BELEDWEYNE, SOMALIA – Federal troops and al-Shabaab fighters fought with heavy and light weapons on the morning of Friday 9 October around Hees and Xaanshigadafer, two villages in Mahaas district of Hiiraan, after the army had spent several days setting up positions at Hees to reinforce its presence there. The clash came a day after residents of Tardo, in neighbouring Jalalaqsi district, fought al-Shabaab for hours when its fighters tried to take a herder’s rifle, leaving at least seven people dead by a local administrator’s count. Both battles followed the agreement al-Shabaab announced in Mahaas on Saturday 3 October, in which Hawadle elders it did not name undertook to keep the Macawisley militias out of their areas. The Hirshabelle interior minister says those elders do not represent the people of Hiiraan.
Federal Positions at Hees
Residents described gunfire from light and heavy weapons across the ground between Xaanshigadafer and Hees early on Friday, in fighting between federal forces and al-Shabaab that followed the army’s move into positions at Hees over the preceding days. Local reports gave the purpose of that deployment as strengthening the government’s military presence in the area, and the first accounts spoke of dead and wounded on both sides. Later the same morning al-Shabaab claimed through its own media that its fighters had overrun the army’s base at Hees, killing two soldiers and seizing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. By the afternoon of Friday 9 October the army had neither confirmed nor denied that claim, no independent account had established who held the positions, and no unit or commander had been named.
Hees lies in Mahaas district, whose capital al-Shabaab has held since July 2025. Government troops withdrew from Mahaas on the night of 26 July that year without telling the Macawisley fighters who were defending the town beside them. The group’s fighters entered the town the next morning, in a week when federal aircraft were moving troops to Gedo for a confrontation with Jubaland. Moreover, the fall of Mahaas came weeks after al-Shabaab took Moqokori and then Tardo, and it opened the roads between Mahaas and Beledweyne to the group. The African Union mission had handed its forward base in Mahaas to the Somali army on 7 August 2024, so the army had carried sole responsibility for the district for almost a year before it pulled out.
On Friday 24 July 2026 Macawisley fighters, reinforced later in the day by army units, fought al-Shabaab at Waab-weyn in Mahaas district after the group killed two residents, during what were described as coordinated federal and local operations in the district. Eight days later, on Saturday 1 August, al-Shabaab attacked Teedaan, also in Mahaas district, and government forces withdrew from it by evening without any announced counterattack. No operation to retake Mahaas or Teedaan had been declared by the time Hawadle elders sat down with al-Shabaab in Mahaas on 3 October. Since then the defence ministry has said nothing in public about the purpose or the strength of the positions at Hees, which local reporting places in the days before Friday’s fighting.
A Herder’s Rifle at Tardo
On Thursday 8 October al-Shabaab fighters in Tardo tried to take a weapon from a local herder, who refused to give it up, and the residents who came to his aid were soon in an armed confrontation with the group. Osman Hussein Gure, the local administrator known as Osman Dheere, said the fighting went on for several hours and that at least seven people were killed and nine wounded, with civilians among the dead. Furthermore, he said al-Shabaab fighters surrounded the area as the battle intensified, and that residents fled to places between 40 and 80 kilometres away.
One Somali-language report counted at least five dead and nine wounded after al-Shabaab members opened fire at the market, and another put the number of civilians killed at eleven while describing the figure as preliminary. That second report also said it could not yet establish who held Tardo once the shooting stopped. Osman Dheere called on the federal government and the Hirshabelle administration to step in, saying residents needed immediate help and a lasting answer to the recurring violence, and he made the appeal before the fighting at Hees began.
Tardo was one of the places the Macawisley took from al-Shabaab in September 2022, at the height of the clan uprising that began in Hiiraan that year. On Sunday 13 July 2025 al-Shabaab announced that it had retaken the area, after government forces withdrew and the Hawadle militia that had held it for three years pulled out without a fight, having learned that an attack was coming. A week earlier the group had taken Moqokori, and both places sit on the roads that join Hiiraan to Galguduud. Fifteen months after that announcement, the fighting at Tardo set residents against al-Shabaab over a single rifle, and the army’s clash at Hees followed less than a day later.
Sixteen Points Agreed in Mahaas
Al-Shabaab announced on Saturday 3 October that it had reached an agreement with Hawadle elders at a meeting in Mahaas attended by dozens of elders and by former Macawisley fighters, and its media arm released photographs and a video communique the same evening. The sixteen-point joint statement that circulated afterwards commits the elders to keep the peace in areas the clan controls or influences, and to refuse the Macawisley any recruitment, operations or shelter there. The group named three of its own representatives, Hussein Ali Fidow, Hassan Yacqub Ali and Mohamed Abu Abdalla, and named no Hawadle signatory.
Al-Shabaab officials also said the clan supported implementing Islamic law in the areas where the Hawadle live, and former Macawisley members at the meeting described the war as one that had cost them heavy casualties and economic losses. The Hawadle of central Hiiraan took up arms against al-Shabaab in 2022 and, with federal troops and American aircraft, drove the group from most of the inhabited country between Beledweyne and the Galguduud border. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, elected in May 2022, built his campaign against the group around that uprising, and in September 2023 he went to Mahaas to seek the backing of Hawadle elders.
Local reporting described the residents who fought al-Shabaab at Tardo on Thursday as Macawisley, the force the Mahaas clause bars from Hawadle areas. The troops at Hees belong to the army those militias fought beside in 2022. Osman Dheere questioned whether the agreement was genuine and suggested that some of the videos linked to it had been made or altered with artificial intelligence, though he offered no evidence for that. By Monday 5 October no Hawadle participant had published an account of the terms. Arrangements between al-Shabaab and Hawadle sub-clans were also reported in 2023, the year after the uprising began, and the latest one was announced six days before the army went into action at Hees.
Jowhar Answers the Elders
On Wednesday 7 October the Hirshabelle interior minister, Abdirahman Dahir Gure, known as Karoore, said in an interview that the elders at Mahaas were neither representatives of the people of Hiiraan nor its recognised traditional elders. He said they had long worked with al-Shabaab, called their videos propaganda, and said the state would take firm, legally grounded action against those who went to the group. No federal statement on the Mahaas agreement had been reported by Friday 9 October, when the army was fighting at Hees.
On Thursday 10 September President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud met Abgaal politicians in Mogadishu, backed President Ali Gudlawe for a second term as head of Hirshabelle and asked the other Abgaal contenders to stand aside. Two days later Vice President Yusuf Ahmed Hagar Dabageed, a Hawadle, accused the president of breaking an understanding that the post would go to a Hawadle candidate. On 14 September Ugas Yusuf Ugas Hassan told residents in Beledweyne, “We are consulting, and we will make tough and decisive decisions,” and asked those with weapons and money to be ready to carry them out.
Hawadle gatherings in Beledweyne declared on 21 September that no Hirshabelle vote would be held in Hiiraan without a prior agreement, and elders kept regional officials and aircraft out of the airports they control. A rival Hawadle council in Mogadishu, chaired by former President Ali Abdullahi Osoble, had endorsed President Ali Gudlawe on 15 September. On Saturday 3 October, the day of the Mahaas meeting, the electoral commission announced in Jowhar that the Justice and Solidarity Party had won 78 of 99 seats, without listing which districts had voted, although six of the twelve districts due to vote lie in Hiiraan.
In the six days after those results were read in Jowhar, al-Shabaab announced terms with Hawadle elders in Mahaas, Hirshabelle promised legal action against those elders, residents of Tardo fought the group over one rifle, and the army set up positions at Hees, in the same district as the town it withdrew from in July 2025.
