GALKAYO, SOMALIA – Clan militiamen in south Galkayo seized part of a federal weapons shipment on Tuesday 4 August as it came off the trucks in the Galmudug-run half of the city, and local reports say the cargo was bound for the Puntland Security Force fighters surrounded in a camp on the Puntland side. A firefight followed in which two people were wounded, and Galmudug forces spent the evening trying to recover the crates. Puntland’s presidency said within hours that the federal government had sent the arms to its forces on the Puntland side, and blamed President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud by name.
What happened in south Galkayo
Armed men intercepted weapons described as federal government property as crews unloaded them in southern Galkayo on Tuesday, according to reports from Mudug. The militiamen moved in during the offloading, took part of the consignment and drove it away in vehicles, and security forces then exchanged fire with the group at the site, leaving two people wounded. Galmudug units launched an operation to recover the seized weapons, which was still running into the evening, and residents described the city as tense.
Accounts from the city said the cargo included mortar rounds and that the fighters who took it come from clans in the same district, and some of them described the seizure as solidarity with Puntland, whose forces sit a short drive north. Villa Somalia and Galmudug had said nothing about the weapons shipment by Tuesday night.
The Puntland State House issued a statement within hours confirming that the federal government had offloaded another weapons shipment in Galkayo on Tuesday, on the Galmudug side, for transfer to its forces on the Puntland side. Garowe commended Galmudug’s government, forces and residents for blocking the delivery, then placed the blame by name. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the statement said, is stoking conflict in Mudug, and responsibility for whatever insecurity follows rests with a president whose term has expired. It closed by urging Puntland’s public to stay alert to federal interference in their territories.
Local accounts placed the cargo with the forces loyal to Villa Somalia on the Puntland side of the boundary, and only one such force exists there, the PSF unit that answers to Mogadishu. Its camp outside the city has sat surrounded by Puntland troops for the past week. The weapons shipment left federal hands, landed in south Galkayo and was headed for that encircled unit inside Puntland’s lines when local gunmen stopped it, and every link in that chain began with a decision in Mogadishu.
A weapons shipment with one plausible address
The PSF contingent in question has been the region’s central problem for a month. Puntland forces stopped a PSF column near Laag on 20 July, seized 13 military vehicles and captured 30 fighters. A week later the unit’s remnant abandoned its base on the Puntland side of Galkayo, near the airport, and crossed with five military vehicles toward Baraxley on the Galmudug side, after which municipal authorities dug trenches around the empty compound. Puntland troops then surrounded the camp the force still holds near the city. Garowe treats the unit as an armed group operating unlawfully on its soil, and days before the withdrawal the Puntland presidency declared that no force known as the PSF legally exists within its defence establishment. Villa Somalia treats it as a federal formation and keeps paying it.
Rifle fire can hold the perimeter of an encircled camp, while mortar rounds reach across a city. Resupplying that camp with indirect-fire weapons would turn a contained standoff into a bombardment threat inside a divided city of several hundred thousand people. That is the cargo the reports describe, and it is why this weapons shipment alarmed Galkayo more than any convoy before it.
Garowe accused the federal government on Wednesday 24 June of smuggling weapons into its territory to incite civil war, and its Ministry of Security said there was a coordinated plan between four foreign nations and the federal government to arm clans against each other. The ministry banned all non-local security forces from Puntland the same day. In late July Puntland warned Galmudug against letting its airports and roads carry arms aimed at Puntland, and Galmudug never answered the warning in words. On Tuesday the answer came from militiamen and, in Garowe’s telling, from Galmudug’s own security agencies and residents, who together kept the cargo from crossing the line.
The Bosaso precedent hanging over the camp
Mortars near Galkayo frighten people because the PSF has used its guns inside a Puntland city before. The force fell out with Garowe after the 2019 state election, when President Said Abdullahi Deni defeated General Asad Osman Abdullahi, known as Asad Diyano, and then dismissed the PSF commander Mahamud Osman Diyano, the general’s brother, who refused to go. By December 2021 the dispute had exploded into heavy fighting in Bosaso, with shells landing in residential districts of the city the force was created to protect. The two sides clashed again over control of Bosaso Airport in 2024.
