BAIDOA, SOMALIA – South West State’s security minister told civilians on Saturday 12 September to stay away from any area held by forces loyal to former president Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen or by al-Shabaab, and said the administration would strike those areas from the air. Aircraft bombed the outskirts of Baidoa that night and casualties were reported, with no government confirming either the raid or the toll. Three weeks earlier the African Union had authorised its mission in Somalia to fight al-Shabaab and its affiliated armed groups in South West State, and had instructed the same troops to steer clear of political fighting. Laftagareen governed the state until 30 March, denies any link to al-Shabaab, and nobody outside the federal government has produced evidence of one.
A Warning That Names Two Sets of Targets
“We are targeting al-Shabab militants in South West regions with airstrikes,” the security minister Isaaq Mohamed Korsaar said on Saturday, before telling the public to stay away from areas where “these groups are located”. Residents had already been told to avoid locations where al-Shabaab or Laftagareen-aligned forces are present, and to take particular care wherever military operations were expected or wherever groups opposed to the government maintain a presence.
Aircraft struck the outskirts of Baidoa late that night, and casualties followed without an independent count of them. A critic of the federal government attributed the raid to President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and to Turkiye, saying the two had shown their hostility to the people of South West State “by the indiscriminate airstrikes they are carrying out against civilians living in Baidoa and its surrounding areas”. Neither Ankara nor the federal authorities issued any detailed statement confirming the strikes or the number of dead.
Laftagareen rejected the charge on 27 August, in a statement answering the African Union memorandum directly, describing his men as the South West Darawish and as legally established security forces raised to protect civilians, public institutions and constitutional order in South West State. He warned that labelling them al-Shabaab affiliates without independently verified evidence would put civilians and security personnel at risk and damage public confidence in the African Union mission, and he offered to share information and take part in an independent investigation. No such investigation has been announced.
Al-Shabaab operates across much of Bay and the regions around it, and has kept the capacity to attack Baidoa through every offensive mounted against it since 2022. Farming settlements on the roads out of the city sit inside that contested belt, and so do the positions the Darawish have held since March. A civilian reading the warning is being asked to work out, without a map, which of the two sets of armed men is closest to his own village.
Inside the African Union Memorandum of 21 August
An African Union memorandum dated 21 August, addressed to the head of the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia, followed a federal request for the mission to intervene in the deteriorating security situation around Baidoa. The Commission recorded its concern about a growing alliance between local armed militias and al-Shabaab, including coordinated attacks on Somali military positions in and around the city, and authorised the mission to join federal forces in operations against al-Shabaab and its affiliated militias or armed groups in South West State.
The same document instructed the mission to maintain political neutrality and impartiality and to “steer clear of any political fighting”. It is silent on who determines what counts as an affiliated armed group, and nine days later the cabinet in Baidoa supplied that determination itself. The administration making it was installed by the federal government and is a party to the dispute over who should govern South West State.
Villa Somalia has pressed Ankara with the same argument, telling Turkish officials that forces supporting Laftagareen have established links with al-Shabaab and asking Turkiye to help protect the administration now controlling Baidoa. The evidence offered in public is a single armoured vehicle, which the defence ministry says was recaptured from an attacking convoy and had been taken by al-Shabaab from the Somali army in 2023. People familiar with the fighting add the use of vehicle borne explosives, an al-Shabaab signature, and the massing of Laftagareen’s men in villages 40 to 60 kilometres out in country al-Shabaab controls. The army has published nothing identifying the attackers themselves.
Federal forces took Baidoa on 30 March and Laftagareen resigned, and the method that followed has been run in other member states: a president removed and a loyalist installed through a managed vote, with the capital and the courts treating the outcome as settled. The deployment of federal troops into Jubaland applied the same instrument against Ahmed Madobe without dislodging him. Sheikh Aden Mohamed Nur, known as Aden Madobe, was sworn in as president of South West State on 6 July, with the prime minister and two other regional presidents in the hall. Aircraft bombed the outskirts of the city that same morning.
A Designation Any Cabinet Can Now Make
South West State’s Council of Ministers met in extraordinary session on 30 August and resolved that intelligence from state and federal security agencies pointed to an alliance between al-Shabaab and Laftagareen’s militia. “Abdiaziz and the militia he leads are now officially recognized as a terrorist group that has joined Al-Shabaab,” the council said, undertaking that federal and South West authorities would confront the group under the same framework used against terrorist organisations. The ministers who voted were appointed by Aden Madobe, who holds the office Laftagareen held in March. Six days later the federal information minister, Abdifatah Qasim, said the federal government had nowhere designated Laftagareen a terrorist.
