MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – A former commander of Duufaan, the special unit of Somalia’s National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), has crossed into al-Shabaab territory carrying the unit’s laptops, communications equipment and files, according to reports that surfaced on Sunday 8 November and were detailed by sources close to the agency on 10 November. Known only as Luqmaan, he had been deputy commander of NISA’s special forces and had been removed from his post over security suspicions. He then left Mogadishu through Daynile and Basra for Middle Juba. NISA, which has spent two months announcing the al-Shabaab intelligence chiefs it says it has killed, had said nothing about him by Wednesday 11 November.
What Luqmaan Is Reported to Have Taken From Duufaan
The route Luqmaan is said to have taken runs west out of the capital through Daynile district and the Basra area of Lower Shabelle, then south to Middle Juba, where al-Shabaab holds Jilib and most of the valley around it. Sources close to the agency say he carried computers, communications devices and documents tied to Duufaan operations, and some accounts add operational logs, personnel rosters and the names of informants. Basra sits thirty kilometres from Villa Somalia, and the road he is reported to have used crosses the same belt the army spent September defending against al-Shabaab.
Rashid Abdi, an analyst at the Nairobi-based Sahan Research, said on Sunday 8 November that NISA was “severely compromised” and that al-Shabaab may now hold intelligence data including the names and addresses of informants. “NISA is scrambling to contain the crisis but it might be too late,” he added. None of the accounts gives Luqmaan’s full name, rank or clan, and none has been confirmed by the agency or the security ministry. No statement from al-Shabaab about him had been reported by Wednesday 11 November.
Moreover, the same reports describe Duufaan as a unit that received training in Turkiye, the partner that has also trained the army’s Gorgor commandos and the police Haramcad. Turkiye’s training base at Camp TURKSOM in Mogadishu has been open since 2017. Mahad Salad, the NISA director, joined the police commissioner and the army chief on the night of Tuesday 10 November at the Mogadishu residence of former Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble to meet leaders of the Somali Future Council, among them former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire, about the coming elections. The accounts of that meeting record agreements on keeping security out of politics and on consensus elections, and they mention nothing about Duufaan or the commander it is reported to have lost.
Duufaan Was Built From Men Who Had Left Al-Shabaab
Duufaan was assembled under former President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, when Fahad Yasin ran NISA, largely from al-Shabaab fighters who had surrendered and passed through the Serendi rehabilitation centre in Mogadishu’s Xamar Jajab district, with others brought in from Gedo. In September 2021, during the standoff between former President Farmaajo and Prime Minister Mohamed Hussein Roble, the unit held a junction near NISA headquarters and refused entry to the agency’s new director, Bashir Goobe, and at least fifteen of its members deserted that month. Some were reported to have gone to al-Shabaab with their weapons, while others were said to have dropped their rifles in Mogadishu and gone home to their families.
In August 2023 NISA said it was hunting two men over the suicide bombing at the Jaalle Siyaad military academy in Mogadishu, which had killed at least 25 soldiers in July, and one of them, Abdisatar Abdikadir, belonged to Duufaan. Later that month al-Shabaab fighters attacked a Duufaan patrol at Beerta Ali Mahdi in Daynile and killed its commander, and the group claimed the attack through its own media. Daynile is the same district through which Luqmaan is now reported to have left the city, and the unit’s patrols there have been an al-Shabaab target since at least 2023.
Consequently, the unit has lost fighters to al-Shabaab in 2021, had one of its own men named as a suspect in an al-Shabaab bombing inside a military academy in 2023, and, if the reports hold, lost a former commander with its files in 2026. Former al-Shabaab members have also risen elsewhere in the federal state: Mukhtar Robow, the group’s former deputy leader and spokesman, was appointed minister of endowment and religious affairs in August 2022. The policy rests on the argument that a defector’s knowledge of the group outweighs the risk of taking him in, and Duufaan is that argument organised as a NISA unit.
NISA Has Changed Hands as the Election Fight Grew
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud twice made Abdullahi Sanbalolshe director of NISA, most recently in April 2024, and replaced him with Mahad Salad in June 2025, when the cabinet approved the change in an emergency session while Macawisley militias and al-Shabaab were fighting in Sanbalolshe’s home region of Hiiraan. Abdullahi Sanbalolshe has since gone into open opposition, and in an interview that circulated on 25 October he said he was building a new administration among the Hawadle in Hiiraan and did not rule out cooperating with al-Shabaab. Duufaan served under both directors as one of NISA’s special units, and Luqmaan was deputy commander of the agency’s special forces. A man who ran the agency until June 2025 now declines in public to rule out working with the group it was built to fight.
On Sunday 11 October NISA accused the guards of former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed of trying to drag its forces into a gunfight in Wadajir, as troops and armoured vehicles closed the roads to his home and to that of former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire. Sheikh Sharif’s office called the accusation fabricated, and it said his staff had been abducted and food and water stopped at his gate. Mahad Salad has also led the government’s consultations with opposition leaders since at least February, and on 10 November he sat with the Future Council alongside the police and army chiefs.
On 6 October, in the same weeks, NISA said it had killed Bashir Ahmed Haji Nunow, whom it described as head of the Amniyat from 2016 to 2024, in an operation in Jilib, and on 30 August it said it had killed another man in Jilib who had run al-Shabaab’s intelligence since 2013. Jilib is the capital of Middle Juba, the region Luqmaan is reported to have reached, and NISA credited both operations to its own intelligence work with international partners it did not name. If the Duufaan files include the informants behind those raids, they are now in the region where the raids took place.
What the Duufaan Files Could Expose in Middle Juba and Daynile
Sources close to the agency say the material Luqmaan took may include Duufaan’s operational logs and personnel rosters as well as the names of informants, and the alarm raised in Mogadishu since 8 November concerns the civilians who pass information on al-Shabaab to the government. In Daynile and the farmland of Lower Shabelle, an informant lives among the people he reports on, and al-Shabaab’s Amniyat has publicly executed men it accused of spying for the government and for foreign forces throughout the insurgency. The officers named on a Duufaan roster face the same exposure in a city where al-Shabaab has repeatedly reached NISA patrols and bases. In August 2024 alone the group attacked a NISA base on the edge of Mogadishu twice in a matter of days.
General Zakia Hussein, a former deputy commander of the Somali Police Force, has said that some fighters feign defection in order to enter the army or NISA while keeping their ties to the group, a remark the European Union’s asylum agency recorded in its May 2025 report on Somalia. On 10 February 2024 a gunman inside the General Gordon military base in Mogadishu killed three Emirati soldiers and a Bahraini officer who were training Somali troops, and al-Shabaab claimed the attack. After the Lido Beach attack of August 2024, which killed more than fifty people, Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre said officers were among the suspects arrested.
Meanwhile, the federal government enters the week of its election talks, called for 14 to 18 November, with its intelligence director at the negotiating table and his predecessor organising in Hiiraan. Uganda’s bilateral troops are going home and the UN mission UNTMIS closed on 31 October, so the federal security forces are losing outside partners in the same weeks NISA’s own records may have changed hands. NISA had issued no statement and announced no inquiry into Duufaan by Wednesday 11 November, three days after the first reports of Luqmaan’s departure.
