Pre-Dawn Fighting in Baidoa Leaves 71 Wounded and One Civilian Dead

SOMALIA · DEFENCE

The Baidoa fighting on Thursday morning wounded 71 people and killed one civilian, according to the city’s main hospital, in the sharpest flare-up yet of a months-long dispute over who governs South West state. Somalia’s defence ministry said its forces were responding to an attack by militias loyal to the region’s ousted president.

What the Baidoa fighting involved

The shooting started before dawn on the edges of the city and lasted several hours, subsiding in the early afternoon. Residents described heavy gunfire and families leaving their homes in the dark.

Bay Regional Hospital took in 71 wounded people, 15 of them women, and one dead civilian. The count came from Dr Abdikafi Omar Mohamud, who runs the hospital’s emergency department, speaking to the Associated Press.

Somalia’s defence ministry said government forces had come under attack and responded. It attributed the attack to fighters loyal to Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen and to al-Shabab.

Pairing a political rival with an armed group in the same sentence is a familiar move in Somali statements. It is also, in this region, sometimes accurate, which is part of what makes the conflict so hard to read from outside.

The dispute behind the gunfire

Baidoa is the seat of South West state, one of Somalia’s federal member states, and it sits about 245 kilometres north-west of Mogadishu. Whoever controls it controls the administration of a large agricultural region.

Laftagareen had governed the state since 2018. Federal forces took the city on 30 March this year and he resigned shortly afterwards.

That did not settle the question. Forces loyal to him have remained in the area, and the past five months have produced repeated clashes rather than a transfer of authority.

The pattern is not unique to South West. Somalia’s federal government and its member states have spent years arguing over who appoints regional leaders, and the argument is regularly settled by force rather than by ballot.

A city with several armies in it

The March advance on Baidoa did not involve Somali forces alone. Laftagareen’s administration accused Turkey of providing drone cover for the advancing government units and alleged civilian casualties from drone strikes, Somali Guardian reported at the time. The federal government denied the claims, which could not be independently verified.

Ethiopian troops, serving with the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), have held the airport and the presidential compound. They stayed out of the fighting in March, having been long associated with the regional leadership.

That leaves a single mid-sized city hosting federal troops, regional forces, an African Union contingent and an insurgency. Any one of those actors can restart a firefight without the others deciding to.

It also complicates the arithmetic of any settlement. A deal between Mogadishu and Laftagareen would still have to survive whatever al-Shabab does next.

The cost is falling on civilians

The casualty pattern tells its own story. Seventy-one wounded against one death suggests fire in a built-up area rather than a pitched battle between formations.

A month earlier, a separate round of fighting in the same city killed four civilians and wounded 98. Two incidents in five weeks have therefore produced close to 170 injuries.

Bay region is also one of the areas worst affected by Somalia’s food crisis. Fighting that closes roads and markets does its damage long after the shooting stops.

Aid agencies were already stretched before this. The World Food Programme has reached only a fraction of the six million Somalis short of food this year.

Why this matters beyond Somalia

Somalia is trying to sell itself as an investable frontier, with port concessions, telecoms growth and a debt relief process behind it. Every Baidoa is a discount applied to that pitch.

The country is also a theatre for outside powers. Turkey supplies air support and training, Ethiopia supplies troops, Gulf states supply money, and the United States runs its own operations against al-Shabab.

The mission is meanwhile underfunded and running out of logistical support after the United States said it would stop financing the United Nations support office that sustains it. Uganda, the largest troop contributor, says all its forces will leave by August 2027.

That combination points one way. External appetite for underwriting Somali security is shrinking at the moment when internal disputes are getting more violent.

What the money side looks like

For investors and shipping operators the relevant metric is not the number of clashes but their location. Baidoa is inland, and the coastal and port economy has so far been affected more by piracy than by federal disputes.

That separation is not guaranteed to hold. Piracy off the Somali coast returned to a ten-year high this year, and insurers price political risk as a single country-level number.

The federal government’s revenue base depends heavily on the ports and on customs. A state-level conflict that spreads to the roads feeding those ports would show up quickly in the budget.

This is the practical reason to watch a provincial firefight from Rio de Janeiro or Lagos. The distance between a regional standoff and a sovereign risk premium is shorter than it looks.

What to watch

The first thing is whether Mogadishu names a permanent leadership for South West state and whether that name is accepted locally. Until it is, the clashes have no obvious end point.

The second is AUSSOM’s funding, which remains unresolved as troop contributors plan their exits. A thinner presence in Baidoa changes the balance in the city.

The third is the electoral calendar. Somalia’s shift towards direct elections has already produced disputes elsewhere, and South West is now the sharpest test of whether that shift can be made to hold.

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