BOSASO, SOMALIA – The federal-backed force did not last the morning in the hills above Bosaso. Puntland’s Dervish ambushed a convoy of the former Puntland Security Force in the Laag area this week, captured eight of its fighters, and seized their technical vehicles along with an ambulance left behind in the retreat. The United States trained that unit, and the federal government later adopted it. Yet in the same Bari mountains it once patrolled, it came off worst against the state it was raised to defend. Puntland paraded the captured weapons and accused Mogadishu of organising the men.
The rout is the sharpest battlefield setback yet for Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, whose year-long effort to plant a federal chain of command inside Puntland has produced prisoners instead of a foothold. It also lands as his campaign, according to leaked logs, prepares a second front far to the south, around the divided city of Galkayo.
A Convoy That Did Not Last the Morning
The fighting unfolded near Laag, roughly thirty kilometres south of Bosaso on the highway to Garowe, where the road threads through broken high ground that favours an ambush. Dervish units caught the convoy in that terrain and pinned it down, and the federalised troops broke under fire. Puntland forces took eight prisoners and hauled away eight military vehicles and an ambulance the fighters left behind, according to Somali Guardian. Commanders then displayed the seized hardware to reporters, a deliberate signal that the state had not merely repelled the column but humiliated it. For Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the images of captured federal vehicles were the opposite of the message he had meant to send. The clash capped a longer operation Puntland had launched around Laag, which it said cleared an armed group responsible for months of local insecurity.
The bloodshed had begun a day earlier, when a checkpoint confrontation on the Bosaso road left at least one of the federalised fighters dead. Puntland moved quickly to seal the corridor, then went on the offensive rather than wait to be tested again. Garowe framed the whole episode as proof of a plot directed from the capital. The federal government had recruited, armed and organised the group to wreck Puntland’s security from within, its officials said. Mogadishu offered no public answer to the accusation. That silence was familiar, and so was the underlying pattern, in which a contested unit tests the state’s control of a road and the state responds with overwhelming force.
Ground of this kind rewards the side that knows it, which is the detail Mogadishu’s planners appear to have discounted. Dervish units have operated in the Bari range for two decades, they recruit from the settlements along that highway, and they can move without notifying anyone. A federalised column driving south from Bosaso enjoys none of those advantages, and it cannot resupply without passing through territory the state controls.
Why the Scheme Shifts to Galkayo
With the northern front stalled and now embarrassed, the pressure appears to be moving south. In late June, military and logistics logs surfaced showing the presidency pressing allied factions to trigger armed clashes in Puntland’s urban centres. The goal, it said, was to recast the president as a leader managing regional turmoil rather than one fighting his own opposition. The logs describe a proxy effort organised into four divisions, and the heaviest mobilisation gathered around Garowe and western Galkayo. Galkayo is the obvious pressure point, a city split down the middle between Puntland in the north and Galmudug in the south, where a single spark can ignite lines that never fully cooled.
The southern design fits a wider consolidation. Villa Somalia spent the spring bending Galmudug to its will, deploying forces to Dhusamareb and leaning on President Ahmed Qoor-Qoor until he announced in late June that he would not seek re-election, clearing the way for a compliant successor. A Galmudug aligned with the capital gives Hassan Sheikh Mohamud a friendly base along Puntland’s southern flank, and Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has spent two years assembling exactly that kind of southern arc, and Galkayo is where that leverage would bite. Puntland has read the danger and reinforced its checkpoints in the city alongside those in Bosaso and Garowe. What the rout in the north demonstrated by force, the manoeuvring in the south pursues by other means, and both trace back to the same objective of bringing the federation’s most independent state to heel.
Galkayo also carries a specific institutional memory. The 1993 division of the city, the militia clashes of 2016 and the repeated ceasefires brokered by elders since have left both sides with maps of where the lines run and lists of who died where. Neither administration has the resources for a sustained urban fight, which is exactly why an external actor with an interest in disorder finds the city attractive.
A Front Hassan Sheikh Mohamud May Not Win
The strategy keeps stalling for a reason. Even among Puntland figures aligned with the federal government, the destabilisation plan has reportedly split its intended executors into rival camps. Some lawmakers pushed to import the fight; others refused to burn their political futures before the next electoral cycle; and a business-linked wing complained it was mobilised and then abandoned without support. Traditional elders have warned those politicians against carrying out an agenda written elsewhere. A proxy war works only when the proxies stay bought, and in Puntland they have not. That is the lesson the Laag hills delivered to Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, whose adopted force was captured rather than victorious.
The wager on Galkayo is more dangerous precisely because the city is already flammable, and a clash there could pull Puntland and Galmudug into a war that neither treasury can afford. Its one certain beneficiary would be the movement waiting in the wings. Al-Shabaab’s offensive feeds on Mogadishu’s political chaos, and a fresh southern front would hand the group more of the space it needs. Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has framed each of these moves as restoring national authority over defiant regions, and his supporters would call the federalisation of Puntland’s forces a step toward one army under one command. His opponents see a federation dismantled one state at a time. After Laag, the president has fewer men on the ground to argue his case, and a scheme that must now succeed in Galkayo or not at all.
The electoral calendar explains the urgency. Villa Somalia needs friendly administrations in place before any vote on the electoral model, and Puntland is the one state it has been unable to move by political means since 2023. Garowe and Kismayo have already refused Ankara’s mediation on the same grounds. Force was the remaining option, and the Laag hills have now shown what force produces when it is applied at the end of a long supply line against people fighting at home.
