MAHAAS, SOMALIA – Al-Shabaab announced on Saturday 3 October that it had reached an agreement with the Hawadle clan to end four years of fighting in Hiiraan, at a meeting in Mahaas attended by dozens of Hawadle elders, former fighters of the clan’s Macawisley militia and the group’s own representatives. Government troops left the town overnight in July 2025, and the announcement came on the same day that the electoral commission declared in Jowhar that the Justice and Solidarity Party had won 78 of the 99 seats in a Hirshabelle vote the Hawadle had said could not be held in Hiiraan without a political settlement. Neither Villa Somalia, the Hirshabelle administration nor the clan’s traditional leadership had confirmed the terms by Monday 5 October, and it is not yet clear how many Hawadle the men in Mahaas speak for.
Former Macawisley Fighters Sit Down With al-Shabaab in Mahaas
Al-Shabaab officials said the purpose of the deal was to stop the fighting and to begin implementing Islamic law in the areas the Hawadle inhabit. Participants quoted in local reporting described the war as having reached an unsustainable point, and former Macawisley members said their long armed campaign against al-Shabaab had cost them heavy casualties and economic losses. One participant said the situation had become so difficult that a new path had to be found, and none of the reports named the elders who attended.
In 2022 the Hawadle of central Hiiraan took up arms against al-Shabaab, and their militia, with federal troops behind it and American aircraft above it, drove the group out of most of the inhabited territory between Beledweyne and the Galgaduud border. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, elected in May that year, built his campaign against al-Shabaab around that rising, and in September 2023 he travelled to Mahaas to seek the support of the same Hawadle elders after a run of setbacks on the front. The town sits on the junction that links Hiiraan to Galgaduud and Middle Shabelle, so whoever holds it controls the roads into Beledweyne from the south and the west.
Al-Shabaab has held Mahaas since July 2025, and the elders who travelled there negotiated on ground the group already governs. Al-Shabaab’s media arm released photographs of the meeting and a video communique on Saturday evening, while no Hawadle participant has published an account of the terms, and the reporting that carried the announcement stressed that the federal government, the Hirshabelle administration and the clan’s traditional leaders had yet to give their own account. One analysis published on Monday said it was unclear whether the elders at the meeting represent the wider Hawadle community or only a part of it.
A second analysis published on Monday 5 October read the communique as committing the participants to end Macawisley activity and to support the group against federal and African Union forces. The group’s own announcement on Saturday presented the agreement as the end of a four-year war with the Hawadle clan as a whole, and named no Hawadle signatory.
The Town the Army Left Overnight
Government forces withdrew from Mahaas on the night of 26 July 2025 without telling the Macawisley fighters they were supposed to be defending it alongside, and al-Shabaab walked in the next morning, taking a district capital the state had held since 2014. Local militias had prepared for an attack from the north, and the group came at the town from the south. That same week, federal aircraft were carrying troops to Gedo for the confrontation with Jubaland. Mahaas fell after a run of losses that began with Adan Yabaal in April 2025 and Moqokori in June, more than twenty settlements across three regions between February and the summer of that year.
After Mahaas, the group took the roads linking it to Beledweyne and left the regional capital with fewer secure routes in or out. On Saturday 3 August 2026 it attacked Teedaan, inside Mahaas district, and the government forces there withdrew by evening without a counterattack being announced. No federal operation to recover either place has been declared since. Mahaas had already paid a price for the 2022 rising, when two al-Shabaab car bombs killed 35 people in the town on 4 January 2023. The African Union mission handed its forward operating base at Mahaas to the Somali army on 7 August 2024, during the drawdown that preceded the current mission, so the federal army has held sole responsibility for the district for more than two years.
The Macawisley carried most of the 2022 offensive in Hiiraan and paid for it in casualties the federal government has never fully counted. Complaints about government support, weapons and money for the local defence forces recur through four years of reporting from the region, and when Mahaas fell the militias around it were described as unpaid and unequipped, without reinforcements because those had gone to political operations elsewhere. The former fighters who spoke in Mahaas had held that front alongside an army that left it before them.
A Promise Withdrawn in Villa Somalia
Before the Hirshabelle election, a Hawadle delegation led by Ugas Yusuf Ugas Hassan agreed to back the federal government in exchange for consideration of a Hawadle candidate for the state presidency once Ali Gudlawe’s term ended. On Thursday 10 September President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud received Abgaal politicians in Mogadishu and backed Ali Gudlawe for a second term, asking the other Abgaal contenders to stand aside. Two days later Vice President Yusuf Ahmed Hagar Dabageed, a Hawadle, accused the president of breaking the understanding and said no vote could take place in Hiiraan, not even in a single village, without a political agreement first.
On 1 September Macawisley fighters had occupied the voter registration centres in Beledweyne and said they would go to war before any election was held there, and on 7 September an attack on one centre killed a man. The Ugaas arrived in Beledweyne on 14 September to unify the clan’s position, and on 15 September a rival Hawadle council in Mogadishu, chaired by former Hirshabelle president Ali Abdullahi Osoble, endorsed Ali Gudlawe. On 21 September the Hawadle in Beledweyne declared that no Hirshabelle vote would be held in Hiiraan without an agreement, and three days later a large crowd marched against the election in the city.
Villa Somalia held the vote anyway. On polling day, Wednesday 30 September, hundreds of residents protested in Beledweyne against a process they called one-sided, while Hawadle elders kept regional officials and their aircraft out of the airports they control in Hiiraan. The ruling party had settled the outcome in mid-September by making Ali Gudlawe its only candidate. On Saturday 3 October the religious scholar Sheikh Ali Mohamud Hassan, known as Ali Wajis, said in a television interview that the Ugaas had taken up work that was not his, and that a traditional leader’s place was to preserve custom and advise the government. Al-Shabaab announced its agreement in Mahaas the same day.
Seventy-Eight Seats in Jowhar and No Front Around Mahaas
The commission’s chairman announced the results in Jowhar on Saturday 3 October. The vote took place in ten districts, he said, with thirteen parties competing for 99 seats; the Justice and Solidarity Party won 78 of them with 88,130 of the 112,451 valid votes, and Karaama came second with six. The announced figures did not list which districts voted and which did not. Six of the twelve districts that were due to vote lie in Hiiraan, where the Hawadle had said the ballot would not be allowed to proceed.
In Galmudug the same party won 67 of 89 seats in a rerun held the same Wednesday, from which Towfiiq, the party whose court case had forced the rerun, had been barred, and its vote in Balanbale was disputed. In South West the assembly elected President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe by 88 votes to one on 10 June, after federal forces had removed his predecessor from Baidoa, and fighting with forces loyal to the former president broke out in the city at the end of September for the third time since 17 August. The Hawadle are now the armed constituency outside the Hirshabelle settlement, and theirs is the clan whose rising the federal government’s 2022 offensive in Hiiraan was built on.
Furthermore, the agreement announced in Mahaas would give al-Shabaab something its fighters could not take by force in 2022, the consent of at least part of the clan that drove it out. The group’s stated aim is to administer the Hawadle areas around Mahaas under its own law, with the agreement of some of the men who fought it, on the roads between Beledweyne and the rest of Hirshabelle. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government spent September organising a state election in Hiiraan and has announced no operation to retake Mahaas or Teedaan since they fell. The commission declared Ali Gudlawe’s party the winner on Saturday 3 October, and on the same day al-Shabaab announced its agreement with Hawadle elders in the town the army left.
