MOGADISHU, SOMALIA – Dozens of Somali soldiers were killed and more than a hundred wounded when al-Shabaab ambushed a federal column at Jameeco, in Buurhakaba district, on the afternoon of Monday 26 October, according to two soldiers who were in the battle, one of whom said he carried 40 bodies to hospitals in Mogadishu. The defence ministry answered on Tuesday with a figure for one side only, nearly 75 al-Shabaab fighters killed and 56 wounded, a count that no independent reporting has corroborated, and it has published no number for its own dead. A security source said at least four army vehicles were destroyed, and by Tuesday morning the column that left Xero Shiino for Buurhakaba on Saturday was reported back in the same camp. Former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire have demanded an independent inquiry into the Jameeco operation.
What the Soldiers at Jameeco Reported
One soldier, who gave his name as Ahmed, said he helped carry 40 dead soldiers and more than a hundred wounded to hospitals in Mogadishu after the fighting. A second soldier, Farah, said al-Shabaab’s car bombs destroyed five military vehicles and that dozens of his comrades died in the explosions. Both gave only their first names. Their account was published on Tuesday, the same day as the ministry’s statement. Their figures could not be independently verified when they were published, and the ministry’s statement does not mention them.
Security sources quoted on Monday night put the column’s losses at 36 military vehicles, six of them Turkish-made Kirpi armoured carriers, and named five officers as missing: Mahad Caamir, Anas Dheere, Jeego, Abdikarim and Ahmed Gaashaan. Halac, commander of the 64th Battalion of the 7th Brigade, was reported wounded. Reports on Tuesday added Dhamme Cabaas Ciise and Dhamme Cabdi Xasan, commanders of the 172nd and 174th units of the 17th Brigade, and three other officers to the list of wounded. A group of Hawadle soldiers fighting near Leego spent nearly five hours under fire and refused to leave a wounded comrade behind until Danab commandos reached them.
Al-Shabaab claimed it killed 321 soldiers and fighters of an allied militia in a three-hour ambush, said it took prisoners, weapons and vehicles, and released photographs of burned and captured armoured carriers. A security source told reporters it doubted that hundreds of soldiers had died, while confirming that at least four army vehicles were destroyed. On Monday evening the group also claimed the ground between Jameeco and Leego. Neither the 321 nor the 36 vehicles has been independently confirmed. The figure of 40 dead rests on one soldier’s account of the bodies he moved, and an officer who travelled with the convoy, Abshir Abdikarim, said late on Tuesday that he saw at least 20 dead soldiers after the attack.
The Ambush on the Leego Road
About 2,000 troops with more than two hundred vehicles, drawn from the Galgaduud, Mudug, Middle Shabelle and Lower Shabelle fronts and from Mogadishu, had just left Leego when the attack began at Jameeco, and the operation’s aim was to reopen the road from Mogadishu through Buurhakaba to Baidoa, according to accounts of the convoy. A second federal force moving out of Baidoa was ambushed on the Buurhakaba road the same morning and forced back, an attack Laftagareen’s forces claimed, and the two columns had been meant to meet at Buurhakaba. Dozens of army vehicles were later seen heading back toward Baledogle through Yaqbariweyne.
Samira Gaid, a military analyst, said the army was hit by “layers and layers” of suicide attackers on a narrow road through muddy ground, and that sending it through a known insurgent area “wasn’t well planned”. She said al-Shabaab saw “an opportunity” to strike an army it knew to be weak, and that the losses would shatter its morale and cohesion at a time when its soldiers face severe salary cuts. The security source described a collapse of federal authority across almost all of South West State and a notable expansion of al-Shabaab’s influence there.
A drone struck a government position at Jiiro Yaasiin, near Jameeco, during the fighting, and nobody has said whose aircraft it was. Reports that Turkish F-16s or armed drones had hit army positions at Leego by mistake circulated the same night, and on Tuesday 27 October the federal government called them “false and misleading” and said its security partnership with Turkiye remained strong. It gave no other account of the aircraft over Jiiro Yaasiin. Separate reports said Laftagareen’s forces took over a base at Leego that federal troops had used and seized or burned more than fourteen vehicles there, and those reports have not been verified.
One Column of Figures From the Ministry
The defence ministry’s statement on Tuesday 27 October described a “major assault lasting several hours” by the army on al-Shabaab positions at several sites around Jameeco under Operation Banooda, and it put the group’s losses at nearly 75 dead and 56 wounded. It acknowledged that al-Shabaab had driven vehicles packed with explosives into army vehicles and said “some” were damaged. It named no unit, no commander and no position held at the end of the day, and it said the operation would continue. No outlet that reported the statement was able to confirm any of its figures.
The ministry gave a figure for al-Shabaab’s dead after the first reported clash of Operation Banooda near Leego on 24 October, seven killed, and none for its own. After the ambush near Jamaada on 21 October, which residents said cost two or three armoured vehicles, it disclosed neither its dead nor its wounded, and it published nothing on the mines between Afgooye and Wanlaweyn that soldiers said killed up to twenty of their comrades the same week. A local outlet in Baidoa reported that the cabinet met in emergency session over “heavy casualties and substantial military equipment losses” at Jameeco, and Villa Somalia has published no account of that meeting.
On 26 August 2023 al-Shabaab overran the army’s new base at Cowsweyne in Galgaduud with car bombs and gunmen, the state news agency reported that the attack had been repelled, and a commander called the withdrawals from four towns that followed “small strategic retreats”. Al-Shabaab claimed 178 soldiers killed, officials gave no figure of their own, and within a week President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud acknowledged the defeat. After Gorgor troops lost Caad in Mudug to an al-Shabaab assault on 24 January 2024, the army court-martialled 30 of them for abandoning their positions and the loss of nine military vehicles.
Sheikh Sharif, Khaire and an Inquiry
Former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed said in a statement on Tuesday 27 October that the army’s repeated heavy losses raised serious questions about planning, intelligence, operational preparedness and the independence of the military command. He called the national army “the nation’s most precious asset”, said Somali soldiers’ lives must not be gambled for political ambitions, and asked for an independent investigation into whether there had been negligence, together with a national plan for the wounded and the families of the dead. Former Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire said the same day that elite troops had been sent on an operation born of a political dispute that cannot be settled on the battlefield, and asked for a full government report on Jameeco.
Sheikh Sharif led the country from January 2009 to August 2012, and al-Shabaab left Mogadishu in August 2011 during his presidency. On 6 August 2026 he accused the government of diverting the army from the war on al-Shabaab to political ends. When Defence Minister Ahmed Moalim Fiqi branded opposition figures in Abu Dhabi traitors on 1 October, he answered that the weapons meant for al-Shabaab were being readied to burn Mogadishu. Khaire, prime minister under former President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo from 2017 until a no-confidence vote in July 2020, has said government forces attacked his residence on 3 June. Troops closed the roads to both men’s homes on 10 October, and both oppose President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s extended term.
In December 2024, after clan militia executed seven soldiers on leave at Ceelbaraf, the ministry promised a court within forty-eight hours, and in September 2026 the army opened another investigation on the same road with no outcome yet published from the first. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud spent Monday 26 October at State House Entebbe asking President Yoweri Museveni to keep Ugandan troops in Somalia longer. By Thursday morning the ministry had answered neither Sheikh Sharif nor Khaire, the soldiers’ accounts of 20 and 40 dead remained the only counts of the army’s losses at Jameeco, and the column was back at Xero Shiino.
