CEELBARAF, SOMALIA – Armed men organised along clan lines stopped the Somali National Army soldier Ahmed Shire Hussein off his motorcycle in the Calaag area of Ceelbaraf district in Middle Shabelle, put questions to him while a camera ran, and then shot him, and the body his relatives collected had been broken by a beating severe enough to make burial difficult. The army command opened an investigation on Friday 11 September, twenty months after it opened an investigation into the near identical killing of seven of its men on the same stretch of road. Ceelbaraf is ground the federal government counts among the territory it has taken back from al-Shabaab, and a soldier coming home from its front line could not cross it alive.
The Video His Killers Made at Ceelbaraf
Hussein had taken leave from the forward positions at Buurane in Middle Shabelle, where he had been serving for months, and was riding towards Hiiraan when the gunmen brought him down off the road at Calaag. They put their questions to him with the camera running and his motorcycle lying in the dirt beside them. He told them he was ill, that he was hungry, and that he had come off the front line and was travelling to see his family. “Maternal uncles, do not kill me,” he said. “I am on my way to my family.” Footage of him making that appeal has circulated across Somali networks since Wednesday 9 September.
His body reached Bulo Burde in Hiiraan on Wednesday 9 September. Relatives who received it said it had come apart under the beating that preceded the shooting, and that preparing it for burial took considerable effort. Hussein Jurus, a traditional elder in Hiiraan, said the young man had been killed without mercy, that his eyes had been put out, and that those who washed him could not work out how to lay him properly in the grave. He asked the federal government for a tangible answer, which is a modest request from a community that has been sending its sons to the forward positions for a decade.
Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame set out what the footage records. The soldier, he wrote, was sick, hungry and unable to defend himself, and with death standing in front of him he begged the men holding him for mercy. “He sought protection in Islam, in humanity, in Somaliness and in kinship, but none of it softened their hearts,” he wrote. “They recorded his pleading, and then they killed him.” He asked that the last plea become a mirror Somalis hold up to themselves, and the question he attached to it, about what has happened to the national conscience, has run through every thread on the killing since.
The army command’s account of Friday 11 September confirms the essential facts. Hussein was away from his unit on authorised leave when he was killed, the command said, and investigations are under way to establish the details and to identify everyone who took part in the act.
Ceelbaraf Did Exactly This Twenty Months Ago
Seven men were killed in the same district on Thursday 26 December 2024, six soldiers and the driver carrying them, and two others with the group escaped to describe what happened. Those men had come off the same forward positions after months in the line. They were travelling to families in the same region. Clan militia took them off their vehicle, blindfolded them, filmed them and shot them in the head, and local accounts at the time identified the dead as young Hawadle men caught in the quarrel running between Hawadle and Abgaal communities along the administrative boundary the road crosses.
The defence ministry announced within a day of that attack that everyone involved would be before a court inside forty eight hours, the army launched joint operations across Ceelbaraf district, and by 29 December the district governor, traditional elders and other suspects were in custody, with the HirShabelle administration suspending the district administration altogether. Speed was the argument the federal government made for itself at the time, and it was the reason the December executions read as a case the state meant to close quickly.
The dead of December 2024 were buried at Beledweyne in the presence of the army commander General Odowa Yusuf Rage, the intelligence director Abdullahi Mohamed Ali Sanbaloolshe and a federal cabinet minister, and the military court issued warrants for the men involved.
The forty eight hours the defence ministry set itself produced detentions, a suspended district administration and those warrants, and then the file went quiet. No outcome from those arrests has been published since, and the governor and the elders who were paraded as suspects have not been reported before any court. The quarrel behind both killings is an older one about grazing and about the line between Hiiraan and Middle Shabelle, and militias from the two communities clashed on that boundary again in January 2025, three weeks after the December killings and after every mediation that was supposed to settle it. Twenty months of that record is the context in which the army command now promises lawful measures once its investigators have established who is responsible at Ceelbaraf.
The Corridor That Ceelbaraf Sits On
Ceelbaraf lies on the road running north from Mahaday through Middle Shabelle towards Adan Yabaal and the Hiiraan boundary, which is the overland artery between Mogadishu and Beledweyne and the axis along which the 2022 offensive against al-Shabaab was fought. Much of the fighting that cleared it was done by clan militia, with regular units thin on the ground along that axis. Hawadle fighters took Ceelbaraf itself and called for unity against al-Shabaab when they did, and the federal government banked the town as a gain without ever building the administration that would hold it afterwards.
Al-Shabaab overran the African Union forward operating base at Ceelbaraf on 3 May 2022, opening with two suicide truck bombs and pushing some four hundred fighters through the perimeter, and the Burundian contingent holding the position lost about thirty five men on the American count and several times that number on the insurgency’s own claim. Adan Yabaal, further along the same road, was taken in December 2022 and lost again on 16 April 2025. What remains is a patchwork of garrisons connected by ground nobody governs, where al-Shabaab moves freely and taxes what travels, and where clan militias armed for the offensive and never demobilised move with equal freedom.
Mogadishu’s answer to the manpower problem along this corridor has been to reach for the same militias again. The army chief spent August weighing a recall of Ali Jeyte to lead the Macawisley in Hiiraan as al-Shabaab pressed the east of the region, which is a request to a clan mobilisation to fight a war the national army cannot fight on its own. The state that makes that request holds no instrument for disciplining the same fighters when they set themselves up on a district road. Ahmed Shire Hussein was travelling that road from Raage Ceelle towards Buulobarde when the militia stopped him.
What Mogadishu Has Said Since
The statement the army command issued on Friday 11 September runs to three short paragraphs. It confirms the death, records that an investigation is under way, undertakes to act lawfully once the results arrive, and closes on a sentence about the institution itself: Somali soldiers are entitled to have their lives, their honour and their rights protected, and the army is a national force serving every Somali citizen. It names no unit conducting the investigation, announces no arrests, and sets no date for either. Villa Somalia and the HirShabelle administration have published nothing at all, and the state news agency that announced the December 2024 detentions within three days has carried no report of this killing.
Sharif Sheikh Ahmed filled the silence on Thursday 10 September. The former president condemned the killing, sent condolences to the family, and said clan revenge killings among Somalis have become recurrent and have grown more frequent over recent months. “Every time our statehood weakens, chaos and the wars between the clans increase,” he said, before calling for a just government capable of saving Somali blood wherever it is being spilled, and asking communities to stop treating each other’s blood as cheap and to settle their disputes by talking.
Malik Abdalla of the House of the People demanded that the government produce a satisfactory public response within twenty four hours and prosecute those accused, and asked the dead man’s family not to answer the killing with retaliation. None of the machinery of December 2024 has moved since either man spoke. No district administration has been suspended at Ceelbaraf this time, and no joint operation across the district has been announced.
The federal government has spent this year moving brigades towards Baidoa and towards its domestic opponents while the districts it recovered in 2022 revert to whoever is armed and present on the road, a sequence set out most starkly at Basra, thirty kilometres from Villa Somalia. Ceelbaraf poses the narrower version of the same question. A state that cannot guarantee one of its own soldiers safe passage home is asking that soldier to hold Buurane on its behalf, and at Ceelbaraf it has now received its answer twice, delivered on video both times.
