BAIDOA, SOMALIA – Federal officials are preparing to freeze the personal assets and bank accounts of Abdiaziz Laftagareen and to withdraw the passports of the politicians around him, a package worked out with the finance and internal security ministries, the Somali Police, the immigration authority and the national committee against money laundering. The measures surfaced on Monday 7 September, four days after fighters loyal to the ousted Southwest president attacked Baidoa before dawn and filled the region’s main hospital with wounded, and hours after a twenty three year old reporter shot twice in the back during that fighting died of his injuries. Mogadishu removed Abdiaziz Laftagareen with soldiers at the end of March, and it now proposes to finish the argument through the banking system.
The Agencies Asked to Draw the List
The plan under consideration would block the private property and the bank accounts held by Abdiaziz Laftagareen, along with the money and accounts of individuals and institutions tied to his former administration. Officials are separately assembling the names of politicians and senior figures from his camp for transmission to the immigration service. Their travel could then be restricted and their passports and other travel documents suspended or cancelled. The package was discussed with the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Internal Security, the Somali Police, the Immigration and Citizenship Agency and the National Committee for Countering Money Laundering. Mogadishu has been trying to control his movements since March, when it grounded every flight bound for Baidoa and he reached the city anyway aboard an Ethiopian military helicopter.
That last body is the machinery Somalia assembled under close international supervision to trace terrorist financing, satisfy the reporting demands of correspondent banks and keep the remittance corridors that carry roughly a fifth of national income from closing. It exists because Somali institutions spent a decade persuading foreign regulators that money moving through Mogadishu could be watched. Turning it on a man the same federal government dealt with as the president of a member state until the end of March converts a counter terrorism instrument into a weapon of internal political competition. In Bay region that distinction has already worn thin.
Federal officials justify the reach by arguing that the confrontation in the Southwest has moved past a quarrel over who holds an office and become armed organisation aimed at state institutions. Abdiaziz Laftagareen has helped them make the argument. He has repeatedly attributed the assaults on Baidoa to forces loyal to him and called them operations meant to recover the city and the administration. That places him some distance from a politician who deplores violence committed in his name. Once the claim is made in public, the federal case that what stands against it in Bay region is an insurgency becomes far easier to state.
Four Months of Assaults and a Label Nobody Has Evidenced
Federal forces took control of Baidoa on 30 March, two days after Southwest legislators returned Abdiaziz Laftagareen to office for a five year term in a ballot Mogadishu rejected. He announced that he was standing down as federal troops entered the city, then reversed himself, and he has maintained ever since that the vote of 28 March was lawful and that he remains the legitimate president of the Southwest. The administration assembled in the city after his removal is one he refuses to recognise, and he describes the men fighting for him as the security forces of a state whose government was taken from it.
The assault of Thursday 3 September began at about a quarter past four in the morning. Fighters came at Baidoa from several directions, took two federal army bases on the outskirts and pushed into the town for hours of close fighting before pulling back out. The commander of the personal guard of Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe, installed as Southwest leader in June, was among the dead, and the commander of the army’s Eighth Brigade of the Sixtieth Division was seriously wounded. The defence ministry said its troops had repelled the attack and inflicted heavy losses, and published no figure for its own.
Nur Sidow, the Southwest information minister, told reporters in Baidoa that the assault had opened with suicide car bombs, and the federal defence ministry filed the attackers as militias loyal to Abdiaziz Laftagareen mixed with al-Shabaab fighters. The Southwest presidency went further the following day, describing an assault mounted from two directions with vehicles packed with explosives and putting more than forty al-Shabaab dead, a figure its federal partner has never matched in an account that leaves Abdiaziz Laftagareen out altogether. No evidence for the al-Shabaab claim has been produced by either government, and the accusation repeats the label applied to the dead of the August battle, which former officials in the city disputed at the time. Additional federal troops were flown from Mogadishu into Baidoa on 29 August, days before the attack, and the reinforcement did not keep two bases from changing hands.
Seventy One Wounded and a Reporter Shot Twice in the Back
Bay Regional Hospital received seventy one wounded people on 3 September, among them fifteen women and twelve children, by the count of the medical charity that supports the facility, while an official at the hospital put the day at four civilians killed and ninety eight wounded. Hospital emergency staff counted at least thirty civilians, women and children among them, treated for wounds sustained while the two sides fought over the ground their houses stand on. The fighting ran through the Alfaras, Boonkaay and Al-Ahmar neighbourhoods on the northern approaches that the fighters of Abdiaziz Laftagareen have used since March, all of them residential, and it emptied several of them.
Bashir Mohamed Abdullahi was twenty three and reported for a Maay language station in the city. He was at home in Al-Ahmaar when the shooting started, noticed armed men he did not recognise moving through the neighbourhood and telephoned his director, who told him to stay indoors until the situation settled. He went out later to work. Armed men in uniform with their faces covered stopped him, questioned him, shot him twice in the back and left him where he fell. Surgeons operated at Bay General Hospital, arrangements were made to fly him to Mogadishu for specialist treatment on the morning of Monday 7 September, and he died in the early hours before the transfer.
He was “a young journalist with a promising future ahead of him”, the secretary general of the journalists’ union said, asking who had killed him, why, and who would be held to account. He is the second journalist killed in Somalia this year. His killers wore uniforms, which narrows the field considerably in a city garrisoned by federal soldiers and attacked by the forces of Abdiaziz Laftagareen, and neither side has announced an inquiry. Days earlier a cleric told a gathering attended by the defence minister that anyone who fights the government should be killed as a terrorist is killed, and no official contradicted him.
Abdiaziz Laftagareen Answers From the Outskirts
Ugas Hassan Abdi Mohamed, who speaks for Abdiaziz Laftagareen, gave his response on Monday from outside Baidoa, and he addressed the aircraft now flying over the region. “You can bring foreign aircraft and foreign vehicles, but the decision and the destiny of the Southwest regions is in the hands of our people,” he said, telling residents to stay united and promising that the operations would continue. A spokesman for the Darwish fighters had put the same position in plainer terms on the morning of the attack. They would go on fighting, he said, until the last federal soldier leaves Bay region and control of it returns to its people. The claim to a popular mandate is the one asset no asset freeze reaches.
The aircraft are Turkish, and they have been the second half of the Southwest story since the spring. Farmers near Baidoa burned Turkish flags in August over drone strikes in the region, and the same anger has since spread to Kismayo and Afmadow, where crowds carried posters of President Erdogan with blood painted on his hands. Ankara supplies the air power on which the federal campaigns in Bay region depend, and every strike that kills a farmer converts a Somali political problem into a foreign policy one.
Warplanes struck the outskirts of Baidoa overnight, hitting what was reported as a gathering of al-Shabaab commanders and fighters, destroying weapons and vehicles and breaking up preparations for another assault on the city. No government has published a casualty figure or claimed the aircraft. Fighters loyal to Abdiaziz Laftagareen were paraded on those same approaches on 2 September, the day before the last assault, and both sides have been massing there ever since.
Freezing a bank account does not vacate a claim to an office, and the men on the approaches to the city are not paid through the banking system Mogadishu proposes to close to them. The federal government answered a disputed election with soldiers in March, and it is now answering the consequences of that decision with air strikes and the instruments of financial crime, having used up the ones that were supposed to settle the matter in the spring.