Puntland dissolved the PSF on paper after the 2021 battle and built a new security agency in its place, and Mogadishu adopted the losing faction when it made Asad Diyano chief of the federal police. On 22 June this year President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud signed decrees creating a Bosaso-based 17th unit of the Somali National Army under Lieutenant Colonel Abdullahi Osman Abdullahi, known as Diyano, and federal leaders then declared the PSF absorbed into it, a move Garowe rejected as unconstitutional. The unit now besieged outside Galkayo is the product of that adoption, and it carries Puntland’s name, Mogadishu’s payroll and a grudge now seven years old.
The men in the camp have shelled a city before when the command dispute turned against them, and a mortar resupply gives them the means to do it again. Arming them to repeat it in Galkayo is the escalation Puntland has warned about since the day it suspended cooperation with the federal government. Critics in Garowe argue that the camp was placed to hold a fuse, and that a weapons shipment of mortar rounds shows what it was meant to be used for. Puntland had already said on 18 June that it would operate separately from the federal government until the two sides reached a comprehensive settlement.
A pattern Mogadishu no longer hides
Federal recruitment drives aimed at Puntland ran through Mudug for weeks before the weapons shipment reached Galkayo, and Puntland forces were reported to have arrested two army officers linked to the 54th Division over recruitment in early July. The prime minister and the interior minister said separately in early July that the federal government would recruit soldiers in Puntland despite the state’s ban, and a letter from an army supply unit dated 25 June detailed weapons transfers to newly recruited federal forces in the region. A vehicle carrying 250 military uniforms was stopped entering north Galkayo from the Galmudug side in late July, and federal arms were reported arriving in the city on 23 July. Puntland has spent the summer reinforcing Bosaso, Garowe and Galkayo while coordinating with Jubaland against Villa Somalia, and Mogadishu has spent it moving men and materiel north.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s term expired in May, and his government continues, in the opposition’s phrase, as a caretaker that refuses to behave like one. A day before the seizure, his party swept Galmudug election results built on one approved candidate, and the same week his diplomats briefed international partners on an electoral agenda those partners doubt. A weapons shipment to a rebel unit inside Puntland was travelling through the state his party had just won, toward the state that has refused his agenda since March 2024. In April President Said Abdullahi Deni said Puntland had foiled plots against the state, amid reports that forces allied to the federal government were being mobilised against it.
The militiamen’s stated motive, solidarity with Puntland, deserves the caution owed to any claim made over seized guns. Clan calculations in Mudug rarely reduce to slogans, and Galmudug’s scramble to retrieve the cargo suggests Dhusamareb wants its side of the city back under control. However the interceptors explain themselves, they stopped a federal arms delivery to a surrounded force inside a state Mogadishu cannot govern and will not leave alone.
What the seizure changes in Galkayo
The PSF camp now knows its resupply line is compromised, which shortens its planning horizon, and Puntland holds public evidence for the accusation it has made since June. Its commanders will treat every vehicle approaching the camp as a weapons run. Galmudug is left fighting local militias to recover cargo it never admitted was crossing its territory, a day after an election meant to prove the state was under control. Every week of the siege is paid for by a Puntland administration that entered the summer with a budget shortfall of about a third for 2026.
Foreign partners pressing for a settlement now have a concrete incident to weigh against Mogadishu’s assurances, an audience that runs from the AUSSOM troop contributors to the donors behind the communique President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud edited in Kampala. A federal government asking for troops and money against al-Shabaab was caught, in local accounts, shipping mortars to a rebel unit inside a member state. The same government had named a new commander for the army’s 54th Division in Garowe in mid-June, and Puntland rejected the appointment on 18 June and restricted the movement of federal forces across the state. Days before the PSF left its Galkayo base, the Puntland presidency said it recognises no federal military unit operating in Puntland without its authorisation.
Galkayo has absorbed proxy confrontations before, and its residents know how quickly a contained standoff becomes a city fight. The seizure of one weapons shipment removes the deniability that kept this standoff quiet, and it hands al-Shabaab and the Islamic State faction another month in which every gun in Mudug points at another Somali. Part of the weapons shipment is now loose in a city that remembers what mortars are for, and the camp it was meant for is still surrounded.
