By Abdijaliil Osman,  An investigative analysis

A federal army crossed 246 kilometres of Al-Shabaab territory, dismantled seven years of regional power, and ended two decades of Ethiopian influence — in less than 72 hours. How did it happen, and what does it mean?

The soldiers at Baidoa’s Shaati Gaduud airport did not move. Ethiopian contingents of the African Union force were stationed there — as they had been for nearly two decades, a quiet guarantee of the regional order. They watched from their compounds as a column of Somali National Army troops, led by elite Gorgor commandos, entered the city. They did not intervene.

It was March 30, 2026. By the time the sun set over the Bay region, the political geography of Somalia had shifted in ways that will take months, perhaps years — to fully absorb.

Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen, the president of Southwest State who had governed Baidoa for more than seven years and was re-elected just 48 hours earlier, posted a resignation statement on Facebook and boarded a flight to Nairobi. The city that Jawar Mohammed, the prominent Oromo politician, would later describe as having been “under Ethiopian influence for nearly 20 years” had, within a single afternoon, become the federal government’s orbit.

Nobody expected it. Not Al-Shabaab, which had held the roads into the city for years. Not the international community, which had been monitoring a slow-building political crisis and bracing for a bloody standoff. And not Lafta-gareen himself, who had flown to Addis Ababa weeks before and returned, by Ethiopian military helicopter, apparently assured of protection.

Those assurances proved worthless. This is the story of why.

A Road Not Traveled Since 2014

There is a road from Mogadishu to Baidoa. It runs 246 kilometres northwest through Middle Shabelle, past market towns, dry riverbeds and Al-Shabaab checkpoints, into the Bay region. The last time Somalia’s national forces used it was 2014. After that, it became, for practical purposes, Al-Shabaab’s road.

Last week, a column moved along it again — and the way it moved tells you as much as the fact that it did.

The operation was assembled in stages. Gorgor commandos — Somalia’s elite infantry unit, trained and funded by Turkey — left Mogadishu alongside UAE-trained special forces and pushed northwest toward Balli-Doogle airbase, the first staging point. There, the US-trained Danab Brigade was waiting. The three units consolidated, then moved together toward Buurhakaba, clearing three Al-Shabaab checkpoints along the way. By the time the column reached Buurhakaba, only four soldiers had been injured. Al-Shabaab’s resistance on the early stretch was thin — scattered, unprepared, outpaced.

At Buurhakaba, the column split — deliberately. Danab and the UAE-trained special forces held the position. They were not being kept back for lack of capability. This was military tactics: securing the supply line, holding the ground already taken, protecting the rear. Gorgor moved on alone.

Then came Daynuunay.

“No one expected the government could reach Baidoa. Not the opposition. Not Al-Shabaab. People thought they would stop at Buurhakaba or Barawe.”   A senior Somali security source, speaking on condition of anonymity

Between Buurhakaba and Daynuunay, the operation hit its hardest moment. Al-Shabaab planted landmines across the road and held direct combat. The fighting was heavy. Turkish drones — Bayraktar TB2s and the larger, night-capable Akinci flew from Mogadishu and struck militant positions. When the dust settled, 60 Al-Shabaab fighters were dead, weapons had been seized, and the column had broken through.

Gorgor forces and their militia allies entered Baidoa exclusively. Danab and the UAE-trained units remained in Buurhakaba. By the afternoon of March 30, the federal flag was flying over the city.

The Battle That Didn’t Happen

The speed of the collapse raised an immediate question: why didn’t Southwest’s forces fight?

Lafta-gareen had spent seven years building a security apparatus. His forces had routed pro-federal opposition fighters from Baidoa’s streets just weeks before, in heavy clashes that left dozens dead. He was not without military capacity. Yet when the SNA arrived, his army largely melted away.

Two things happened. The first was intelligence work. A week before the operation, SNA intelligence had been cultivating officers inside the Southwest State military, building relationships, making payments, creating networks of loyalty that would, at the critical moment, render command structures unreliable. By the time Gorgor moved, significant parts of Laftagareen’s army had already, quietly, changed sides. In Somalia, battles are frequently won in the weeks before the first shot is fired.

The second was arithmetic. The Southwest forces that remained loyal looked at what was coming — modern equipment, Turkish aerial cover, a column that had just fought through Al-Shabaab territory and won and made a calculation. Resistance would be costly, temporary, and futile. Strategic withdrawal, leaving open the possibility of future political negotiation, was the rational choice. They took it.

The result, remarkably, was a transfer of a major city with limited civilian casualties. Minister Hassan Eelaay, who addressed both SNA troops and Southwest forces immediately after the fall in the Maay dialect, made a point of stressing civilian protection and warning against reprisals. The message was calibrated: this was a political transition, not a conquest.

