BAIDOA, SOMALIA – Forces loyal to former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen attacked positions of the Somali National Army’s 60th Division inside Baidoa at dawn on Monday 28 September, and reports from the city put an explosion at a site believed to hold weapons and military supplies before fighting spread through at least seven districts and up to the South West State presidential compound. It was the third assault on the city in six weeks. The defence ministry said the attackers were repelled with heavy losses, President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe’s administration put the dead at more than seventy and called them al-Shabaab, and Laftagareen’s camp said its Darawish had entered Baidoa to restore order and accused Turkish F-16s of bombing it. Bay Regional Hospital took in sixty-nine wounded and recorded three deaths, one of them a health worker.
What the 60th Division Was Sent to Baidoa to Fight
In December 2024 the army’s air force flew its first aircraft since 1991 into the 60th Division’s base at Baidoa, and the division’s commander at the time, General Hassan Isaaq Omar, called the machines crucial for the operations against al-Shabaab that the deployment was meant to support. Bay is ringed by al-Shabaab country, and the roads out of Baidoa have been cut or taxed by the group for years. On 15 May this year an al-Shabaab ambush on the city’s outskirts killed General Ali Addow, commander of the 8th Brigade, and Colonel Yonis, a senior officer of the 60th Division, two months after federal troops had taken the city from Laftagareen; the group claimed twenty soldiers dead and the government confirmed no figure.
Federal troops took Baidoa in March, when President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud removed Laftagareen after a rushed one-day re-election, and President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe was elected roughly ten weeks later with federal backing. The army then pushed into the Bay region against the forces of the man it had removed. On 14 September the division’s current commander, Colonel Ishaq Adan, known as Ishaq Bardaale, briefed the army’s land forces commander, Brigadier General Sahal Abdullahi Omar, on what he called gains against enemy groups around the city, at a time when the government’s operations in the South West were aimed at al-Shabaab and at other armed actors. Six days later President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe visited the division’s headquarters with his security minister and his chief of staff and praised its soldiers for protecting citizens.
On Monday the Darawish went for the 60th Division itself. A food warehouse near the division’s headquarters burned during the fighting, with the cause unclear, and residents described heavy weapons, drones and shelling close to the presidential compound. Hassan Abdi Mohamed, named information minister in the cabinet attributed to Laftagareen on 18 September, said his fighters had destroyed military vehicles Turkiye supplied to Somalia and several weapons depots. None of those claims could be verified, and the army has given no figure for the 60th Division’s own losses.
Three Assaults on Baidoa and One Explanation
Laftagareen’s forces entered Baidoa on 17 August and were driven out after the defence ministry reported about thirty attackers killed, and on 3 September they fought inside the city for about six hours before withdrawing. Both times Mogadishu put al-Shabaab beside the forces fighting the 60th Division. The evidence offered in August was an armoured vehicle the ministry said al-Shabaab had seized from the army in 2023, and in September the ministry pointed to explosions it said were meant to terrorise civilians. Meanwhile an African Union memorandum of 21 August had authorised AUSSOM to act against al-Shabaab and its affiliates while ordering the mission out of political fighting, and every federal and South West statement since has placed the Darawish on the first side of that line.
Mohamed Sheikh Abdullahi Xaayow, the South West administration’s spokesman, said on Monday that al-Shabaab had attacked the city and that federal and state forces had beaten it back. A statement from President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe’s administration that evening said more than seventy fighters had been killed, some of them foreign nationals. The defence ministry displayed bodies and said the attackers had suffered heavy casualties without giving a number, and Defence Minister Ahmed Moallim Fiqi said the terrorist elements that attacked Baidoa had been decisively defeated. A senior army commander, Mohamed Ali, said the attackers had brought vehicles packed with explosives and explosive drones. The South West count, and its description of foreigners among the dead, came without names or nationalities and has not been independently verified.
