MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed has accused the national army and the Presidential Guard of taking a direct hand in the demolition of homes across Mogadishu, and has asked why soldiers who gave ground to al-Shabaab have found their courage against unarmed families. His remarks name the units working alongside the bulldozers and instruct officers to refuse the task, which moves the argument over the evictions from the conduct of the government to the conduct of the armed forces. The charge arrives a fortnight after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud stood on a parade ground and declared Somalia ready to carry its own security. Sheikh Sharif has set the two propositions side by side and asked which war the army is actually fighting.
Sheikh Sharif Names the Units Behind the Bulldozers
Where a fortnight of criticism has addressed the federal government as an abstraction, Sheikh Sharif identified the formations he says were present in the affected quarters, and put the charge in writing. “What is new is the Presidential Guard taking part directly in the evictions, and the bulldozers of the national army were seen levelling the ground,” he said, before calling on officers and soldiers to keep away from operations aimed at civilians and describing what has happened as a source of shame. A second account of the same address carries the wording almost identically, and neither formation has issued a denial.
The Presidential Guard is attached to Villa Somalia itself and answers to the presidency in a way ordinary line units do not. A municipal enforcement action carried out by police would sit within an ordinary, if contested, legal frame. A demolition campaign in which the presidency’s own protection force appears among the machinery describes something closer to a political operation conducted with military assets. The midnight clearance of the Tookiyo quarter of Yaqshiid, carried out with heavy weapons while Turkish aircraft flew over the capital, already suggested a scale beyond civic administration, and the identification of the units puts a chain of command behind the machinery. Federal security forces killed at least five people and wounded more than ten others in the capital that Sunday, which is a casualty list from an operation the government still describes as urban development.
Somali politicians routinely denounce government policy, and the denunciations change nothing because the chain of command runs through Villa Somalia and nowhere else. Addressing the soldiers directly, and telling them to decline the work, invites a form of refusal that no former president can enforce and no serving commander can comfortably ignore. Sheikh Sharif spent his own presidency asking this same army to hold ground against this same insurgency, which gives the appeal a provenance that a civilian opposition figure would lack. His party made a version of the charge in December, when it said presidential guard units had grown in number and were joining demolitions on public land elsewhere in the city, and nobody in the presidency answered it then either.
The Government’s Own Word Turned Back on It
The passage that has travelled furthest is the one questioning the army’s courage. “The bullets were not meant for these people, so why did you run from al-Shabaab when you stood against the Khawarij? When civilians are shot at you are brave, nothing turns you back, and that is inhumanity,” he said. Khawarij is the federal government’s own preferred designation for al-Shabaab, adopted over the past two years to frame the insurgency as a heretical sect placed outside Islam and therefore beyond negotiation.
Borrowing the term obliges the state to answer in its own vocabulary. The designation was adopted to mark an enemy so illegitimate that fighting it requires no further justification, and it is now being used to ask why that enemy was left in possession of ground while the same soldiers proved unstoppable in a residential district of the capital. Mogadishu cannot disown the label without disowning years of its own messaging, and it cannot embrace it here without conceding the comparison being drawn. Sheikh Sharif has built the trap out of the government’s own vocabulary, which leaves the presidency arguing against a word it spent two years teaching the country to use.
The label has also been travelling in the other direction all year. When federal forces fought militias loyal to the ousted Southwest president in Baidoa, Mogadishu counted the dead as al-Shabaab until former officials identified them as Darwish troops of the administration the government had just removed. The defence ministry had filed them under that heading within hours, before any identification of the bodies had been attempted. A state that has spent the year widening the terrorism category to cover its political opponents now finds a former head of state narrowing it back to its original referent, and then using that narrowed version as the yardstick for the army’s performance against the enemy the word was invented to describe.
A Readiness Claim and a Retreat in the Same Month
The accusation lands against a specific and very recent government claim. On 16 August the president closed the training of more than three thousand soldiers at Xananbuure in northern Galgadud, the largest class trained inside the country since 1991, and used the occasion to say Somalia had reached the point of taking full charge of its own security. He asked that the African contingents be handed a bunch of flowers and sent home. Sheikh Sharif has now supplied the obvious rejoinder, which is that a graduation parade measures intake and settles nothing about whether ground can be held.
That claim is being tested from an unexpected direction at the same time. The international support structure is being dismantled around it, with the United Nations issuing termination letters and auctioning mission equipment ahead of a December funding cliff, so the question of what the Somali army can actually hold has stopped being theoretical and acquired a date. An army whose readiness is counted in graduates is one thing. An army that vacates positions under pressure is another, and the second is the one that will inherit the towns when the convoys stop running.
Neither the defence ministry nor the presidency has answered the substance of what Sheikh Sharif alleged. The information ministry’s response to the wider controversy has confined itself to affirming that peaceful protest is a legitimate right, which addresses a complaint nobody had made and says nothing about which formations were operating in Yaqshiid. Silence on the specific charge is doing more damage than a denial would, because footage of the machinery is already circulating, the vehicles in it carry recognisable markings, and every day without a rebuttal hardens the account into the accepted one. A government that has answered far smaller allegations within hours has so far offered nothing on this one beyond the protest formula.
The Army Mogadishu Has Actually Been Deploying
August has produced an unusually complete record of where the federal army has been sent. Its units fought a pitched battle inside Baidoa against forces loyal to the president they had helped remove, leaving roughly thirty dead in a regional capital. The Southwest flag came down in Marka in favour of a rival administration. Heavy weapons were turned on a residential quarter of the capital. Al-Shabaab was the adversary in none of these engagements, and the insurgency spent the month consolidating in the districts nobody contested.
Measured against that record, the cowardice charge works as an accounting exercise. Sheikh Sharif is pointing at a force that has been energetic, mobile and reliably supplied whenever the target was domestic, and hesitant wherever the insurgency holds ground and shoots back. The pattern describes an institution configured for internal control, which is a different proposition from a national army, and which will not become one because another three thousand men have passed out of a training camp in Galgadud. A force acquires the capabilities its missions demand, and the missions this one has been given all year have been domestic.
Puntland offers the comparison the federal government would prefer nobody drew, having fought its own campaign against Islamic State in the Calmiskaad mountains on its own budget, with its own casualties, and without levelling anybody’s neighbourhood in the process. The federal army has the larger force, the foreign trainers and the international logistics chain, and it has spent the year turning all three on Somalis. The contrast is available to every Somali who has watched both administrations operate, which is why the charge has carried so far so quickly, and why the presidency has found no comfortable answer to it. Sheikh Sharif has now said aloud what the deployment map has been saying since March, and he has addressed it to the soldiers themselves.
