DOOLOW, SOMALIA – General Mahad Abdirahman Aden, the former commander of Somalia’s Custodial Corps known across Somali newsrooms as Taliye Shub, has given his first public account of the 3 September strike on his house in Doolow. In it Taliye Shub puts a Turkish F-16 over the roof at midnight, two missiles into the room where he was sleeping and his own driver in the hands of the district commissioner. Speaking in an interview on Friday 18 September, he named the Speaker of the House of the People, the director of the national intelligence agency and the man installed over South West State as the figures he holds responsible. He produced no document, no photograph of the aircraft and no intercept, and the federal government still maintains that the explosions came from inside the building.
Taliye Shub Puts an Aircraft Over Doolow at Midnight
The hour Taliye Shub gave was midnight. He said he woke to an aircraft over the roof of the compound, saw it, and was struck by the first missile moments later, with a second arriving behind it. Both, by his account, came down on the part of the building where he had been lying. One of them appeared to enter the room itself, and the walls and the roof came apart around him. He was hit by shrapnel and displayed the fragments and the wound on his face during the interview. He then walked out to the general hospital in Doolow, where he was treated the same night alongside the others hurt in the compound, and he said his condition has since improved.
Jubaland’s own administration published a different count after the strike, five people injured including his wife, and no dead at all. Taliye Shub gave a heavier one, describing a woman killed and several others wounded beside him. The counts that circulated out of Gedo have never been reconciled with one another. Seventeen days on there is no published casualty list, no hospital record and no name. The state administration that governs Doolow and the man the missiles were aimed at still give different answers to the question of who died in the compound that night. The first reports out of Gedo, carried while no government would claim the strike, counted the wounded and left the dead uncounted.
Taliye Shub commanded the Custodial Corps, the prison service that holds Somalia’s convicted militants and a good number of its political detainees. He is also the father-in-law of former President Abdiaziz Laftagareen, whom President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government removed from the South West State presidency in March. He had been reported under house arrest in Mogadishu in the weeks before the attack, and he had travelled to Doolow, a border town in Gedo that sits inside Jubaland’s writ and beyond the reach of the federal army. The compound the missiles found also housed the district commissioner. Federal forces and fighters loyal to former President Laftagareen have fought in and around Baidoa since March, and the defence ministry has counted the dead from those battles as al-Shabaab.
The Driver Taliye Shub Says Came Back From Mogadishu
Taliye Shub said political friends who stayed with him for several nights in Doolow warned him about the young man who drove his car, a former driver of his from Mogadishu, and told him to dismiss the man. He had noticed the same behaviour himself, the driver stepping aside with a telephone and speaking quietly, and he sent him back to Mogadishu. The driver telephoned again, returned to Doolow, and was in the house when the missiles arrived three nights later.
At the hospital that night, by his account, the district commissioner arrived with the driver, looked at him, said that was the man, arrested him and took his statement. Taliye Shub said the driver remains in custody and that an investigation is running. He offered two further details from the days before the attack. Masons repairing the house told him the same man had photographed the building from all four sides. A female worker then came into the room where his head lay, writing something down, and told him the light was being switched off and that he should step outside. He told her to switch it off and get on with her work. That was the night of the explosions, and she has since gone.
Nothing in the account has been verified by anyone outside Taliye Shub’s own circle. The driver has not been charged in public, no investigating authority has produced a name, a transcript or a photograph, and the masons and the house worker have not spoken. Taliye Shub is describing a targeting chain, a watcher inside the compound feeding a position to an aircraft, and that is a claim only the people holding the detainee can settle. Jubaland’s police have said nothing about the arrest. The federal government maintains that no aircraft flew over Doolow at all, and its published explanation of the night contains no aircraft, no driver and no arrest.
Taliye Shub Names the Speaker, the Intelligence Director and Baidoa
Taliye Shub named Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur, the Speaker of the House of the People, Mahad Mohamed Salad, the director of the National Intelligence and Security Agency, and President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe, installed over South West State in June after federal forces removed his father-in-law. He said a Turkish aircraft carried out the strike and that these men were part of the operation against him. He produced no evidence for any of it, and none of the three has answered him.
Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur has been named for Doolow once already, when a former intelligence chief put the strike at the Speaker’s door on 5 September and the federal government replied by naming nobody at all. Taliye Shub adds the victim’s own voice to that accusation and two further names to it. Mahad Mohamed Salad runs the agency that would have to investigate a targeted killing on Somali soil. President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe governs the state whose army was sent into the Bay region against the president it removed, and the daughter of Taliye Shub is married into that removed president’s household.
Former President Laftagareen made his own allegation in the days after the strike, naming two Turkish nationals and one Somali national, and three weeks later nothing has come of it. The sequence has repeated at Garmaal, at Kismayo and now at Doolow. A senior figure names a foreign air force and a set of officials, the officials decline to reply, no investigation reports, and the claim passes into the stock of things Somalis believe without ever having been tested. Taliye Shub has more standing than most to make the charge, since he was under the roof when it came in. Proving it is beyond him, because his evidence amounts to a crater, a detainee in somebody else’s custody and what he says he saw in a night sky.
A Fact-Finding Committee With Nothing to Show
The federal government’s explanation has not moved since 5 September. It said preliminary information indicated the blasts came from explosives being prepared inside the house, denied that any strike had taken place, and promised a fact-finding committee to establish the motive and the authors. Seventeen days after the explosions, no committee has reported, no findings have been published, and the government has not responded to the interview in which Taliye Shub set out what he says he saw.
Jubaland’s information ministry accused Turkish military aircraft of the attack within days, and the administration has since joined Puntland in asking the Security Council to revisit the arms embargo lifted in December 2023. Protests ran through Kismayo, Afmadow, Doolow and Garbahaarey in the days that followed, Turkish flags burned in Kismayo, and hundreds of people demonstrated in Dangoroyo in Puntland on 9 September. Ankara has not publicly acknowledged responsibility for Doolow, and it has not publicly denied it either, which is the position it has held since the strikes on the Nugaal coast in August. Ankara has trained thousands of Somali soldiers over the past decade, and the Turkish parliament renewed its military deployment to Somalia for another two years in July.
Seventeen days after two missiles came through his roof, Taliye Shub has a type for the aircraft, a name for the man he says guided it to the room and three names in Mogadishu and Baidoa. The state that is supposed to protect him offers a fact-finding committee that has published nothing and an explanation putting the bomb in his own bedroom. The intelligence service and the parliament are the machinery that exists to choose between those two versions, and two of the men Taliye Shub has accused run them. Everything else on the record of 3 September was put there by Taliye Shub himself, three weeks late, holding up fragments taken out of his own face.