Laftagareen’s own statement the same day said the Darawish had carried out security operations to keep order in Baidoa, and it accused Turkish F-16s of bombing the city, killing civilians and destroying property. Accounts from Baidoa describe fighter jets as well as drones over the fighting; the claim that they were Turkish is his, and it is unverified. His camp made the same accusation after the Doolow explosion of 3 September, which the federal government said was no airstrike at all.
A Week of Warnings Before the 60th Division Was Hit
The cabinet attributed to Laftagareen appeared on Friday 18 September, with Hassan Abdi Mohamed back in the information portfolio and no decree or signed roster behind it. Two days later General Mahad Abdirahman Aden, known as Taliye Shub, told a Somali television channel that the Darawish were positioned around Baidoa and intended to return to the city. He is Laftagareen’s father-in-law and the former commander of the Custodial Corps, and he was injured in the Doolow blast. His interview and President Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe’s visit to the 60th Division took place on the same Sunday, one in Kismayo and one in Baidoa.
On Tuesday 22 September the South West Peace Council told reporters in Nairobi that a ceasefire around Baidoa was the most critical issue in its mediation, after four weeks of meetings with both men. The next day Laftagareen’s faction said no ceasefire had been agreed with anyone, while federal and South West forces were moving reinforcements into the city.
On Saturday 26 September Laftagareen wrote to the United Nations and to international partners asking for an independent investigation into federal operations in the South West. His letter alleged airstrikes by Cessna aircraft on villages around Baidoa, among them Hartiagle, Ceel Doon and Sagara Gali, with harm to civilians and livestock, and repeated the accusation that a Turkish F-16 struck the house at Doolow. It asked partners to condemn the attacks, open an inquiry and end the airstrikes, and the federal government has disputed parts of it.
On Sunday 27 September Defence Minister Ahmed Moallim Fiqi, speaking in Mogadishu about the opposition there, said anyone mobilising militias should be dealt with firmly and that there should be no mercy for anyone who reaches out to harm security. The Darawish attacked the 60th Division before dawn the next morning, two days after their leader had asked the world to stop the war and a day after the defence minister had promised no mercy to armed opponents in the capital.
Bay Regional Hospital Counts What Baidoa Pays
Doctors Without Borders said Bay Regional Hospital received sixty-nine patients from Monday’s fighting, five of them children, and recorded three deaths. Elsewhere in the city a health facility was severely damaged, a health worker was killed, an ambulance was looted, two medical staff were robbed and another was injured, and roads to the hospital were blocked for much of the day. “Injured people need immediate medical attention, but many cannot reach hospital,” said Dr Elshafie Mohammed, the organisation’s country representative, who counted Monday as the third outbreak of fighting in Baidoa since 17 August. “Without timely treatment, many can bleed to death,” he said, and the organisation called on every party to protect civilians, health workers and medical facilities. Hussein Abdifatah, a resident, said families had struggled to leave their neighbourhoods because the fighting had spread across the city.
On 17 August the hospital treated ninety-four wounded, twenty-nine of them women and twenty of them children, and four people died; on 3 September it treated seventy-one, including fifteen women and twelve children, and one person died. Local reports said a vehicle-borne explosion badly damaged the RP Hotel on Monday, and residents stayed behind closed doors while the fighting moved between Boonkaay, Barwaaqo, Al-Axmaar and the streets around the presidential compound.
Baidoa, the city the 60th Division holds, is also where the South West’s displaced have gathered for years. Half of the young children screened in its displacement camps were acutely malnourished, according to the same medical teams, and a food security analysis released on 23 September found that about twenty-six thousand displaced people in the city could face famine before the end of the year.
On Tuesday 29 September the UN humanitarian coordinator, George Conway, said the fighting had driven fresh displacement and called for prompt investigations into civilian casualties, while about seventy Gorgor special forces soldiers were reported flown from Mogadishu to Baidoa after the fighting, with trucks of heavy machine guns and ammunition. Moreover, the 60th Division’s aircraft, depots and soldiers have now spent six weeks defending a regional capital against the forces of its previous president, while al-Shabaab still holds the countryside where it killed the division’s colonel in May.
