medical care and casualty evacuation to some 12,000 African Union personnel. Uganda, the largest contributor, has signalled that its soldiers are going home after nearly two decades, and Burundi has already cut its role following a dispute over troop allocations.
Partners have spent months asking Mogadishu for a written transition plan setting out which bases transfer first, on what timeline and to which Somali units, and no such document has appeared. The president has held readiness reviews with his commanders, but diplomats say the missing roadmap has left troop contributors unable to plan their own drawdowns. The African Union had to ask Somalia in late July simply to nominate delegates for the consultations, which indicates how far the process had drifted before Kampala convened. AUSSOM took over from ATMIS in January 2025 with a mandate running to 2029, and nobody can now say what Somali forces will be holding by then.
The gap matters because Villa Somalia’s pitch to its backers rests on continuity and competence. Nobody ever funded the 8,000-troop reinforcement the government and the AU agreed after al-Shabaab’s advances, the electoral model it promised remains unacceptable to the states holding the northeast and the south, and nobody has written the transition framework its partners requested. The Somali Future Council did not manufacture that credibility problem. It has simply arranged for six presidents to be reading about it on the morning they decide the mission’s future.
What Conditionality Would Cost Both Sides
The strategy is not free of risk for the opposition. Inviting foreign capitals to set terms on a Somali constitutional question hands Villa Somalia an easy line about sovereignty, and the federal government will use it for as long as it works. The sharper danger is that conditionality reads, in the wrong room, as permission to leave. Uganda and Burundi are already reassessing their commitments, and a summit that hears Somali politics is unresolvable may conclude that its soldiers should not stand in the gap while Somali leaders litigate mandates. Al-Shabaab has spent two years demonstrating what it does with that kind of vacancy, retaking districts across Lower and Middle Shabelle as ATMIS unwound. The Somali Future Council is betting that the six governments fear a collapsed political settlement more than they fear the accusation of interference.
Events on the ground argue for the opposition’s framing rather than against it. Puntland accused Galmudug in late July of letting its airports and territory carry militia and supplies that the federal government had organised, a charge Garowe has levelled repeatedly and Galmudug has not answered. Days earlier, Puntland forces and the Mogadishu-aligned Puntland Security Force clashed near Laag in Bari, where Dervish units seized vehicles and captured fighters. Federal and regional guns now train on each other in the one region that has pursued the Islamic State hardest, which is as plain an illustration as the summit will get of what fragmentation costs in the field.
Kampala will not settle the mandate question this week. Troop contributors deal in force levels and financing rather than constitutional rulings, and none of the six has any appetite for adjudicating a Somali succession. The mandate rows that stalled the NCC show how durable the deadlock becomes once positions harden. What the Somali Future Council has achieved is narrower and still worth marking. Mogadishu came to Kampala expecting a conversation about money, bases and timelines, and will instead sit through one about whom it speaks for, in front of the governments whose troops are the reason that question has stayed academic this long.
