BELEDWEYNE, SOMALIA – Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan, the traditional leader of the Hawadle, told the clan’s soldiers in the Somali National Army on Friday 6 November to gather in Beledweyne and stand with him. Speaking at a press conference at his home, he said “there is no government to be defended today” and that people cloaked in the name of a clan had invaded Hiiraan. He spoke hours after Abdullahi Sanbalolshe, the former intelligence chief who is backing a Hiiraan administration outside Hirshabelle, drove into the town from Ethiopia with combat vehicles, and after Hirshabelle’s vice president, Abdifatah Hassan Afrah, arrived unannounced with armed guards. On the same Friday the Attorney General’s office declared that the Supreme Court ruling ending President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s term on 15 May had no legal effect, while the Ugaas told Hawadle soldiers that the government’s time had run out.
Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan Calls the Clan’s Soldiers Home
“People cloaked in the name of a clan have invaded the people of Hiiraan,” Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan told reporters at his house, according to the recorded remarks. “You must defend your honour and your existence, and the soldiers who come from the Hawadle must gather in Beledweyne and stand with me, as their Ugaas.” He then addressed the men in uniform directly, telling them that there was no government to be defended and that they should refuse to be used in a war against the people of Hiiraan. “If you want my blessing, stand with me,” he said, and he asked every person from Hiiraan to come to his house the next morning, ready.
Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan did not name the clan he accused of invading Hiiraan, and a second account of the same press conference rendered his words as a clan wearing the shirt of the state. That account also had him saying that the government led by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud had reached the end of its time and gave that as his ground for calling the soldiers to their clan. Meanwhile, government troops who had left Xananbuure in Galgaduud were reported to be heading for Beledweyne to defend the Hirshabelle administration, after Macawisley fighters surrounded the house in the Ceel Jaale neighbourhood where Vice President Abdifatah Hassan Afrah was staying.
The Macawisley, the Hawadle militia that carried President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s campaign against al-Shabaab around Bulo Burde, Mahaas and Ceel Baraf after 2022, are already in the town. About two thousand of them left their trenches outside Bulo Burde and Matabaan at the start of the month, according to reports from Hiiraan on 1 November, and other units were said to be preparing to leave the Jalalaqsi sector. Since 30 October they have held the compound in Beledweyne that houses the Hiiraan administration and an army base, and the soldiers posted at its gate withdrew without firing. No response from Villa Somalia, the defence ministry or the Hirshabelle administration to his call had been published by Saturday morning.
The Hawadle Nomination Handed to Villa Somalia
Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan was crowned the twenty-first Ugaas of the Hawadle at Daaro Ugaas, near Halgan, on Monday 13 May 2024, and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud congratulated him that day and urged him to uphold the tradition of his predecessors. Former President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo sent his own congratulations. Within days Abdullahi Sanbalolshe, then director of the National Intelligence and Security Agency, called on the new Ugaas in Beledweyne and asked him to back the government’s campaign against al-Shabaab. For the next two years the Ugaas and the federal government stood on the same side of that war.
On the night of 4 August 2026 the Ugaas led a Hawadle delegation into Villa Somalia, where President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud asked the clan to unite behind a single candidate for the Hirshabelle presidency, and the elders and politicians agreed to leave the choice of their nominee to the president himself. Yusuf Ahmed Hagar Dabageed, then Hirshabelle’s vice president, later said the clan had undertaken to back the federal government and stay out of opposition in exchange for a Hawadle candidate being considered. Instead, the president’s Justice and Solidarity Party renominated President Ali Gudlawe, and Dabageed called the decision a shock from a head of state who had turned away from his maternal uncles.
Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan flew back to Beledweyne on 14 September with members of both houses of Parliament, where the Hiiraan governor and Hawadle officials of the Hirshabelle administration met the delegation at the airport while armed vehicles moved through the town. “Today we want the decision we reach to be implemented, and those who can implement it are you, the people,” the Ugaas told the crowd, adding that the clan would take hard and decisive decisions. Three days later Hawadle politicians and elders said that no Hirshabelle vote would be held in Hiiraan without a political agreement. On 24 October the assembly in Jowhar re-elected President Ali Gudlawe by 81 votes to 13 regardless.
