MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA) said on Sunday 11 October that armed men taking orders from former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed had tried to drag its forces into a gunfight in Wadajir district and had forced their way into homes there carrying AK-47 rifles, PKM machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Troops and armoured vehicles had moved overnight onto the airport perimeter and the roads leading to the homes of Sheikh Sharif and former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire. Sheikh Sharif’s office called the accusation fabricated and said his staff had been abducted and food and water stopped at his gate. Defence Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi answered that the opposition was manufacturing a pretext for war.
What NISA Says Happened in Wadajir
The agency’s statement, carried on Sunday evening by the state broadcaster, said it was saddened by and strongly condemned armed attacks on its People’s Protection Forces at the first branch of the General Daud department in Wadajir, in the Banadir region. It blamed militias it said take orders from Sheikh Sharif, accused them of trying to provoke an armed confrontation, and said its own forces had shown restraint and avoided any step that could have led to clashes or harmed civilians.
NISA said its evidence, which it described as camera footage, showed militiamen with AK-47s, PKMs and RPGs forcing their way into houses in the Tiintiinley neighbourhood of Wadajir. Seven camera stills released with the statement show armed men in mixed uniform walking a street past rubble and a building site, and several carry a camera timestamp of 11 October, shortly after 04:00. Nothing published with them identified the men, the houses or the street, and the agency’s text said only that the incidents had taken place in recent days.
The statement then reached back to the early summer in Wadajir. On 24 June, NISA said, the same militias attacked its People’s Protection Forces in Wadajir and abducted one of the personnel on duty, and on 27 June they again blocked operations by forces working in the General Daud department. Neither incident had been made public by the agency at the time, and the statement did not say what became of the abducted man.
In its closing lines the agency described itself as a legally mandated security institution, independent of political disputes, that would not let its forces be drawn into political conflict and would not negotiate over security and public safety. Nothing in the statement explained why the June incidents were raised in October, or why the agency chose Sunday, hours after the overnight deployment around the opposition homes on the edge of Wadajir, to raise them in public.
Troops on the Airport Road
Residents of the districts around the airport, Wadajir among them, said a large body of troops and armoured vehicles was in place around the perimeter of Aden Adde International Airport by about midnight on Saturday 10 October, and that the roads and lanes leading to the compounds of Sheikh Sharif and Hassan Ali Khaire in the Buulo Xuubey and Zoobe neighbourhoods had been sealed off, the first of them in Wadajir. Photographs from residents showed soldiers barricading parts of the Zoobe road, shopkeepers were told to close, and civilians were warned away from the alleys near the two compounds, while no government statement explained why the deployment had been ordered.
Heavily armed units were still in place on Sunday along Jayga Road near the airport. A security official whom local journalists identified as commander of the operation wrote on Facebook that nobody may bear arms in Mogadishu, citing the security of the city, and an exiled journalist reported that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had told elders close to Sheikh Sharif he would act within three days unless the former president disarmed. That account has not been confirmed, and government officials did not answer requests for comment.
Sheikh Sharif’s Himilo Qaran party said on Sunday that it was following what it called sabotage and the creation of civil conflict, and that the president, whose term it says has ended, would bear responsibility for any attack on the premises of politicians. It warned officers and soldiers against carrying out orders aimed at opposition figures and called for a quick agreement on the election dispute. Separately, members of the opposition Salvation Forum issued a parallel warning about troops seen in their neighbourhoods near the Jasiira hotel.
A smaller deployment of the same kind had already been seen at the edge of Wadajir. On the night of 28 September troops with combat vehicles set up checkpoints on the roads to Sheikh Sharif’s home near the airport and turned civilians away, again without any official explanation, and that episode passed without a clash.
Sheikh Sharif’s Answer and Fiqi’s Charge
Within hours Sheikh Sharif’s office issued a written statement rejecting every part of the agency’s account. “The NISA claim cannot change the facts,” it said, calling the accusations against his guards baseless and fabricated to create a pretext against his area, and it denied that his guards had attacked anyone in Wadajir. It said a series of incidents near his home had included road blockades and restrictions on movement, that water and food had been blocked, that heavily armed forces had surrounded the residence and that some of his office staff had been abducted, while his guards held back to avoid an armed clash.
“Somalia does not need a new security tension,” the statement said, asking that all the incidents be documented and verified and that anyone who did wrong under state authority be held to account. It accused NISA of using unverified incidents to pressure and intimidate opposition politicians, called for dialogue and an agreed electoral process, and asked international partners to press for transparency.
Defence Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi had already put out his own version of events in and around Wadajir, saying in a written statement on Sunday that the opposition had hatched a new plot, already failed, to spread the claim that it was under attack, win sympathy and justify mobilising armed groups. Some opposition members, he wrote, believe power can be taken by force and want a war to reach their goals, and he said they had made three failed attempts with foreign money behind them, citing an attack on the Wardhiigley base in September 2025 and rocket and mortar fire in May and June 2026 that struck civilians.
He insisted that government forces had never started a fight and had always been the side attacked, and that no militia would be accepted if its aim was to destabilise the capital. The same day, by one report, government forces and fighters loyal to Sheikh Sharif came close to a confrontation on the airport road. On Monday 12 October the Somali Future Council, which joins the Salvation Forum with the Puntland and Jubaland administrations, condemned the forces around Sheikh Sharif’s home as harassment and said the president would bear responsibility for whatever followed, while elders denied carrying a mediation to Villa Somalia and said the city was calm.
June’s Fighting and the Mandate Behind It
The forces now facing each other in Wadajir have fought before. On 3 June, as fighting in the capital killed at least thirteen people and displaced some 12,500 households, troops were posted around the homes of Sheikh Sharif and Hassan Ali Khaire, and on 10 June more forces moved into the Buulo Xuubey quarter of Wadajir, near both residences. International mediation ended that round, and the two men went back to their homes near the airport. The two dates NISA now cites, 24 and 27 June, fall in the weeks that followed.
Khaire, whose compound was sealed off again on Saturday night, said on Monday 12 October that posting troops around the homes of former national leaders was a provocation, accused President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of being thirsty for blood and said the crisis could not be settled by military force and intimidation.
Beneath the standoff in Wadajir lies the dispute over the mandate. The Halane talks mediated by American and British diplomats collapsed in May over whether the president’s term had run out, with the opposition declaring that it expired on 15 May and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud holding that parliament’s amendments keep him in office until May 2027. On 1 October Fiqi branded opposition figures meeting in Abu Dhabi traitors who were studying how Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces work, and on 7 October Sheikh Sharif replied that the president wanted to declare his blood lawful to shed with weapons bought for the war on al-Shabaab.
Sheikh Sharif brings a long record to the standoff in Wadajir, having led the Islamic Courts Union that drove the faction leaders from Mogadishu in 2006 and served as president from 2009 to 2012, and he draws armed support from his own branch of the Abgaal, the clan family of the president. Abdikarim Ali Kar, a former presidential spokesman, warned that an operation against him could push the country back toward the war of 1991 and close the airport, a fear the opposition voiced in August.
Al-Shabaab, meanwhile, still holds ground within thirty kilometres of the capital, and in the four days before the Wadajir statement the federal government lost Qansaxdheere, Beled Hawo and, by one count, Hees. The agency that says it stands outside politics has now put its name to an accusation against a former head of state.