Mogadishu has spent this year applying the Khawarij label to domestic opponents, freezing assets and withdrawing passports, and the South West security ministry had already asked the federal government to issue an arrest warrant for Laftagareen and route it through Interpol and Kenya. A terrorist designation reaches banking and remittance channels, the travel documents of everyone it names, and the legal basis on which foreign partners may deal with a Somali political faction at all. On the African Union’s own authorisation of 21 August it also converts the designated party into a lawful object of AUSSOM operations.
Every federal member state now in dispute with Villa Somalia keeps armed forces of its own. Puntland fights al-Shabaab and Islamic State with its own units while contesting Mogadishu’s constitutional changes, and Jubaland absorbed federal troop deployments and kept Ahmed Madobe in office. The South West State precedent lays a route between a political dispute and the counterterrorism file that needs no court, no published evidence and no act of parliament, only a vote by ministers the winning side appointed.
Somalia is meanwhile attempting its first universal suffrage elections with President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s own mandate contested and the opposition disputing the timetable. A designation available by cabinet decision alters the price of refusing a result, and it does so before any vote is held. Laftagareen has asked for an independent investigation and offered to give his own information to it. No court, Somali or regional, has been asked to test the designation, and the government that asked AUSSOM for counterterrorism support has declined to make it.
Turkish Aircraft Over the Baidoa Outskirts
Laftagareen’s office answered the 6 July strikes with a statement naming helicopters, F-16s and unmanned aircraft, and recording deaths, injuries and destruction of civilian property. It called the operation a naked invasion mounted by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, whose term it described as expired, and asked Ankara to re-examine how its military assistance is used so that it would not be turned against civilians. The same appeal went to the United Nations, the African Union, IGAD, the European Union, the United States and the United Kingdom, asking them to watch the security and humanitarian situation in Bay.
In May he had been more specific about the aircraft. Six civilians were killed when Baidoa changed hands, he said, three of them a father and two of his children, and Turkiye has no right to threaten poor civilians and the constitutional forces of South West State with an F-16 and tell them they are about to be bombed. Four months later the administration that replaced him announced airstrikes and instructed civilians which areas to leave.
Ankara’s position in Somalia is the largest it holds anywhere abroad. Turkiye runs its biggest overseas military base in Mogadishu, trains the Gorgor commando brigades, supplies equipment, and holds interests running from the port and the airport to oil exploration, fisheries and the planned space launch facility at Warsheikh. Somali political and security figures have accused Turkish drones of striking the Doolow home of General Mahad Abdirahman Aden on 3 and 4 September, injuring him and four civilians. The federal government denied involvement, said preliminary information pointed to explosives being prepared inside the house, and promised a fact finding committee whose findings have not appeared.
Protests followed in Gedo, where demonstrators burned Turkish flags, and the federal answer took the form of a communications forum. The Turkish Presidency’s Directorate of Communications convened officials and academics in Mogadishu on 10 September, the Speaker of the House of the People opened the event, and the information minister proposed permanent machinery linking Somali and Turkish institutions to monitor media narratives and respond to what both governments call disinformation. Two days separated that proposal from the airstrike warning issued in South West State.
South West State Moves From Arrest Warrants to Airstrikes
Forces loyal to Laftagareen fought federal and regional troops in and around Baidoa on 17 August, in fighting that killed dozens including at least four civilians, and the state’s internal security minister said afterwards that government troops had recovered the bodies of al-Shabaab fighters and captured others alive. Three days later the same minister accused Laftagareen of responsibility for eleven explosions in the city and asked the federal government to issue an arrest warrant against him and to work with Kenya through Interpol to have him detained. No independent confirmation of that accusation has been produced.
Renewed fighting broke out on the outskirts on 3 September, when Laftagareen’s forces briefly seized two federal army bases before withdrawing, and the defence ministry said its troops were answering an attack mounted by his fighters and by al-Shabaab together. Bay Regional Hospital treated 71 wounded that day, among them 15 women and 12 children, and local reporting counted more than a dozen dead. Bashir Mohamed Abdullahi, a 23 year old reporter, was shot twice in the back in the Al-Axmaar neighbourhood while trying to reach safety and died four days later. In Middle Shabelle the accusation once ran in the opposite direction, with a faction backed from Mogadishu accused of shielding al-Shabaab fighters.
Al-Shabaab reversed two years of army advances as the African Union began drawing down, a decline the transition out of ATMIS was expected to deepen, and the group has spent 2026 pressing on Bay and the Shabelle valleys while the units that would contest that ground were committed to Baidoa. South West State now carries an insurgency inside its territory and an air campaign announced against a former president, and the same brigades are expected to handle both.
The African Union wrote its neutrality instruction on 21 August, and by 12 September the administration it is being asked to support had published a list of places for civilians to leave that took in the positions of the man who governed South West State until March. Al-Shabaab remains capable of attacking Baidoa and operates across the regions around it. The arrest warrant, the battlefield communiques and the aircraft of a foreign air force are aimed at the Darawish.
