BAIDOA, SOMALIA – Forces loyal to former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen entered Bardaale district in the Bay region on Friday 16 October, about 60 kilometres from Baidoa, and the troops holding it pulled out without a serious fight while the district commissioner took refuge in an Ethiopian army base. Bardaale district is the third in the Bay region to change hands in eight days, after Qansaxdheere on 8 October and Buurhakaba on the Mogadishu road on 15 October, where Laftagareen’s camp displayed dozens of captured federal soldiers, and federal troops left their camps at Awdiinle, about 30 kilometres west of Baidoa, the same night. By Friday evening Laftagareen’s office said its forces held Diinsoor as well. President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe was in Mogadishu, and his administration’s answer so far was a spokesman’s claim that al-Shabaab had fought beside the Darawish at Buurhakaba.
Bardaale District Changes Hands
The fighters came into the town from several directions, according to local accounts of the takeover, and the forces stationed in Bardaale district left once a large contingent was inside, with no heavy fighting reported in the streets. The commissioner was reported to have gone into the Ethiopian base, where Ethiopian troops have been stationed for several years. Residents are mostly Leysaan, one of the larger clans of Bay and Bakool, and officials in the town had been warned several days earlier that an attack could come. No casualty figure has been published. Laftagareen’s camp was reported to have moved from frontal assaults to local talks and money to win over the forces holding the towns, and Bardaale changed hands without a fight.
Reports on Tuesday 13 October had already placed Laftagareen’s forces on the move around Bardaale district and neighbouring Diinsoor, and said the district’s deputy commissioner for security and politics had gone over to them. That defection was never confirmed and no reason for it was published. In August a contingent of fighters led by Ali Mohamed Salad was reported to have come out of Berdaale, the alternative spelling of the same town, to join the forces gathering on the outskirts of Baidoa, and Ugaas Hassan was reported to have welcomed them. A Darawish commander was killed by an al-Shabaab roadside bomb in Bardaale district in September 2024, when the Darawish still served Laftagareen as the state’s own force. Clan militias there had fought South West forces that June.
On 23 July the federal defence ministry said more than 150 fighters who had backed Laftagareen, led by Ibrahim Mohamed Nur Kalaay, a former commissioner of neighbouring Awdiinle, had surrendered with weapons and vehicles in the Bay region. It said the group had abandoned politically motivated armed activity there. Three months later the same opposition holds Bardaale district, Qansaxdheere and Buurhakaba, three district towns within 90 kilometres of Baidoa. On the night of Thursday 15 October the federal troops at Awdiinle, on the road from Baidoa to Luuq, left their camps, and residents were reported to have looted what they left behind; the government gave no reason for the withdrawal.
Qansaxdheere, Buurhakaba and the Prisoners
Qansaxdheere fell on Thursday 8 October, about 90 kilometres southwest of Baidoa, and part of its garrison surrendered while the rest withdrew into a camp the Ethiopian army keeps in that district. Forces aligned with the federal government had held it since the March campaign that removed Laftagareen from Baidoa, and President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe’s administration declared Laftagareen’s Darawish a terrorist group in August. On the same Thursday Ethiopia told the UN Security Council that Eritrean troops had pushed sixty kilometres into its north. The federal committee on money laundering put Laftagareen, his spokesman and eight others on its list of al-Shabaab financiers on 13 October.
Two days later the Darawish attacked Buurhakaba at about five in the morning and by mid-morning ministers of Laftagareen’s camp were speaking from the town centre, and Ugaas Hassan said on video that the forces would remain there. Buurhakaba lies about 60 kilometres from Baidoa, the same distance as Bardaale district. Ethiopian soldiers serving with the African Union mission held the Buurhakaba base from 2014 until 8 August, when they handed it to the Somali army’s 60th Division, and units of that division had been attacked inside Baidoa on 28 September. Laftagareen’s camp displayed dozens of federal troops it said were captured in the town, with injuries reported on both sides and no figure for the dead.
