GALKAYO, SOMALIA – Puntland forces stormed the PSF camp on Galkayo’s northern edge at dawn on Wednesday and, by mid-morning, footage circulating on social media showed their troops inside it. The assault began around six in the morning with mortar and heavy machine-gun fire near Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed Airport. It ended a week-long siege of the last force in Puntland’s half of the city that answers to Mogadishu. Officials on all sides had yet to confirm the capture by late morning. The videos spreading from the city were doing it for them.
How the PSF camp fell
The fighting opened before most of the city woke. Puntland units shelled the PSF camp that sits between the airport and the Jeexdin area. Residents described mortar and heavy machine-gun exchanges as black smoke rose over the district. Both sides fed reinforcements in through the morning, and the clashes spread toward new neighbourhoods before the guns quieted.
By mid-morning, videos shared from the city showed Puntland soldiers inside the compound. Local accounts described the remnant garrison as broken. What became of the fighters was not yet clear: some were reported captured, others fled toward the Galmudug side of the line. Garowe had issued no statement by late morning, and neither had Villa Somalia nor the unit’s own command. The silence fits the pattern of this standoff. Every escalation has arrived on the ground before it arrived on paper.
The city paid for the battle in its usual currency. A mortar round landed in a residential neighbourhood, killing a boy and wounding his mother. Shells were reported in the Buulo Doora district, and which side fired them is not established. Families fled the airport-adjacent blocks, businesses stayed shut, and security forces held the main roads through a tense morning.
A garrison that was already bleeding out
The PSF camp’s fall completes a month-long collapse. Puntland forces stopped a PSF column near Laag on 20 July, seizing 13 vehicles and capturing 30 fighters. The remnant, loyal to the federally adopted commander Asad Diyano, abandoned its main Galkayo base in late July. Its men kept defecting: 83 reportedly crossed to Puntland’s side near the airport in one day, after 84 others surrendered near Bosaso. What stayed behind at the PSF camp was an encircled garrison living on resupply promises from Mogadishu.
That resupply line died on Tuesday. Clan militiamen seized a federal weapons shipment as it was offloaded in south Galkayo, cargo reportedly including mortar rounds bound for the PSF camp. Puntland’s State House confirmed the interception within hours and blamed Hassan Sheikh Mohamud by name. A besieged garrison that has just lost its ammunition run is on a countdown. Puntland’s commanders evidently decided not to let it finish.
What Mogadishu loses with the camp
The PSF camp in Galkayo was the federal government’s last military foothold inside Puntland, and its purpose was never local. The unit gave Villa Somalia a pressure point against an administration it cannot capture politically. Federal forces played the same role in Baidoa before a managed vote delivered South West State. With the camp gone, the pressure play in Mudug is gone with it, at least until Mogadishu builds another instrument.
The political cost lands on a president already under siege of his own. Two former heads of government spent Tuesday night warning that Hassan Sheikh is working toward civil war. The camp’s fall proves at least half their argument. That confrontation did come to battle, in a city of several hundred thousand people. The Somali Future Council demanded an immediate halt to the fighting on Wednesday. It warned of displacement and of al-Shabaab exploiting the gap, and offered elders and clerics as mediators. Even the president’s own prime minister said this week that Puntland should not be fighting an internal conflict.
A win that settles nothing
Puntland now holds the ground, the prisoners and the argument. It predicted the weapons runs, intercepted one with local help, and dismantled the force they were meant to feed within a day. Garowe will present the operation as law enforcement against an unlawful armed group. Its record of warnings makes that case easier to sell abroad than Mogadishu’s silence.
Yet the morning’s cost shows why nobody in Galkayo is celebrating. A child is dead in a city that spent years building a fragile peace across its dividing line. And the PSF camp is only one instrument in a larger campaign. The federal recruitment drives, the militia pipelines and the political money have not gone anywhere. Al-Shabaab profits from every Somali gun pointed at another Somali. The PSF camp has fallen; the policy that built it has not. Until that changes, Wednesday’s dawn assault is a battle won inside a war that Somalia’s leaders have not yet admitted they are fighting.
