MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – The Defence Committee of Somalia’s House of the People on Saturday 26 September summoned Defence Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi and the army commander, Brigadier General Ibrahim Mohamed Mohamud, to appear before it on 4 October. The committee had found that the allowances of close to 6,000 retired and disabled soldiers and the families of men killed at the front had been cut, by half for some retirees and disabled soldiers and by sixty percent for the families of fallen officers. It gave the minister seventy-two hours to say in writing where his ministry found the authority to reduce money parliament approved in the 2026 budget, and asked how many army camps have been sold. The same day MPs said they were preparing a motion against Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre, three days after the House voted 136 to two to annul one of his decrees.
What the Defence Committee Wants Fiqi to Explain
The Defence Committee’s letter, issued on Saturday 26 September, says the cuts were made by the Ministry of Defence working with the command of the Somali National Army and carried out with the Ministry of Finance. It lists those affected as retired soldiers, disabled soldiers and the families of soldiers killed on the front lines. It puts the reduction at fifty percent for some of the retired and disabled and at sixty percent for the families of officers who died in battle. Its questions to Ahmed Moalim Fiqi cover the legal basis for the cuts, the authority that ordered them, their likely effect on troops still serving at the front, and whether the allocation parliament approved in the budget has been altered.
The Defence Committee also asked the minister for the number of army camps that have been sold and the number of soldiers and families moved out of their homes, and for an account of what the ministry has done for the families who lost their housing. Ahmed Moalim Fiqi and General Ibrahim Mohamed Mohamud were ordered to appear at 11:00 on Sunday 4 October at the committee’s office in Villa Hargeisa, the parliament compound in Mogadishu. A written reply to the questions is due before then, within seventy-two hours of the letter.
Ahmed Mohamud Jama, a member of the Finance Committee known as Buux, said on Saturday that his committee wanted answers from the defence and finance ministers within twenty-four hours, and that the money for the army sits in a budget parliament has already passed. He said messages and photographs sent by soldiers serving in Jubaland show men being told that $100 had been deducted from their salaries. “For the orphans of the martyrs who died for the nation to have their entitlements cut is a painful thing,” he said. Parliament approved the 2026 budget of $1,386,807,242 at a joint sitting on 23 December 2025, by 174 votes to four with one abstention. Neither the defence ministry nor the finance ministry had published an explanation for the cuts, or a reply to the Defence Committee, by Sunday 27 September.
The Stipend Conditions an Army Commander Refused
Eight months before the Defence Committee’s summons, on Thursday 29 January, the Council of Ministers meeting under Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre removed General Odowaa Yusuf Rageh as army commander on the proposal of the Ministry of Defence. In his place it appointed Ibrahim Mohamed Mohamud, a younger officer trained in Turkiye who had run the army’s support command and earlier served as its chief of finance and administration at headquarters. It was the second time in four years that Odowaa had lost the post. The government gave no reason, and ministers told the new commander to speed up operations against al-Shabaab in southern Somalia.
In the last week of February, General Ibrahim Mohamed Mohamud dismissed four battalion commanders of the Gorgor force who had opposed conditions Ankara was attaching to the stipends it pays that unit. Turkiye funds the Gorgor at $100 a month for each rank-and-file soldier, with more for officers, and under the reported conditions a soldier who was wounded, hospitalised or disabled would lose his stipend. Odowaa had been presented with the same measures and declined to apply them, asking how soldiers could be expected to fight if they knew their pay would stop when they were wounded. Some observers linked his removal to Turkish pressure.
Families raising the children of soldiers killed fighting al-Shabaab said on Friday 25 September that the monthly allowance for each child had fallen from $200 to $100 without notice. The same day the former intelligence chief Fahad Yasin cited Decree 198 of this year, which set up an agency for the orphans of fallen soldiers, the disabled and the retirees, and asked President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud to name the legal basis for the cut and the authority that approved it. Disabled soldiers are on the Defence Committee’s list, and so are the families of the dead. General Ibrahim Mohamed Mohamud, who applied the February conditions to the Gorgor, is one of the two officials called to Villa Hargeisa.
The House Turns on Hamza Abdi Barre
On Wednesday 23 September the House of the People voted by 136 to two, with two abstentions, to annul Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre’s decree of 17 September. The decree would have filled the posts of department directors across ministries and agencies through open competition, and about thirty lawmakers had objected that it would displace sitting officials. On Saturday the Civil Service Commission suspended the director vacancies it had advertised and told every federal ministry and agency to comply with the House resolution, saying it would act under articles 158 and 159 of the provisional constitution.
“The motion we are pursuing concerns the prime minister’s failure to do his job. We rescued the civil servants from him, and now it has reached the army, the 6,000 who died fighting for this country and whose families have been cut,” Mohamed Hassan Murjan told reporters on Saturday, adding that someone would lose his post over the case. Dahir Amin Jesow put the blame on Hamza Abdi Barre and his Council of Ministers, and said the prime minister would be summoned and that the leadership of the House would remove him if he failed to appear. Abdullahi Arab said nobody had the authority to cut the money, since a soldier’s family must be cared for after he dies. The Defence Committee’s letter and the motion both went public on the same Saturday.
The leadership Jesow invoked belongs to Speaker Abdulkadir Mohamed Nur, known as Jama, whom the House elected on Monday 10 August as the presidency’s candidate. He held the defence ministry until March 2025, and he spoke out against the hiring decree on 24 September. Fahad Yasin on 5 September and former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen, in a letter to foreign governments on 25 September, have both named him alongside President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud over the strike on the Doolow compound of General Mahad Abdirahman Aden. In October 2024, about seventy MPs backed a motion against Hamza Abdi Barre. He defeated it by appointing ten new ministers and deputy ministers, among them MPs who had led the effort to remove him.
Paying for the Army That Replaces AUSSOM
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud told the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday 24 September that Somalia needed predictable and sustained financing for its security transition, and that the handover of full security responsibility to Somali forces must be properly financed. In the same speech he told the Assembly that Somalia is not calling for the United Nations to leave. On 1 September Ahmed Moalim Fiqi had declared the country ready for a Somali-led security framework that is accountable, efficiently managed and financially sustainable, as the money for the African Union mission ran short. The Security Council has extended AUSSOM only to 31 December 2026, and the Defence Committee’s hearing falls eighty-eight days before that date.
Roughly 3,000 recruits passed out at Xananbuure on Sunday 16 August, the largest class the army has graduated on Somali soil since 1991, paid for by Saudi Arabia and taught by instructors from Romania, Ukraine and Sudan. The brigade that collapsed at Teedaan in the summer had been pleading for ammunition before it fell, and salaries at the intelligence agency were late in early September for units that included men on the Basra front against al-Shabaab. Federal and South West forces were moving reinforcements into Baidoa in the same week the families reported the allowance cut, against fighters loyal to former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen.
The Defence Committee has asked Ahmed Moalim Fiqi what effect the cuts will have on the men still serving at the front. General Odowaa Yusuf Rageh put a similar question about the Gorgor stipends before the cabinet removed him in January. The officer who replaced him is due at Villa Hargeisa on 4 October, beside the minister who declared on 1 September that Somalia was ready to take over its own war, to explain why the families of officers killed in it now receive, by the committee’s count, forty percent of what they did.
