BELED HAWO, SOMALIA – Abdirashid Janan assembled the federal forces under his command at a military camp on the edge of Beled Hawo on Tuesday morning and told them that his dispute with Jubaland had ended. The man President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government installed as its Gedo intelligence chief in July 2025 has crossed to the administration of Jubaland President Ahmed Madobe together with his troops, and Kismayo has agreed to assume the salaries and entitlements that Mogadishu left unpaid. The defection folds the federal government’s strongest remaining instrument in Gedo into the member state it was built to contain, and it repeats, almost clause for clause, the overnight settlement that emptied the federal register in Nugaal the same week.
A Payroll Settles What Deployments Could Not
The announcement at the camp on the outskirts of Beled Hawo followed several days of talks between Abdirashid Janan and the Jubaland leadership. He told the assembled soldiers that a new understanding had been reached with Kismayo, that no personal animosity divided the two sides, and that the forces they served in would now operate under Jubaland’s structures. Moreover, Jubaland has agreed to take responsibility for the salaries and entitlements of the troops, who had gone for an extended period without regular pay from the federal government they nominally served. By accounts from the camp, the men received the news as a settlement of arrears as much as a change of flag.
His parting account of his employers was harsher than the handover required. Abdirashid Janan accused the federal government of failing to act in good faith in its dealings with Jubaland, and he charged senior security officials and federal leaders with handling national affairs through personal and clan calculations. Furthermore, he said Mogadishu’s neglect of Gedo had wrecked the development plans he had been pursuing in the region, an indictment delivered by the official the federal government had trusted to embody its presence there.
Money decided the outcome more surely than any argument from Kismayo could have. The federal government held its Gedo forces together on a register it was not paying, and Jubaland dissolved that hold by meeting the payroll and everything attached to it. Beled Hawo commands one of the busiest crossings on the Kenya border, which makes the garrison’s allegiance a question of customs revenue and cross-border trade as much as of politics. Consequently, a force that guards a trading town learns quickly which government’s money is real, and that lesson had been accumulating through every missed pay run since the deployment began. Puntland ran the identical arithmetic in Nugaal days later, and the federal register there dissolved the moment a solvent alternative presented itself.
Abdirashid Janan Comes Full Circle in Gedo
The career now closing its loop began inside the administration it has rejoined. As Jubaland’s security minister, Abdirashid Janan was named in United Nations reporting for abuses committed between 2014 and 2015, including extrajudicial killings, torture, illegal detentions and forced renditions, and his 2019 arrest in Mogadishu drew international demands for a prosecution that never arrived. He escaped custody in January 2020, made his way back to Gedo and spent the following years as the armed centre of the federal quarrel with Kismayo. Federal and Jubaland forces fought pitched battles for Beled Hawo through 2020 and 2021 with him at the heart of them, and the town has anchored every subsequent round of the dispute over the region.
Jubaland dismissed him once he aligned himself with Mogadishu, and successive federal administrations kept him in play as their man on the border. In July 2025, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government appointed Abdirashid Janan director of the National Intelligence and Security Agency for Gedo and head of the region’s security agencies, a decision human rights organisations condemned at the time and one that Kismayo read as a declaration of intent about the coming electoral season. The appointment came after the federal campaign in Ras Kamboni collapsed, and it moved Villa Somalia’s pressure on Jubaland from expeditionary deployments to a resident proxy with local roots.
That design has now consumed itself along with the year Mogadishu spent building it. The fugitive the federal government rehabilitated to anchor its Gedo presence has carried the anchor to Kismayo, and the investment in his office has become a transfer payment into Jubaland’s order of battle. An administration that spent two years failing to dislodge Ahmed Madobe with troops has now equipped him with the force it recruited for the opposite purpose, and it has done so without extracting a single concession in return.
The Second Register Mogadishu Lost in a Week
The defection of Abdirashid Janan landed within days of the overnight deal at Ligle, where roughly a thousand men left the federal register after Puntland repositioned its forces and Garowe took over their pay. The two settlements were negotiated separately, by different mediators, at opposite ends of the country, and they resolved themselves on identical terms: the member state assumes the payroll, and the federal force stops existing. Mogadishu has spent the electoral cycle recruiting parallel forces inside Puntland, Jubaland and the central states, and in a single week the two most consequential of those registers dissolved into the armies they were raised to check.
Meanwhile, Jubaland’s external standing has survived the confrontation intact. The United States special operations command met Ahmed Madobe in Nairobi on a regional tour that never touched Mogadishu, and Kenya continues to treat Kismayo as the working authority on its Somali border. A federal strategy that depended on isolating Jubaland politically while eroding it militarily has instead certified its neighbour’s usefulness to every partner that matters, and the return of the Gedo forces removes the last federal lever inside the state’s territory. The leverage Abdirashid Janan once represented for Mogadishu is now pointed in the opposite direction.
Every one of these registers was recruited, armed and provisioned from a security budget that is supposed to be prosecuting the war against al-Shabaab, at the precise moment the African Union transition is running ahead of its funding. Accordingly, the men Abdirashid Janan marched across Beled Hawo represent more than a provincial realignment; they are the measure of how much of Somalia’s fighting strength has been diverted into contests between its governments. A federal government that cannot pay the forces it recruits finishes by arming its rivals on credit, and in Gedo the bill has now been presented.