Turkey’s Partner, Somalia’s Commander

When Brigadier General Ibrahim Mohamed Mahmud walked into his new role as Commander of the Somali National Army in January 2026, the sceptics were ready. He had trained at the Turkish Military Academy in Ankara. He had studied at the Turkish Defence University. To outside observers, the resume read as a foreign product — Ankara’s man in Mogadishu’s uniform.

They were looking at the wrong thing.

I first met Ibrahim Mohamed Mahmud in 2022, inside the Ministry of Defence in Mogadishu. He was not a headline then no ceremony, no fanfare. He was a mid-ranking officer doing the unglamorous work of building an institution from the inside. What struck me was not his rank but his manner: composed, respectful, genuinely engaged with the people around him. He gave me a tour of the ministry, spoke with the kind of quiet seriousness you find in officers who actually care about the work rather than the title. I remember thinking — this man understands what he is building and why.

That was five years before he became the SNA’s most powerful officer. Five years of watching, learning, rising — not from outside the institution, but from within its bones. The clearest testament to that came not from his supporters, but from the man he replaced. When General Odawa Yusuf Rage handed over command, he said publicly that he was glad General Ibrahim was his successor because Ibrahim had grown up under his watch, inside the SNA, inside the system they had both served. That is not the language of a man who feels displaced. It is the language of an institution passing the torch to someone it recognises as its own.

Ibrahim Mahmud is the product of a strategic choice Somalia made a decade ago: that rebuilding a national army required genuine international partnerships, not symbolic ones. Since 2017, when Camp TURKSOM was established outside Mogadishu, Turkey has trained thousands of Gorgor and Haramcad personnel and deepened its commitment through naval agreements, resource cooperation, and a parliamentary mandate for up to 2,500 troops. Somalia did not stumble into this relationship. It negotiated it, renewed it, and shaped it — because when the SNA operates at its ceiling, the results are what March 30 produced.

Some Western analysts, citing the Sahan Intelligence bulletin’s note that his promotion came “via his affiliation with Ankara,” raised the spectre of a commander serving foreign interests. What that framing misses is the man it describes. Ibrahim Mohamed Mahmud did not arrive from Turkey. He arrived from within the Somali National Army — formed partly through that partnership, yes, but committed to the institution that institution serves. His relationships inside the army are not manufactured; they are the result of years of presence, of shared hardship, of being known.

Baidoa was his first test at the national level. He passed it. When Turkish-trained forces, Turkish equipment, and Turkish aerial support aligned behind a clear Somali objective, the column that had not traveled the Mogadishu-Baidoa road since 2014 traveled it again and arrived.

Was this Ibrahim Mahmud’s victory, or Turkey’s investment paying off? The honest answer is: both. And there is nothing diminishing in that. The best militaries in the world are built on alliances, shared training, and external partnerships. What Somalia must now ensure is that this partnership deepens the institution — that the next commander after Ibrahim, and the one after that, inherits an SNA that is stronger because of what was built here, not merely because Ankara remains engaged.

That is the longer work. But first: Baidoa. And Baidoa is done.

Ethiopia Steps Aside

For nearly 20 years, Baidoa was, in any meaningful sense, Ethiopia’s city inside Somalia. The Bay region was Addis Ababa’s buffer, its intelligence platform, its guarantee of influence over whoever governed in Mogadishu. Ethiopian troops at Shaati Gaduud airport were not peacekeepers in the ordinary sense — they were the structural guarantee that what Ethiopia wanted in Southwest Somalia would be protected.

On March 30, they watched from their compounds as that guarantee expired.

The collapse of Ethiopia’s position did not happen overnight. The groundwork was laid over the preceding year, most critically on February 24, 2025, when Addis Ababa signed a new agreement under the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia. The key clause: Ethiopian forces would now operate under Mogadishu’s direct command, not as an independent force that regional leaders could invoke for protection. The agreement was sealed in Addis Ababa by Field Marshal Birhanu Jula. It was, in hindsight, Laftagareen’s death warrant.

“This means that Baidoa, which had effectively been under Ethiopian influence for nearly 20 years, may now move out of that sphere. Egypt and Turkey are expected to replace Ethiopia there.”  Jawar Mohammed, March 31, 2026

Three calculations drove Ethiopia’s decision to step aside. The first was an assessment of Egypt. When Cairo began shipping weapons to Mogadishu following Ethiopia’s controversial deal with Somaliland, which Somalia’s government treated as an existential provocation — Addis Ababa’s military intelligence analysed what had arrived. Their conclusion, according to regional security sources, was that Egypt’s hardware posed no genuine threat to Ethiopian territory. The fear of Egyptian encirclement, which had driven much of Ethiopia’s posturing, did not survive contact with the actual evidence. If Egypt was not a real threat, the price of protecting Laftagareen suddenly looked very high for a very thin return.