Abdullahi Sanbalolshe and Abdifatah Hassan Afrah Reach the Same Town
Abdullahi Sanbalolshe crossed from Ferfer, in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, early on Friday and reached Beledweyne with armed troops and combat vehicles, as many as twenty-eight Land Cruisers by one count. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud twice made him intelligence chief, most recently in April 2024, before replacing him in June 2025. He now sits in the federal parliament without a portfolio. On 25 October he said that he and his supporters were building a Hiiraan administration outside Hirshabelle, that the effort could become an armed movement against Mogadishu, and that he did not rule out working with al-Shabaab. He has also said he met President Said Abdullahi Deni, Jubaland’s President Ahmed Madobe and Somaliland’s President Irro in the Emirates, and none of them has confirmed it. Since his travels abroad he has met Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan and other Hiiraan politicians, by one account.
Vice President Abdifatah Hassan Afrah, a Hawadle politician born in Beledweyne and a former governor of Hiiraan, was elected President Ali Gudlawe’s deputy in Jowhar on 24 October by 79 votes to 16. He arrived on Friday with armed bodyguards and told a press conference that nobody could turn him back from the town of his birth. “I want to find kinsmen I can convince or who can convince me,” he said. Furthermore, he described the armed men in Beledweyne as people of one descent with a common interest, and said he had come to hear the grievances of Hiiraan’s residents. Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan held his own press conference in the same town that day.
Abdirisak Mohamed Abdullahi Al-Cadaala, a member of the Hirshabelle Assembly, said the same day that it was deeply regrettable that Abdullahi Sanbalolshe was organising an attack on Hirshabelle’s deputy leader, and he urged him to keep away from spilling the blood of his own kin. Abdullahi Sanbalolshe has not answered the accusation publicly, and no statement has confirmed any plan to attack the vice president. Abdifatah Hassan Afrah had been announced to arrive on 30 October, the day the Macawisley took the Lama-Galay compound. By Friday night he, Abdullahi Sanbalolshe and Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan were all inside Beledweyne, and gunfire and heavy weapons were reported in the town overnight, with neither the sides involved nor any casualties confirmed by Saturday morning.
Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan and the Attorney General Read the Same Ruling
On Thursday 5 November the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Division ruled that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s term ended on 15 May, that Parliament and the federal government expired on 14 April, and that the government may act only as a caretaker until elections within 90 days. The Attorney General’s office answered on Friday that the judges’ decision did not conform to the law, did not serve the national interest or the completion of the Somali state, and therefore carried no legal effect. It also said the court had failed to address its objections on jurisdiction and on the standing of the petitioner, former President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed.
Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan spoke in Beledweyne on the same Friday, telling the Hawadle in the army that the government they serve had come to the end of its time. Moreover, his call came while the army is fighting on two other fronts in the south, against al-Shabaab and against former President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen’s forces in Bay, where a federal column was ambushed at Jameeco on 26 October on the road to Buurhakaba. Uganda has begun withdrawing the troops it kept in Somalia under its bilateral pact. The African Union mission’s mandate, meanwhile, runs to 31 December. Al-Shabaab, for its part, announced on 3 October a deal with Hawadle elders and former Macawisley fighters in Mahaas, which the clan’s traditional leadership had not confirmed when it was announced.
President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud met members of Parliament and the deputy commander of Hirshabelle’s forces after the Macawisley took Lama-Galay, and the options reported from that meeting included retaking the compound and loosening the clan’s unity with money and political offers. In August the Ugaas left the choice of the Hawadle nominee to him inside Villa Somalia; in September he came home with Parliament members to say the clan would decide for itself; on Friday he told the Hawadle in uniform to stand with him as their Ugaas. Government troops were reported on the road from Galgaduud, the Macawisley were around the vice president’s house in Ceel Jaale, and Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan had asked everyone from Hiiraan to be at his door by Saturday morning.
