By Ismail H. Warsame
Garowe, Puntland, Somalia; Toronto, Canada
A memo does not normally announce a mission’s decline. But read closely, the African Union’s Aug. 21 directive authorizing the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) to join the Federal Government of Somalia’s “military operations against the Al-Shabaab terrorist group and its affiliate militias/armed entities” in Southwest State does exactly that. It is the paper trail of a mission searching for relevance in the final months of a mandate it may not survive to be renewed.
The facts of AUSSOM’s predicament are not in dispute. The United States informed the African Union on July 1 that it would end financial support for the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), AUSSOM’s logistical backbone, once the mission’s current authorization lapses Dec. 31. Troop-contributing nations met in Kampala July 29-31 to lobby for an 18- to 24-month extension. The UN Security Council’s Resolution 2809, adopted Dec. 23, 2025, keeps AUSSOM’s 11,826 uniformed personnel funded only through year’s end, “in the face of intensified attacks by Al-Shabaab” it was meant to help defeat. China’s delegate to the council called the funding gap “unsustainable.” That is the mission’s real condition: a clock running out, a donor walking away and a survival case still unmade to the Security Council that will decide its fate by December.
Set the memo against that backdrop and its purpose sharpens. The Commission “expresses utmost concern” over what it calls “growing alliance between local armed militias and the Al-Shabaab terrorist group” around Baidoa, and authorizes AUSSOM to fight both under a single banner. But what is actually unfolding in Baidoa is not, by the public record, a terrorist insurgency. It is the unfinished business of a federal takeover. Somalia’s army seized Baidoa in March, forcing Southwest State President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen to resign days after he had been re-elected to a term Mogadishu called illegal. Federal-backed elections installed Sheikh Aden Mohamed Nur Madobe as his successor June 10. Laftagareen never accepted his removal, and his loyalists, camped outside the city since, have attacked it repeatedly — most recently on Aug. 17, when Somalia’s Ministry of Defense said “nearly 30 attackers” were killed in a raid it attributed to “a mix of Al-Shabaab militants and militias loyal to” Laftagareen. Laftagareen’s spokesman rejected the label outright. No independent source has confirmed that any of the attackers, let alone most of them, actually belonged to Al-Shabaab rather than to a rival Somali political faction that lost a fight for power and wants it back.
That distinction is not a technicality. It is the difference between a counterterrorism mandate and a mandate to help one side of an intra-Somali succession dispute crush the other. AUSSOM’s own rules of engagement are grounded in the AU’s Policy on the Protection of Civilians and international humanitarian law. This same memo instructs AUSSOM to “maintain political neutrality and impartiality” and “steer clear of any political infighting” — a safeguard that exists precisely to prevent the conflation now underway. A mission that brands an ousted state president’s militia as Al-Shabaab, then deploys under its counterterrorism authority to finish him off, has not steered clear of political infighting. It has volunteered to conduct it.
Meanwhile the war AUSSOM was actually built to fight has not paused to wait for Baidoa’s politics to resolve. In the vicinity of Mogadishu, Al-Shabaab has recovered much of the ground Somali forces took from it in Middle Shabelle in the 2022-2025 offensives, and clan militia in Hiiraan are holding the countryside largely on their own, without the mobilization that produced the government’s earlier gains. Mogadishu’s own offensive into Galmudugh stalled this year for the same reason: a failure to organize the Ma’awisley the way it once did in Hiiraan and Middle Shabelle. That is where AUSSOM’s mandate says its war is. Instead, in the season when its funding is most in question and its case to Washington and the Security Council most urgent, the mission is lending its counterterrorism authority to a fight over who governs Baidoa.
This is not an analysis offered lightly. It is a serious charge, and it deserves a serious answer from Addis Ababa: Is AUSSOM fighting Al-Shabaab, or is it fighting Laftagareen and calling him Al-Shabaab because that label survives budget season in New York in a way “Somali political succession dispute” cannot? The Commission’s memo does not answer that question. It assumes it. Puntland, which has watched Mogadishu dismantle federal member states one by one while brokering a security agreement of its own with U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) on Aug. 2, has every reason to ask it plainly, and every reason not to accept a mission’s survival as sufficient justification for how that mission chooses its enemies.
The same suspicious circumstances now extend beyond Baidoa. Southwest State’s Security Minister, Osman Isaaq Mohamed, has publicly called on Kenya to arrest Laftagareen and hand him over through Interpol to the Somali government, accusing him of responsibility for the recent Baidoa attacks. Mogadishu’s federal government has not itself made the demand, but the administration the minister serves is Mogadishu’s own creation, installed in Baidoa by federal troops and answerable to Mogadishu in all but name. Laftagareen, who resigned and fled to Nairobi on March 30 after being violently overthrown, has been based there since, and Kenyan authorities have granted him no formal status beyond refuge. No court, in Kenya or Somalia, has ruled on the allegations against him. Handing over a man ousted by force, on an unproven accusation timed to a military campaign against his own loyalists, would be unfair and unforgivable. Kenya must be careful to avoid drawing itself into Somalia’s quarrel.
Lost in the maneuvering over mandates, labels and extraditions are the residents of Baidoa and the wider Southwest State, who did not choose this fight and cannot escape it. A hospital official told The Associated Press that four civilians were killed and 98 wounded, including 28 women, in the Aug. 17 clashes alone. People of good will, in Somalia and beyond, should not wait for the politics to resolve before helping those caught in the crossfire.
AUSSOM’s mandate runs out Dec. 31. Whether it runs out with dignity or without it will depend on whether the mission spends its final months fighting the insurgency degrading Somalia’s countryside, or spends them helping Mogadishu finish off a domestic rival under borrowed authority. The Commission owes the Somali people, and its own troop-contributing states, a clearer answer than the one in this memo.