MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – The Speaker of the House of the People, Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur, told a dinner for South West State’s federal lawmakers in Mogadishu on Sunday 18 October that the government should ask Nairobi why a man it has identified as a member of al-Shabaab still lives openly in Kenya. He also said the government should make the African Union peacekeepers explain how fighters he described as al-Shabaab came to hold districts the mission once guarded. Five days earlier a federal committee had listed former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen among ten al-Shabaab financiers, and Laftagareen has lived in Nairobi since federal forces entered Baidoa in March. His Darawish took Qansaxdheere, Buurhakaba, Bardaale, Diinsoor and Awdiinle between 8 and 17 October, and President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe, who lost those districts, was among the Speaker’s guests.
The Dinner and the Demand
The dinner honoured members of both chambers of the federal parliament elected from South West State, and its guests included President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe, Deputy Prime Minister Jibril Abdirashid Haji Abdi and the Deputy Speaker, Abdullahi Omar Abshirow. Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur told them that the security of South West State needed urgent attention, above all the return of al-Shabaab to ground that government and peacekeeping forces had previously held. His demand on the African Union mission was specific: “We call on the Federal Government to investigate how al-Shabaab militias established a presence in areas previously secured by the peacekeeping forces, and to ensure accountability,” he said.
He asked the government to explain why a person it has identified as a member of al-Shabaab “still lives openly in known places in Kenya”. He argued that diplomatic and economic ties with Nairobi should not stop Mogadishu from raising it, since a friendly country could not host a man “who is spilling the blood of the Somali people”. The Speaker also urged the government to reassure residents of the districts that had changed hands, which by the night of the dinner meant every district of Bay except Baidoa.
The Darawish loyal to former President Laftagareen took Qansaxdheere on 8 October, Buurhakaba district on 15 October and Bardaale on 16 October, and held Diinsoor and Awdiinle by Saturday 17 October, the last of them about 30 kilometres from Baidoa. Most of the districts changed hands without a fight, and Laftagareen, whom the federal prime minister has described as living in Nairobi, said in a statement that his forces had “successfully recaptured and liberated four districts”.
A resident of Bardaale described fighters arriving on motorcycles and local officials fleeing to the Ethiopian base nearby, where the soldiers stayed inside. The South West information minister, Nur Sidow Baba, told reporters in Baidoa that every district would be brought back under government control, and on Sunday 18 October the state announced an offensive that would begin at Buurhakaba. President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe had been in Mogadishu since at least Friday 16 October and met the Speaker in his office before the dinner.
Ankara, the Ministry and the Chair
Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur, known as Jaamac, served at the Somali embassy in Ankara from 2009 to 2017 and rose to chargé d’affaires. He then became deputy director of the National Intelligence and Security Agency, justice minister and, from December 2021 to March 2025, defence minister across the last months of Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo’s term and the first half of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s. In that post he signed the ten-year defence and economic framework with Turkiye in Ankara on 8 February 2024, before being moved to the ports ministry in March 2025.
He reached the Speaker’s chair on 10 August 2026 in a secret ballot at Villa Hargeysa, with President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre backing him openly and a rival withdrawing after a deal the presidency brokered. The seat had been vacated when Villa Somalia installed its previous occupant, now President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe, in Baidoa after the March offensive, and both men come from the Digil and Mirifle constituency of South West State, whose Arlaadi Council had objected before the vote to reducing its politics to a single post. On 5 September the former intelligence chief Fahad Yasin accused the Speaker of a role in the Doolow strike that wounded General Mahad Abdirahman Aden, Taliye Shub, whom the federal government has since put on its list of al-Shabaab financiers.
