BELEDWEYNE, SOMALIA – Abdullahi Sanbalolshe, a former director of the National Intelligence and Security Agency, said in an interview that circulated on Sunday 25 October that he and his supporters among the Hawadle of Hiiraan are building a new regional administration, a day after President Ali Gudlawe was re-elected head of Hirshabelle in Jowhar by 81 votes to 13. Asked whether the movement would cooperate with al-Shabaab, he did not rule it out. He also said he had asked President Said Abdullahi Deni of Puntland, Jubaland President Ahmed Madobe and Somaliland’s President Irro, at meetings in the United Arab Emirates, to back an armed rebellion in Hiiraan, and none of the three had responded publicly by Sunday evening. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud twice made Abdullahi Sanbalolshe his intelligence chief, most recently in April 2024, and replaced him with Mahad Salad in June 2025.
What Abdullahi Sanbalolshe Said After the Jowhar Vote
In the interview Abdullahi Sanbalolshe said the Hawadle had decided to pursue an administration of their own after being denied the Hirshabelle presidency, and that the effort could become an armed movement against Mogadishu. He predicted a major war, said the current political order was weakening, and said the clan wanted an influential place in whatever system emerged from the turmoil. His movement, he said, would take significant risks to remove the government and would accept help from any party willing to give it, and when al-Shabaab was put to him he left the possibility open. He added that his movement would go further than former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen, whose forces have held five Bay districts since mid-October and whom a federal committee listed on 13 October among the financiers of al-Shabaab.
Abdullahi Sanbalolshe said he had travelled to the Emirates, met President Irro, President Said Abdullahi Deni and Jubaland President Ahmed Madobe there, and urged them to support an armed rebellion against the federal government in Hiiraan. Accounts of the interview differ on whether he said the three leaders agreed, and none of them has spoken publicly about the meetings he described. He said the movement would also seek support from Ethiopia. Nothing in the interview establishes that he has reached an agreement with al-Shabaab or that an armed campaign has begun, and he offered no evidence for the meetings.
Cismaan Xaadoole, a member of the House of the People from Hirshabelle, answered on Monday 26 October that Abdullahi Sanbalolshe was trying to create turmoil in Hirshabelle because he had lost what he wanted, and that nothing threatening the stability of the state would be allowed. He said the national interest should come before one man’s interest, that Ethiopia had no right to drag Somalia into its own troubles, and he asked where the former director was leading the Ethiopians. Local reports on Saturday 24 October had placed Abdullahi Sanbalolshe in Ferfer, on the Ethiopian border north of Beledweyne, seeking Ethiopian military support, and those reports have not been verified. The federal government had issued no statement on the interview by Monday afternoon.
Three Terms at the Head of NISA
Abdullahi Mohamed Ali, known as Sanbalolshe, was born in Buloburde in 1968 and belongs to the Hawadle, the main clan of Beledweyne and much of Hiiraan. He was national security minister in the Transitional Federal Government and later ambassador to the United Kingdom. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud first appointed him to run the intelligence agency in July 2014, during his first term, and Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo, then president, brought him back to the post in April 2017. He holds a seat in the House of the People for Beledweyne, which he won for a second time in March 2022 with 54 votes.
On 4 April 2024 the Council of Ministers named him director for a third time, and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud oversaw the handover from Mahad Mohamed Salad, a fellow member of the Damul Jadiid network. At the end of May 2024 the new director called on the Hawadle to renew their fight against al-Shabaab. On Saturday 14 June 2025 the president oversaw the swearing-in of Mahad Salad in his place, fourteen months after the appointment, and Abdullahi Sanbalolshe questioned the reasons for his dismissal, which he said implied that he had failed in the job.
On 3 June 2026, the day before protests against the president’s extended term, gunfire broke out in central Mogadishu and former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire said government forces had attacked him at his residence in Howl Wadaag. Abdullahi Sanbalolshe later said on television that he and Khaire had both been targeted, and that the president had given the order. Defence Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi replied on 27 June that the fact “he is alive is a mercy.” On Thursday 1 October Fiqi accused Somali politicians in Abu Dhabi of learning from Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces, and reports at the time placed Abdullahi Sanbalolshe in the Emirati capital with President Said Abdullahi Deni, Jubaland President Ahmed Madobe and former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, who said his own visit was for family reasons.
