MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – The African Union mission in Somalia told the UN support office in a letter dated Saturday 31 October that its Sector 1 troops are withdrawing from the Barawe sub-sector to take over four Lower Shabelle positions that Uganda’s bilateral force is leaving, and asked the office to record Barawe as “non-mission positions”. The first page of the letter, reference AUSSOM/HOM/22/044.26, names the four as Sabiid-Anole, Bariire, Awdheegle and Bulonagad, calls them “very critical to Mogadishu security”, and ties the move to the rotation of Ugandan Battle Groups 45 and 48 in November. Barawe, a port about 220 kilometres southwest of the capital, is the official capital of South West State. On Tuesday 3 November reports citing local security sources said Ugandan troops had handed their bases at Barawe and Shalanbood to the Somali army, and neither the mission nor the federal government had confirmed it.
What AUSSOM Asked the UN Support Office to Record
The letter rests its request on paragraph 20 of the ATMIS-UNSOS Guidelines for the Establishment, Handover and Closure of Forward Operating Bases, rules drawn up for the previous African Union mission and still applied to the bases of its successor. On that footing it “formally notifies UNSOS of the Mission’s intention to withdraw troops from Barawe”. The letter then makes three numbered requests of the support office. UNSOS is asked to amend its records to treat Sabiid-Anole, Bariire, Awdheegle and Bulonagad as “new AUSSOM’s locations”, to amend them again so that the Barawe sub-sector counts as “non-mission positions”, and to continue providing logistics support to the four new sites. Nothing on the page asks for support at Barawe after the mission’s troops leave it, and nothing names the force expected to replace them there.
“To avoid this imminent security vacuum,” the letter says, “AUSSOM Sector 1 is in the process of withdrawing from Barawe Sub-Sector to occupy the above-mentioned locations that will be vacated by the Bilateral Forces.” Its stated reason is distance, and noting the four positions’ “close proximity to Mogadishu city”, it argues that “the need to annex those locations as part of AUSSOM FOBs in the spirit of strengthening Mogadishu security, readily manifest itself.” Outside the dateline the page names Mogadishu four times and Barawe three times, and every mention of Barawe concerns leaving it.
The page opens with the salutation “Excellency” and carries neither the recipient’s name nor the signature, which fall on a later page. Its letterhead is that of the mission’s Office of the Special Representative, and it still gives the office’s email address under the au-amisomhom name carried over from the AMISOM years. Reports on Monday 2 November of an AUSSOM letter to the support office bearing the same date said it warned that the Ugandan withdrawal could leave parts of Lower Shabelle open to al-Shabaab attacks. Neither AUSSOM nor UNSOS had published anything on the letter or on Barawe by Tuesday.
The Bilateral Force and the Entebbe Resolution
“As you are aware, during the Summit of Heads of State of TCCs which held on 25 April 2025 in Entebbe, Uganda, it was resolved, among other things, that any TCC that is willing and able to deploy Bilateral Forces to secure Mogadishu should do so,” the letter begins. Uganda did, and the letter credits that force with recapturing and holding “Sabiid-Anole, Bariire, Awdheegle, Mubarack, Dalsalam and Bulonagad positions in the past seventeen (17) months”. The next sentence reads: “However, UPDF leadership has decided to withdraw its Bilateral Force from Somalia.”
The letter is dated two days before Colonel Chris Magezi announced for the Ugandan army on Monday 2 November that the withdrawal of the bilateral contingent was “effective immediately”, while General Muhoozi Kainerugaba’s post of Thursday 29 October had said only that the withdrawal had started, without naming either force. By 31 October the African Union mission was already writing to the UN on the basis that the bilateral force was going first, and was redrawing its own map of Sector 1, Barawe included, to match.
The public record of the operations the letter now assigns to the bilateral force credited the African Union mission at the time, the same mission whose Sector 1 troops held Barawe. AUSSOM’s own announcement of 8 August 2025 described joint AUSSOM and Somali security forces recapturing Bariire after a week-long offensive, quoting the Special Representative, the force commander and the Ugandan contingent commander. The Ugandan army’s account of October 2025 headlined AUSSOM-UPDF and Somali forces retaking Awdheegle in the third phase of Operation Silent Storm. Sabiid and Anole had changed hands twice in the summer of 2025, and Mubarak followed in March 2026 with a forward operating base in Qoryooley district.