Laftagareen, whom the federal government has listed and its prime minister places in Nairobi, is the president Villa Somalia removed by force in March, in an offensive backed by Turkish airpower. The Ethiopian soldiers the Speaker now wants answerable were in Bay throughout his time at the defence ministry, including the months in 2024 when Mogadishu was demanding their departure. Police were reported on the same Sunday to have entered two Hormuud premises in Mogadishu under a court warrant in connection with South West State. The Banadir police command called the reports baseless in a statement dated 18 October and warned that anyone spreading them would face legal action.
The Man in Nairobi
Former President Laftagareen resigned on 30 March, the day federal forces entered Baidoa, and moved to Nairobi. Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre addressed him directly on 26 September, “Where you have gone is not a good place. Come back,” and said the next day that he was resting in Nairobi while his fighters had been left as guests of al-Shabaab. After the Darawish attack on Baidoa of 17 August, South West’s security minister, Osman Isaaq Mohamed, called on Kenya to arrest him and return him to Somalia through Interpol. No Kenyan reply was reported. Laftagareen’s office rejected the al-Shabaab allegations on 27 August, called his fighters the South West Darawish and offered to join an independent investigation.
The federal escalation came on 13 October, when the national anti-money laundering committee listed ten men, Laftagareen and his spokesman among them, as financiers of al-Shabaab in a two-page decision that set out no evidence against any of them. Its December 2025 list of eight al-Shabaab leaders had given a birth year, a post and an accusation for each name. Kenya, which keeps troops in the African Union mission in Jubaland, had published no reply to the Speaker by Monday 19 October.
Abdirashid Janan, whom President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud sent to Gedo as intelligence chief in July 2025, handed his Beled Hawo camps to Jubaland on Friday 9 October and left Mandera the same morning on a Kenyan government military aircraft bound for Nairobi, two months after he had told his troops that his quarrel with President Ahmed Madobe’s administration was over. The Future Council, the alliance of opposition leaders, the Puntland and Jubaland administrations and federal lawmakers that has rejected the electoral commission’s timetable, is expected to meet in Nairobi in the coming days to agree its response. Its members include the Jubaland administration whose intelligence officers took over Janan’s camps.
The Peacekeepers Mogadishu Wanted Gone
Ethiopia’s soldiers in Somalia serve partly under the African Union mission and partly under direct agreement with Mogadishu, and in June 2024 the federal government wanted all of them gone. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s national security adviser, Hussein Sheikh-Ali, said that month that the government expected every Ethiopian soldier to leave when the transition mission’s mandate ended in December. South West’s security minister under former President Laftagareen, Hassan Abdulkadir Mohamed, said the same week that the state was happy to have Ethiopian troops stay and that no one could decide the matter unilaterally. Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur was defence minister at the time. The Ankara Declaration of December 2024 settled the quarrel over Ethiopia’s memorandum with Somaliland and kept Ethiopia in the mission, alongside the contingent Nairobi keeps in Jubaland.
The Ethiopian army held its base in Buurhakaba district from 2014 until 8 August 2026, when it handed the post on the Mogadishu to Baidoa road to the Somali army’s 60th Division; the Darawish took the district ten weeks later. At the end of September, reports said Ethiopia was preparing to withdraw more than 3,000 soldiers from Somalia to fight the rebellion that has reopened the war in Tigray, and a defence ministry official in Mogadishu said Addis Ababa had given no notice. Federal officials are reported to have asked the Ethiopian commanders in Bay to defend the towns they had garrisoned for more than a decade, and the commanders are reported to have replied that their mandate does not extend to a political conflict between Somali rivals.
Bardaale’s district commissioner is reported to have taken refuge in the Ethiopian base when the Darawish arrived on 16 October, and the Ethiopian camp in Qansaxdheere district took in the part of the garrison that did not surrender on 8 October. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud met Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in Addis Ababa on 29 September and in early October sat with the leaders of Egypt and Eritrea at Alamein. Nineteen days after the Addis Ababa meeting, the Speaker whom President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud helped elect asked the government to hold the peacekeepers to account for the towns they did not defend, and to demand an explanation from Nairobi for the man living in its capital.