Bardaale district followed on Friday morning. The South West administration’s spokesman, Hayow, said al-Shabaab fighters had attacked Buurhakaba together with Laftagareen’s forces and that it would retake the district, and the defence ministry has published no account of the federal troops shown as prisoners there. On Friday evening Laftagareen’s office said its Darawish held Qansaxdheere, Buurhakaba, Bardaale and Diinsoor and the Awdiinle area and accused President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of leading the forces fighting them in Bay. A video said to show his fighters entering Diinsoor circulated that night, and no other side has confirmed it. Buurhakaba sits on the main road between Mogadishu and Baidoa, so the route from the capital to the South West capital now runs through a district the Darawish say they hold, ten weeks after the army took over the base there from the Ethiopians.
Ethiopian Bases in Bardaale District and Qansaxdheere
Ethiopian units operate in Bay, Bakool, Gedo and Hiiraan, and twice in eight days a federal garrison or official in Bay has gone into an Ethiopian camp as the Darawish arrived. On Wednesday 30 September reports said Addis Ababa was preparing to pull more than 3,000 ENDF soldiers out of Somalia to fight in Tigray, and a defence ministry official in Mogadishu said the next day that Ethiopia had told the government nothing about it. The plan surfaced the day after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud sat with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa, and Baidoa went under a dusk curfew that same Wednesday after a third round of fighting between the army and Laftagareen’s forces.
On 4 October President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed the Alamein communique with the presidents of Egypt and Eritrea and Sudan’s military ruler, and on 8 October Ethiopia accused Eritrea of an all-out invasion. The communique sides with Cairo and Khartoum on the Nile and says the Red Sea belongs to the states on its shores, and Egyptian officers are reported to be preparing a first deployment of Egyptian troops to a base north of Mogadishu. Mogadishu’s deputy foreign minister said on 12 October that Somalia was neutral between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The Ethiopian camps in Qansaxdheere and Bardaale district have taken in the men the federal government and Baidoa sent to hold those towns, four and twelve days after Mogadishu signed at Alamein.
None of the Ethiopian camps in Bay has been reported taking part in the fighting. The Qansaxdheere garrison and the commissioner of Bardaale district are now sheltering on ground held by a foreign army, inside towns held by the Darawish. If the ENDF pullout goes ahead, Ethiopia would leave those bases at a time when Laftagareen’s forces hold the towns around them and federal forces hold Baidoa itself, with the road behind it running through Buurhakaba.
A Political Militia in a Famine Warning Zone
Larry Andre, a former American ambassador to Somalia, said in a television interview reported on 12 and 13 October that the federal government was “using its forces primarily as a political militia.” He called it “an illegitimate government that has overstayed its mandate,” and urged international pressure to stop the fighting in South West State, three days before Bardaale district changed hands. He said the government was sending troops against people in the state most threatened by famine, and that its operations were producing more refugees from areas already in crisis. He has made the argument before, saying in June that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud was “effectively another major Somaliland independence supporter” because of the way he was dismantling the federal system. No federal response to the interview has been published.
The food security classification system warned in September that about 26,000 displaced people in Baidoa could face famine between October and December if flooding worsens and aid stays short. The city already hosts hundreds of thousands of people displaced by earlier fighting and drought, and violence since August has displaced thousands more and disrupted access to health care and aid. After the fighting inside Baidoa on 28 September the regional hospital received 69 patients, five of them children, and Doctors Without Borders reported three dead, among them a health worker. More than 1,700 families have fled villages near Jannaale in Lower Shabelle since early September to escape airstrikes and ground fighting there, and many arrived with nothing.
On Friday 9 October, the day after Qansaxdheere fell, al-Shabaab took Hees near Mataban on the road to Beledweyne, where federal troops had fought it six days after the Mahaas agreement, and Jubaland took Beled Hawo in Gedo from federal troops the same day. Within eight days the federal government lost Hees to al-Shabaab, Beled Hawo to Jubaland, and Qansaxdheere, Buurhakaba and Bardaale district to the former South West president it removed in March, whose office now claims Diinsoor as well.