The second calculation involved Turkey. Ankara and Addis Ababa have a relationship that runs deeper than Somalia. Turkey supported Ethiopia during the Tigray war, including through Bayraktar drone supplies that proved pivotal. That history creates obligations. Credible sources indicate Turkey made clear, through diplomatic channels, that it had significant interests in Southwest Somalia and that Ethiopian interference with an SNA advance supported by Turkish air power would damage the relationship. For a government already diplomatically isolated over the Somaliland deal, antagonising Turkey was not a risk worth taking.

The third was the simplest: Ethiopia had already signed away its freedom of action. Intervening against a force operating under the same AUSSOM framework Ethiopia had just committed to would have meant publicly tearing up an agreement it had signed months earlier. The cost — to AU credibility, to Western partnerships, to the broader diplomatic rehabilitation Abiy Ahmed’s government needed — was prohibitive.

So they watched. And Baidoa changed hands.

The Man Who Mistook Assurances for Power

Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen had been in office for seven years. He had survived political crises, clan pressures, federal interference and Al-Shabaab’s constant pressure on his borders. He was, by any measure, a durable politician. What he could not survive was the withdrawal of the one thing that had always, ultimately, underpinned his position: Ethiopia’s willingness to stand behind him.

The fracture with Villa Somalia was rooted in disputes over constitutional authority and regional elections — Laftagareen insisted on holding them outside the federal framework; Mogadishu declared them illegal. When the federal government sent Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre to mediate, Laftagareen turned him away empty-handed. When it grounded flights to Baidoa, he returned by Ethiopian military helicopter. When it backed opposition fighters who clashed with his forces in the streets, he routed them. At every turn, his calculation appeared to be that Ethiopia’s protection was a permanent feature of his political environment.

It was not. The February 2025 AUSSOM agreement had already shifted that foundation without him fully grasping it. When he travelled to Addis Ababa in the weeks before the operation and received what he understood to be assurances of support, the assurances were either not given in the form he understood, or were given by people who no longer had the authority — or the will — to honour them.

On March 28, he was declared re-elected. Forty-eight hours later, he resigned. He is now in Nairobi, meeting allies, mapping next steps. The federal government has indicated it will not pursue him politically — a signal that reads less as magnanimity than as political calculation. An exiled Laftagareen nursing grievances and rallying Southwest MPs is a manageable problem. A martyred one could be considerably more disruptive.

What Baidoa Changed — and What It Didn’t

Hassan Sheikh Mohamud now controls something he has not controlled since taking office: the full administrative territory of Southwest State. That matters enormously for the project he is building toward — a direct, “one person, one vote” national election that would replace Somalia’s clan-delegate system and, if it succeeds, fundamentally remake the country’s political architecture.

For such an election to have national credibility, it needs reach. It needs administrative presence in regions like Southwest. Baidoa’s return to the federal orbit is not merely a political win — it is a logistical prerequisite.

But the risks are as real as the opportunity. Laftagareen’s fall has not resolved the underlying tensions in Somalia’s federal system. Puntland and Jubbaland remain in opposition. The Future Council,  the coalition of federal member states that publicly backed Laftagareen, is watching the Baidoa playbook and drawing conclusions about what Mogadishu might do next. If those conclusions lead to deeper entrenchment rather than negotiation, the president will have traded a short-term territorial gain for a long-term constitutional crisis.

The African Union Commission said it was monitoring the situation “with concern.” Al Jazeera reported the unease among regional observers. Even among Hassan Sheikh’s own supporters, there are those who worry that consolidating power through military force is a strategy with a ceiling, one that may be reached sooner than he expects.

What the fall of Baidoa really proved

For all the drama of the past 10 days, one conclusion stands out above the rest. When the Somali National Army is given political direction, elite trained units, modern equipment, and Turkish aerial support — it works. Daynuunay proved that against Al-Shabaab. Baidoa proved it against a regional administration. The SNA that entered that city on March 30 was not the SNA that lost Adan Yabaal to Al-Shabaab last April.

The deeper question, whether this is a replicable institutional capacity or a one-time alignment of favourable conditions, will define Somalia’s security trajectory for the next decade. If it is institutional, Somalia has turned a corner. If it is contingent on Turkey’s continued political alignment with Villa Somalia and on opponents who choose not to fight, then the next test may produce a very different result.

The Horn of Africa is watching. For the first time in a long time, it genuinely does not know what comes next.

Abdijaliil Osman
Email: abdijalilosman@gmail.com
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Abdijaliil Osman is the founder and host of The Abdijaliil Show, a former BBC Focus Africa producer, and the recipient of the Best Somali Podcaster award 2024. He is based in London.