MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Within hours of Tuesday’s weapons seizure in south Galkayo, two former heads of government accused Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of steering Somalia toward civil war. Former prime minister Hassan Ali Khaire said the intercepted arms prove the president is not fighting terrorism. He is preparing something worse. Wadajir leader Abdirahman Abdishakur called the Galkayo fighting a stark warning. The opposition has spent months alleging a power grab. The mortar crates gave the charge a serial number.
Two leaders name the destination as civil war
Khaire’s statement was the bluntest of his career. The weapons moved from Mogadishu to Galkayo triggered clashes and injuries, he wrote on Tuesday evening. They show that Hassan Sheikh “is not invested in unity against terrorism, but is instead working toward civil war.” He set the shipment against the Kampala summit held days earlier. There, international partners discussed a unified front against al-Shabaab. The president, Khaire argued, is doing the exact opposite of what he asked those partners to fund. The people of Galmudug and Puntland have long coexisted peacefully, he added, and the shipment directly threatens that stability.
Abdishakur went further on the mechanics. Hassan Sheikh, he wrote the same afternoon, has plunged Galmudug into two crises at once. The first is “a fraudulent election that has deepened political division.” The second is escalating tension that risks igniting conflict between Galmudug and Puntland. The South Galkayo fighting, he said, threatens years of hard-won reconciliation between the city’s communities. His sharpest line identified the authors. Those who pay for escalation are the people of Galkayo, “not the politicians in Mogadishu who are fueling these tensions from a distance.”
Neither man is a marginal voice. Khaire ran the federal government for three years. Abdishakur negotiated for the opposition through every electoral crisis since 2021. When both reach for civil war language on the same evening, something has shifted.
The incident behind the warnings
The trigger was the interception that Puntland’s State House later confirmed in a formal statement. Clan militiamen seized part of a federal weapons shipment as it was offloaded in south Galkayo. The cargo reportedly included mortar rounds bound for the PSF unit besieged outside the city. A firefight wounded two people, and Galmudug forces spent the evening trying to recover the crates. Garowe commended Galmudug’s forces and residents for blocking the transfer. It pinned responsibility for any consequences on a president whose term has expired. Nothing in that sequence reads like routine logistics to an opposition already warning of civil war.
The timing compounded the damage. A day earlier, the electoral commission had declared the ruling party the runaway winner in Galmudug. Those results were built on one approved candidate, a curfew and a ministerial campaign tour. In local accounts, the same government that engineered the ballot was arming a rebel unit next door before the count was celebrated.
Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, the former president, had opened the day on the same theme. He condemned the continuing abuse of state power on Tuesday morning. He cited the demolition of poor families’ homes in the capital, and the cruelty of forces entrusted with protecting citizens. By nightfall his colleagues were describing weapons runs instead of evictions. The escalation fit inside one news cycle.
A pattern the opposition can now recite
The civil war charge lands because each element has a documented predecessor. Hassan Sheikh’s term expired on 15 May. Parliament’s mandate lapsed a month earlier, then stretched itself through a disputed constitutional rewrite the opposition rejects. In March, federal forces entered South West State, the incumbent resigned under pressure, and a friendlier administration took over. Opposition figures call that the template: armed leverage inside a member state, followed by a managed vote.
Galmudug received the same treatment in sequence. The incumbent quit the race after talks with federal officials. The ruling party named its sole candidate, and ministers campaigned across the state on public money. Puntland cannot be captured through a ballot it does not run, so it got the military version. That meant a federally paid force inside its cities, recruitment drives through Mudug, and now a mortar shipment to a besieged camp. The opposition reads the three cases as one policy with local adjustments.
Khaire has pressed this argument since July. Back then he wrote that the president’s refusal to open an inclusive electoral process had left Somalia in unprecedented uncertainty. Sharif spent the first of August congratulating Puntland on its founding anniversary. He praised it as a model of stable administration, and the contrast with Mogadishu required no elaboration. The opposition’s shared conclusion is that the president is not governing Somalia. He is campaigning against it, state by state, and in their telling the campaign ends in civil war.
A power operation wearing a security uniform
Set the incidents side by side and the opposition’s core claim comes into focus: none of this weakens al-Shabaab. The group holds rural Galgaduud and Mudug and retook Teedaan in Hiiraan the day before the results were announced. Every soldier assigned to the PSF standoff is pointed at fellow Somalis. So is every militia recruited for pressure on Garowe, and every official running a one-candidate ballot. Khaire’s Kampala comparison stings because it is arithmetic, not rhetoric. A government drifting toward civil war spends differently from one fighting an insurgency.
The foreign audience matters because it holds the budget. Donors warned the presidency to reach a broad political deal before the end of August, with development support under review. The opposition bloc has already put legitimacy on that agenda, proposing an interim electoral body if no caretaker government forms. In the same week, the federal leadership briefed diplomats on its electoral plans and was caught, in local accounts, shipping mortars to a rebel unit. That makes the opposition’s case better than any letter could.
Villa Somalia has answered none of it. No statement addressed the seizure, the State House accusation, or the two former leaders’ civil war warnings. The silence is consistent. The federal government also never responded to the walkouts, the boycotts or the interim-body proposal. Its answers arrive as deployments.
Warnings without a brake
What the opposition lacks is a mechanism. Parliament’s term has lapsed. The consultative council sits boycotted by the states that matter, and no court has purchase on a president past his mandate. That leaves the channels used on Tuesday. They are public warnings, foreign pressure and, in Galkayo, the physical refusal of local communities to let weapons pass. Abdishakur appealed to the city’s elders, clerics, women and youth to resist provocation. It read less as a statement than a request that civilians handle the de-escalation their leaders will not.
The next tests are already scheduled. Galmudug’s new councils will seat, the state presidency will follow, and the PSF camp outside Galkayo will need another resupply run. Each step either confirms the opposition’s civil war warning or gives Hassan Sheikh a chance to step back from it. His record since May points one way, and the opposition knows it. That is why the language has stopped softening.
A president with a lapsed mandate is arming a proxy force inside a state that rejects him. Days earlier, his party manufactured an election in the state next door. Somalia’s opposition now says in public what diplomats say in cables. The destination of this road is civil war, and the driver knows the route. The only question Tuesday answered is how many people are still willing to stand in front of the truck.
