Baidoa, SOMALIA – Fighters loyal to former Southwest State President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen battled federal troops inside Baidoa for several hours before dawn on Monday, in the fiercest fighting the city has seen since the March operation that removed him from office. His spokesman claimed the whole city by morning, the federal defence ministry announced about 30 dead terrorists by afternoon, and residents counted civilians among the bodies left between those two versions. Five months after Villa Somalia replaced an elected state government by force, the capital of Southwest State belongs to whichever side last moved an armed column through its streets.
Two Accounts of One Morning in Baidoa
The assault began at about five in the morning, when armed columns entered Baidoa from two directions and struck army positions with vehicle-borne explosives. Heavy weapons fire ran through the city centre for hours, in a city that sits about 250 kilometres west of Mogadishu and shelters hundreds of thousands of displaced families. By afternoon, residents described federal troops holding the streets and the attacking force pushed back beyond the edge of town.
The defence ministry filed the day as a counter-terrorism operation. Its statement described the attackers as Khawarij, the government’s standing vocabulary for al-Shabaab, joined by militias loyal to Laftagareen, and said the army responded “professionally and decisively”, killing at least 30 assailants, capturing others and seizing the vehicles and weapons used in the assault. Clearance operations continued through the day, the ministry added, with fuller details promised once the operation concluded.
Meanwhile, the men who attacked claimed the same morning as a liberation. “The South West State Darwish forces have fully taken control of Baidoa and restored its freedom and dignity,” spokesman Ugas Hassan said, urging residents to leave their homes and welcome the fighters while the guns were still audible. Government military officials answered that their positions had held and the assault had been repelled, and neither claim could be independently verified while sporadic fire continued into the evening.
The verifiable record is smaller and grimmer than either account. One local elder counted ten bodies, four of them civilians and six of them soldiers of the two sides, while other residents reported further dead and wounded from gunfire and shelling in residential streets. No authority on either side has published a casualty list it is prepared to defend, and the fiercest battle Baidoa has absorbed since March closed with the government holding the city and no agreed account of the day.
The Takeover That Keeps Returning Fire
The road to Monday’s battle runs directly back to March. Laftagareen’s administration halted cooperation with the federal government over control of state elections and the constitutional amendments, Mogadishu suspended flights to the city in mid-March, and federal forces then seized Baidoa in an operation that ended with his removal on 30 March and his resignation. Villa Somalia installed Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe, a former federal parliament speaker, as state president, and confirmed his administration through managed votes in early June.
Furthermore, the rebellion has returned to the city at intervals ever since. On 30 May, days before those votes, his fighters entered Baidoa and fought through its streets, and on 30 June they assaulted the Baaliyaale military camp in the Towfiq neighbourhood, where witnesses reported an explosion inside the installation and casualties among the garrison. Each round has arrived closer to the seat of the administration the federal government built, and Monday’s columns reached the centre of the city itself.
The ground under the garrison shifted in the same week. Crowds on farmland outside the city burned the Turkish flag on Sunday over drone strikes attributed to aircraft flying from Baidoa’s expanded airport, the latest turn in a year of allegations that Turkiye’s drones cleared the way for the March takeover and have since struck villages and rival columns across the state. A replacement government now depends on a federal garrison, a foreign air umbrella and a former speaker’s name to hold the capital it was given, and Monday measured that dependence street by street.
Consequently, the sequence reads as the familiar federal formula. A state leadership was removed by force, a loyal administration was installed through votes the removal arranged, and the removed constituency went to war with the result. The formula produced this rebellion in Southwest State in March, and versions of it now shadow the government’s dealings with Jubaland, with Puntland and with every member state whose leadership Villa Somalia has tried to choose.
Thirty Dead Terrorists and a Political War
The official arithmetic of Monday settles a political question by classification. The ministry counts about 30 dead attackers and files each of them under the vocabulary of jihad, while independent reporting from the city identifies the assault force as Laftagareen’s Darwish, drawn from the state’s own security services and loyal to a president the region elected. The government’s ledger for the day therefore records a counter-terrorism victory in Baidoa, where its principal armed opponent is the man it removed from office in March.
Each version of the battle indicts the policy that produced it. If the dead are militiamen, the defence ministry has converted a political rebellion into a terrorism statistic, and every incentive to negotiate with the constituency behind it disappears into the reclassification. If al-Shabaab fighters genuinely moved inside the assault, as the ministry maintains, then the March takeover has pushed part of a member state’s political base into tactical alignment with the insurgency the state was rebuilt to fight. Both readings end in the same place, with a federal policy that manufactures enemies faster than the army can absorb them.
Moreover, the timing sharpens that cost. One day before the battle, President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud presided over the graduation of roughly 3,000 soldiers at Xananbuure, the largest class trained inside Somalia since 1991, built on Saudi money and foreign instructors. The force that parade produced is already mortgaged to garrison duty against Somalis with political grievances, in Baidoa as around Galkayo, while al-Shabaab holds the road between two army bases in Lower Shabelle and chooses the hour of its own attacks. The mission meant to hold the rear of that fight runs out of money in December, and the offensive its chiefs approved remains unfunded. Every hour the Baidoa garrison spends fighting the Darwish is an hour the counter-insurgency does without.
A Hungry City Held by Force
The city absorbing these battles is among the most fragile places in the country. Baidoa shelters hundreds of thousands of people displaced by conflict and hunger elsewhere, and a July survey by the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres found one child in four at its displacement sites severely malnourished. A collapse in donor funding has already gutted the malnutrition response across the country this year, and the city’s camps carry the arithmetic of that retreat. Monday’s fighting ran through the neighbourhoods where those families live, which is how four civilians entered an elder’s count of the dead before midday.
Additionally, the administration defending the city emerged from the battle weakened by its survival. President Madobe’s government took office in June behind federal guns, reinforced Baidoa’s approaches after the May and June attacks, and still watched an opposing column reach the city centre before breakfast. Residents kept indoors through the following day amid sporadic gunfire, waiting to learn which version of their capital would govern the evening. An administration that cannot yet guarantee the city’s mornings will struggle to deliver the elections, services and reconstruction its federal patrons promise on its behalf.
The map of the week runs the same direction at both ends of the country. In the north, the federal president reached only the southern half of a divided Galkayo while Puntland held the other side shut, and in the southwest his government’s writ in Baidoa had to be reasserted with artillery in a state capital his own policy turned hostile. The federal project now spends its newest soldiers proving it can enter or hold Somali cities one column at a time, and al-Shabaab, the enemy the whole structure was rebuilt to defeat, appears in the official record of Monday chiefly as the label attached to the dead.
