Under the acacia: After a night of fire, families from Adale search for safety
Displaced mother and her family sit outside their makeshift shelter/Ergo
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The tree offers a patch of shade and not much else. A few plastic jerrycans, a cooking pot blackened by smoke, a sleeping mat—this is all that remains for dozens of families who fled Adale, a remote town in Somalia’s Mudug region, after armed men set fire to homes and shops late on July 31. The attack, rooted in a smoldering clan dispute, pushed more than 120 families into the bush, scattering them across a brittle landscape already stressed by two years of drought.
A fire meant to erase
By dawn, 20 homes and businesses were ash and charcoal. People ran in different directions, grabbing children first, then the elderly, then whatever they could carry. The fire was not an accident, survivors say—it was designed to leave a mark and erase one at the same time.
“We got food from what people collected for us when the fire was still fresh. We got sugar and flour from Wisil. Now, we’re looking for help from the public and the government,” said Iid Nur Awale, a father of 13 who had run the biggest shop in town. He’d restocked that week, investing everything he had. By morning, the goods were gone, his shop a skeleton of corrugated metal, his house unrecognizable. “It happened so fast. We took the children and ran,” he told me, estimating his loss at about $10,000—an unfathomable sum when your profit on a good day is $20.
Adale is not on most maps. It sits some 35 kilometers from Wisil, a dusty junction town linked by roads that are safe or not, depending on the hour and who you ask. When Iid tried to move his family closer to help, he was shocked by how far the $30 transport fare now feels; sometimes, distance is measured less in miles and more in money you don’t have.
Lives under a tree
It’s a spare existence: one meal a day if they can cook at all, water as rationed as words, and long nights of wind and cold. In the afternoon, the sun chisels down on the cracked earth. Babies cry. The older children tramp off to look for firewood; the little ones scavenge for plastic bottles to trade for a few coins. There is no clinic, no latrine, no schoolbell. Just the waiting for what might come next.
“My home was burned down, which caused us to flee to the bush. I’m struggling with a lack of shelter and water, and my possessions were all burned there,” said Safiyo Hasan Jaama, a mother of nine, her youngest an infant. She used to measure her life in goats and seasons; drought took the herd first, then the fire took the house. “This is the worst situation I have ever experienced,” she said. Her husband is elderly and cannot work. Debts for basic food and water—$240 here, $45 there—stack like dry tinder. She worries credit will end long before relief begins.
In places like Adale, a home is a small economy, not just a roof. It’s a storage for grain and a social ledger—proof that you belong. When that vanishes, the loss is more than material. You are forced to start life at the bottom of an invisible staircase with no guarantee it still leads to the same door.
A governor’s warning and a silence from aid
Adale’s governor, Abdullahi Salad, says he has appealed to the Galmudug state administration and to aid agencies, warning that the precarious situation could slide into something worse within weeks. So far, he says, there has been no response.
“They have nothing to rebuild with,” he told me by phone, pointing to a similar arson attack two years ago when Al-Shabaab fighters burned large parts of the town. “Even the savings that people had are gone.” In humanitarian circles, crises often come labeled—conflict, drought, displacement—but on the ground the lines blur; people experience it as a single, unbroken emergency that arrives in waves without time to recover between sets.
That lack of recovery time is a critical detail in Somalia’s story. The country has endured a grinding mix of insecurity and climate shocks for decades. Every time a community like Adale is knocked back—by a raid, by a failed rainy season, by a sudden spike in food prices—it starts again from a deeper hole.
The wider pattern: drought, conflict, and displacement
Somalia counts nearly four million people uprooted within its borders, according to UN and aid group estimates, and the number shifts with the wind—literally with the rains. The seasons that have structured life for generations are no longer dependable, a climate reality that every herder, market trader, and mother understands without needing a weather map.
In the central regions around Mudug, clans have long managed disputes through customary law, elders, and negotiation. But what happens when the usual brokers are weakened by conflict, when armed men have more sway than peacemakers, or when scarcity makes reconciliation harder? In recent years, burning homes has become a grim punctuation mark in local disputes—a tactic to erase an opponent’s foothold and send a message. The message, of course, lands hardest on the poorest.
International aid arrives, when it does, carefully. Security risks mean convoys move slowly, airlifts are rare, and assessments sometimes take weeks. Funding itself is finite and often late. Somalia’s humanitarian response plans are chronically underfunded; priorities pile atop priorities, forcing impossible triage. Meanwhile, families like those from Adale sleep outdoors, unaware of budgets or briefings, only that the wind is colder than they expected and the children are hungry again by noon.
What would it take to break the cycle?
There are practical steps. Tents, tarps, water tanks, and rations matter immediately. So do mobile clinics to treat dehydration, diarrheal disease, and the quiet malnutrition that often follows a sudden flight. Cash assistance is one of the most efficient batteries in the humanitarian toolkit; it allows families to decide what they need most and supports local markets still standing after the shock. Those investments buy time for mediation—time to cool disputes, to secure roads, to help small traders like Iid restock and reopen.
But bigger questions linger in the dust. How do you stabilize a town like Adale so that rebuilding is not just a bet against the next spark? Can community peace committees, backed by the state and trusted elders, get ahead of the disputes rather than rush in after houses are already burning? What would it mean to harden homes with materials less prone to fire—or to insure assets in places where the nearest bank is a mobile phone and a cousin in a city hundreds of miles away?
Across Somalia, ingenuity fills the gaps where institutions falter: diaspora relatives wire money in minutes; traders extend credit on trust; neighbors share food even when there’s not much to share. These bonds are strong, but they are not inexhaustible. The people from Adale are asking, mostly, to be seen and assisted before their resilience is mistaken for a permanent solution.
Late one afternoon, as shadows lengthen under the acacia, you can hear children laughing. It sounds like normal life, but it is not. The mothers take inventory of the day’s small mercies: a kilo of flour, a jerrycan half full, a rumor that a truck might come tomorrow. In Adale, the fire marked an end. Under the trees, people are trying to mark a beginning.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