In remarks reported on 19 September, the former Hirshabelle president Ali Abdullahi Osoble told a meeting of the Hawadle political council in Mogadishu that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had given Abdullahi Sanbalolshe many posts without visible results. He warned that a man who had lost his position and was inciting unrest would deepen the dispute in Hiiraan.
Hiiraan, the Hawadle and the Count in Jowhar
The Hawadle declared in Beledweyne on Monday 21 September that no Hirshabelle vote would be held in Hiiraan without a prior political agreement, after a week of consultations that followed the arrival in Beledweyne on 14 September of their traditional leader, Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan, with members of both houses of the federal parliament. Hundreds of residents, elders and politicians marched in the town on 24 September, and the next day Abdullahi Sanbalolshe praised them, telling the people of Hiiraan that “your voice has reached Somalis and the rest of the world.” The joint parliamentary and local vote went ahead anyway. On Saturday 3 October the electoral commission announced in Jowhar that the Justice and Solidarity Party had taken 78 of the 99 seats, with 88,130 of the 112,451 valid votes cast in ten districts.
Al-Shabaab announced on the same Saturday an agreement with Hawadle elders in Mahaas to end four years of fighting in Hiiraan, at a meeting attended by former fighters of the clan’s Macawisley militia, the force that carried the federal offensive in the region from 2022. Government troops had left Mahaas overnight in July 2025, and on Friday 9 October federal soldiers and al-Shabaab fought around Hees and Xaanshigadafer, two villages in Mahaas district where the army had spent several days building positions, and the government lost Hees to the group that week.
The new assembly sat in Jowhar on Saturday 24 October, and 98 of its members voted. President Ali Gudlawe took 81 votes against 13 for Nur Ilmi Halane of the Ramaas party, with four ballots spoiled, and Abdifatah Hassan Afrah won the vice presidency by 79 votes to 16 for Abdifatah Bashi Mohamed. President Ali Gudlawe, first elected in November 2020, began a second term with that count. In a 19-minute address after the count he did not mention Hiiraan, and the federal interior minister, Ali Yusuf Hosh, told reporters in Jowhar that efforts to settle the dispute between the region and the Hirshabelle administration were under way.
Turyare’s Warning and the Column at Leego
Abdirahman Turyare, another former director of the agency who now represents Somalia at the Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition, warned on Friday 23 October that armed movements like those fighting in Ethiopia’s Tigray, Amhara and Oromia regions could emerge in Hiiraan, Middle Shabelle and Bay. He said such groups could end up allied with al-Shabaab, warned their organisers against gambling with their lives, and urged the authorities to stop them before they grew into a wider threat. It is unclear whether his warning and the plans Abdullahi Sanbalolshe described two days later concern the same effort. The federal government has commented on neither.
About two thousand federal troops left Baledogle with more than two hundred vehicles on Saturday 24 October to retake Buurhakaba from Laftagareen’s forces, and by Monday they were held at Leego, about 50 kilometres east of the town, on a road al-Shabaab is reported to have mined. Residents said security forces ordered them out of Leego and warned that it could be hit by Turkish air strikes. On Monday 26 October fighting broke out at Burjed, on the outskirts of Baidoa, where Laftagareen’s camp said its fighters ambushed soldiers bound for Buurhakaba and killed dozens of them. Neither the figure nor the account has been confirmed, and the government has not responded.
Hawadle militias took Ceel Baraf from al-Shabaab in March 2025, under the federal campaign their Macawisley had carried in Hiiraan for three years. In October 2026 the clan’s elders hold a truce with al-Shabaab in Mahaas, President Ali Gudlawe has a second term from an assembly chosen in a vote the Hawadle said could not be held in Hiiraan without a political agreement, and Abdullahi Sanbalolshe, twice the intelligence chief of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, is building an administration in Beledweyne and will not rule out working with the group. Two thousand of the government’s soldiers are stopped on the Baidoa road.