If the bilateral force held those posts, they sat outside the mission’s records, unlike the Barawe sub-sector, which is why the letter must ask UNSOS to enter the four as new AUSSOM locations before it can ask the office to supply them. Mubarak and Dalsalam appear in the list of six the bilateral force took and are missing from the four the mission will occupy, and the page does not say who holds them after the Ugandans leave.
Barawe After the African Union Leaves
Somali troops and African Union forces took Barawe from al-Shabaab on 5 October 2014, in an offensive that cost the group its last major port on the southern coast. The town is the official capital of South West State, whose government sits in Baidoa, and it has been the seat of a sub-sector of the African Union mission under each of its three names. Ugandan battle groups hold Sector 1, which covers Mogadishu and Lower Shabelle, and the Barawe sub-sector is the southern end of it. In August the Ugandan army described Battle Group 45, under Colonel Justus Musenene, working from its base in Barawe with the district commissioner, Umar Abdullahi Mohamed, and Battle Group 45 is the formation the November rotation replaces.
At Entebbe on Monday 26 October, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s request to President Museveni, as reported in Kampala from Somali accounts, concerned four positions held by Ugandan troops, Barawe, Bulo Marer, Qoryooley and Jannaale, which Somali forces were said to need more time to take over. Five days later the African Union mission asked the UN to remove Barawe from its books. The soldiers the mission has in the Barawe sub-sector are moving to the four posts nearer Mogadishu, during the same November rotation that brings Battle Group 48 in to replace Battle Group 45.
General Ibrahim Mohamed Mahmoud, the Somali army’s chief of defence forces, visited troops in Barawe on Monday 2 November, received briefings on local security and told them to stay on high alert and to intensify operations against al-Shabaab, according to an army statement. The statement did not say whether Somali soldiers would take over the bases the African Union leaves. Farhan Isak Yusuf, deputy executive director of the Mogadishu-based research group Somali Public Agenda, said the army lacks resources. A day later, reports citing local security sources said Ugandan troops had handed their bases at Barawe and Shalanbood to the Somali army and that federal forces were being sent to take over security, without naming a unit.
The federal defence ministry had published nothing on the letter by Tuesday, and South West State, where President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe’s administration faces former President Laftagareen’s forces in Bay, had issued no statement on Barawe either, although the port is the administration’s official capital.
Supplies for Four Bases From an Office Running Out of Time
The third request in the letter asks UNSOS to “facilitate the continued provision of logistics support to Sabiid-Anole, Bariire, Awdheegle, and Bulonagad, respectively.” The office that receives it is due to lose American backing at the end of the year. Washington reportedly notified the African Union on 1 July that its support for the mission’s logistics structure would end on 31 December, and it has reportedly since offered a twelve-month UNSOS drawdown beginning in January, against the eighteen to twenty-four months the troop-contributing countries asked for when they met in Kampala from 29 to 31 July. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba told that meeting the support office had already cut its help by twenty-five percent.
The AUSSOM mandate under Security Council resolution 2809 runs to 31 December 2026, eight weeks after the November rotation the letter describes. The Ugandan army has said its African Union battalions will leave gradually by the end of 2027, so the soldiers who move out of Barawe this month to Sabiid, Anole, Bariire, Awdheegle and Bulonagad belong to the part of the contingent with the longer timetable, and their fuel, food and medical evacuation will depend on the shrinking office the letter addresses. Uganda was assigned 4,500 soldiers under the mission’s force allocation, the largest share of any contributor.
Al-Shabaab said its fighters attacked the army camp at Bariire on 21 September, and on the night of 8 October and the following morning fighters struck government positions at Jannaale and Bariire and a Ugandan base in Qoryooley, according to local sources. A buried charge on the road between Awdheegle and Mubarak killed more than a dozen soldiers on 10 August. In November the African Union mission will hold those positions with soldiers taken from Barawe, and Barawe, held by the mission since 2014, will be recorded by the UN as a non-mission position.
