By Ismail H. Warsame
Garowe, Puntland, Somalia -Somewhere in Ankara, someone should be asking a plain question: what is Turkey trying to win in Baidoa?
The reported facts are sobering without embellishment. Southwest State officials and residents around Baidoa have for months accused Turkish drones, and at times helicopters and F-16 fighter jets, of providing air cover for federal operations against forces loyal to ousted Southwest President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, known as Laftagareen. On the night of Sept. 3-4, a drone struck the Doolow, Gedo region, home of Gen. Mahad Abdirahman Aden, known as “Shub,” a former federal police commander now politically opposed to Villa Somalia. His family says he survived. Local reporting citing residents at the scene describes deaths and injuries among those present, with one Somali-language outlet citing preliminary information that three people died. None of this is independently confirmed, and neither Villa Somalia nor Ankara has said who ordered or carried out the strike — a silence that has become Turkey’s signature posture in Somalia, the wordless shrug of an ally content to let the smoke answer the questions.
This satire needs no invention. Reality already wrote the punchline: a country that markets itself as patron saint of Somali reconstruction — the airport, the hospital, the scholarships — has become, in the eyes of a growing number of Somalis, subcontractor in a family feud among Somali elites over who sits in which regional palace.
The Loyalty Card Trick
The mechanism is simple. Ankara arrives with a training academy, a port concession, an energy deal, and a line of political credit extended personally to whoever occupies Villa Somalia. The relationship is framed as partnership with the Somali state. In practice it functions as a retainer with the man signing the paperwork. When that man’s rivals happen to be state governors he has fallen out with, Turkish drones stop distinguishing between al-Shabab, the enemy Ankara was invited to fight, and a Southwest State president whose offense was winning his own region’s vote.
One imagines the internal memo: “Mission: counterterrorism partnership.” One reads the results: a deposed president’s forces pushed to Baidoa’s edge; a former police commander’s family home hit in Doolow, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest al-Shabab stronghold worth the fuel. If this is counterterrorism, al-Shabab has disguised itself remarkably well as Somali federalism.
A Villa Somalia Discount Air Force
The pattern speaks for itself. Southwest State’s president was removed in March with reported Turkish air support. His forces were pushed back from Baidoa’s outskirts months later under further reported strikes. By September, drones attributed to the same posture hit the private residence of a general whose apparent crime is opposing Villa Somalia politically. Southwest State residents did not need this desk to notice; they burned the Turkish flag in the streets weeks ago. Ankara’s response has been more silence.
That leaves an uncomfortable proposition this newspaper has circled for months, through the M/V LUTUF affair, the Garmaal and Jiifle strikes, and the SOMTURK dispute under Article 54: Turkey has drifted from partner against al-Shabab to Villa Somalia’s discount air force against other Somalis. A partner defends a state’s sovereignty against external threat. A discount air force defends whoever pays the retainer against whoever does not. Ankara has spent a decade of goodwill blurring that line.
The Doolow Precedent
The Doolow strike deserves gravity, not satire alone. A strike on a private residence that reportedly killed a family member and narrowly spared its intended target, where the target’s apparent offense is political opposition rather than insurgency, is precisely the kind of episode international humanitarian law exists to scrutinize. Whether it meets the threshold of a war crime is for investigators with access to targeting data Ankara has, predictably, declined to share. What is already clear: a foreign air force striking a political rival’s home inside a sovereign state’s internal dispute is not a footnote. It is a precedent — one that could travel to Garowe or Bosaso the next time an official falls out of favor with whichever capital is lending the drones.
A Modest Proposal
If Ankara insists on remaining Somalia’s aerial guarantor, this newspaper offers, in the spirit of Swift rather than sincerity, a modest proposal: publish a price list. If a Turkish airstrike is now available to whoever controls Villa Somalia, Somalis deserve to know the rate and the terms, and whether regional states may place competing orders. Puntland has already found a less ambiguous path in its Aug. 2 basing arrangement with the United States at Bosaso, built on a defined counter-piracy mandate rather than an open tab against domestic rivals. The contrast should embarrass Ankara more than it appears to.
Somalia’s federal member states did not sign up for a foreign power adjudicating their succession disputes from 15,000 feet. Turkey did not build a decade of Somali gratitude to spend it bombing a retired general’s home in Gedo. Somalis are entitled to ask, again: who authorized this, under what law, and to what end?
The smoke over Doolow will clear. The question will not.