Hassan Sheikh Mohamud Pushes Somalia Toward Civil War

By Khadar AfrahSaturday May 9, 2026

In Mogadishu’s Warlaliska neighbourhood on the evening of 6 May 2026, gunfire from federal government forces cut down civilians in a clash that had nothing to do with Al-Shabaab. The violence erupted during the government’s own land clearance drive — a wave of forced removals from public and private property that has swept across the capital in recent weeks. Among the dead was three-year-old Musamil Yusuf Osman. Casualties were reported on both sides. Former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed denounced the shooting as a criminal act, saying the country had crossed a perilous line and urging Hassan Sheikh Mohamud to stop abusing state power and plundering public assets.

What happened in Deyniile was not an aberration. It was the predictable outcome of two years of choices that have stripped away Somalia’s institutional checks, concentrated authority in the hands of one man, driven away the international partners that help keep the state afloat, and set the stage for exactly this kind of bloodshed. As Somalia faces 7 May 2026 — eight days before the president’s mandate expires — the central question is no longer whether the crisis is grave. It is whether the country can pull back before it tips over the edge.

The Policy Behind the Killing

The shooting in Deyniile did not start with bullets. It started with eviction notices.

Across Mogadishu, the federal government has been carrying out forced removals of residents from public land. Opposition leaders, civil society groups and affected families say the pattern is consistent: people are cleared from plots, including in some cases privately owned land backed by legal documentation, and the emptied properties are then handed to individuals with business ties to the presidency. The money involved has not been accounted for.

The government describes the process as a public land clearance programme. Residents in Warlaliska saw something else. When federal forces arrived to enforce the removals, the confrontation turned violent. A child was killed in the crossfire. Sharif Sheikh Ahmed responded without hesitation, calling the attack criminal, demanding accountability and speaking directly to the president: a dangerous threshold has been crossed. Stop abusing the power of the state. Stop looting the people’s assets.

Those are not the words of a politician trying to score points. They are the words of a former president who watched a child die during a government land clearance operation and felt compelled to say plainly what had happened.

This is the government Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has fashioned — not the one he promised to build, but the one now operating in Mogadishu tonight.

Expelling the Monitors, Keeping the Money

To see how Somalia reached this point, it is necessary to trace what has been deliberately removed over the past two years.

On 10 June 2025, the federal government sent a letter through State Minister Ali Omar demanding the dissolution of the C6+. The grouping — made up of the UN, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the African Union, IGAD, Ethiopia and Kenya — had served as Somalia’s main external accountability mechanism on governance and elections. Ali Omar described it as “outdated and counterproductive.” The move came months before an election whose rules were still unsettled and at exactly the moment questions over the president’s constitutional conduct were becoming impossible to ignore.

The C6+ helped resolve the 2021-2022 electoral crisis. It asked the hard questions. Once those questions became inconvenient, the group was pushed aside. The questions did not disappear. They were simply left unanswered.

What makes the decision so damaging is the context surrounding it. Somalia’s 2025 federal budget is $1.32 billion. Sixty-seven per cent of that — $870 million — comes from external donors. The AU stabilisation mission AUSSOM, which provides the security buffer keeping Al-Shabaab away from the capital, runs on an annual budget of $166.5 million. The African Union covers $20 million of that, or 12 per cent, while the rest comes from Western governments. Over two decades, the EU has contributed nearly €2.8 billion to AU peacekeeping in Somalia. Norway, the third-largest donor to the World Bank’s Somalia trust fund, has provided NOK 890 million since 2015 and announced another NOK 102 million in April 2026. In December 2023, multilateral creditors cancelled $4.5 billion in Somali debt.

That is the partnership Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has chosen to weaken oversight of. He pushed out the observers and kept the money. He called it sovereignty. In practice, it looks closer to the reverse: a government that depends on foreign financing to function, while demanding that those financing it refrain from asking how the funds are used.

The consequences are already showing. US senators introduced the AUSSOM Funding Restriction Act in 2025. The UN Security Council missed the May 2025 deadline to lock in the Resolution 2719 hybrid financing framework. The mission standing between Mogadishu and Al-Shabaab is now operating on contingency pledges. A government that spends two years eroding donor confidence while relying on donors for 67 per cent of its budget is not steering through a difficult moment. It is making the situation worse.

The Looting That Has No Paper Trail

The Deyniile evictions are only one part of a wider pattern of resource extraction that has unfolded without accountability under this administration.

The 2024 energy agreements with Turkey’s state oil company TPAO grant exploration rights in three offshore blocks. According to multiple credible reports, TPAO may recover as much as 90 per cent of operational costs before revenue sharing begins. Somalia’s royalty is about five per cent. The deals reportedly contain no signature, development or production bonuses, and TPAO is said to be exempt from domestic taxation. The Çağrı Bey drillship left in February 2026 escorted by three Turkish naval frigates, while F-16 fighters were already stationed at Mogadishu airport. None of those terms underwent published parliamentary scrutiny. The contract itself has not been made public.

Somalia’s offshore wealth belongs to the Somali people. A deal that yields five per cent in royalties, no bonuses and likely tax exemption for a foreign state company — negotiated without parliamentary oversight and with its terms kept secret — is not a development partnership. It is an extraction arrangement drawn up in the dark.

The land clearances and the energy deal are driven by the same logic: state assets are being turned into private gain, outside any accountability system, by a government that has stripped away the institutions that would normally ask where the money went. The energy contract remains unpublished. The parliamentary chamber that should be asking questions has become a rubber stamp for decisions already made.

Threatening the People It Is Supposed to Protect

The Defence Minister warned Mogadishu that anyone who took up arms would regret it, explicitly invoking the 2021 crackdown in which protesters were killed. That was not a security briefing. It was a threat directed at civilians in the capital, delivered through a subordinate, aimed at people asking for nothing more than a legitimate election.

In September 2025, opposition leaders including former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed went to Warta Nabadda police station in Wardhigley district to press for the release of a civilian detainee whose violent arrest had sparked public outrage. Shots rang out. One opposition bodyguard was killed. Civilians were wounded. The Prime Minister called the incident a coup attempt. A former head of state speaking at a police station on behalf of a detained civilian was cast as an insurrectionist.

Now, in May 2026, the same pattern has left a dead child in Deyniile.

The trajectory is not hard to follow. A government that uses armed force against civilians to clear land, that treats a former president’s visit to a police station as a coup, and that issues public threats invoking past crackdowns against protesters seeking elections, has normalised state violence as a political tool. That normalisation is never stable. It escalates. The events of 6 May 2026 are not a stopping point. They are a warning of what may come next if the course does not change.

The International Community: Present, Silent, Complicit

What makes Somalia’s crisis so dangerous is not only what the president has done. It is also what the international community has chosen not to do.

Western governments fund 88 per cent of AUSSOM. They have poured billions into Somalia’s reconstruction over the past three decades. They cancelled $4.5 billion in Somali debt in 2023. They are the reason the federal government in Mogadishu can function at all. And yet they have mostly watched in silence as the government they finance has driven out its accountability mechanisms, carried out forced evictions, signed opaque energy agreements, extended a presidential mandate through a parliament operating on expired terms, and now killed a child during a land clearance operation.

The justification for that silence is usually pragmatic: Somalia cannot be sanctioned without collapse; it cannot be abandoned without handing Al-Shabaab a strategic victory; a flawed government is preferable to none. That argument may once have had merit. It does not tonight, with a three-year-old child buried in Deyniile, eight days left on the mandate and no agreed electoral process in sight.

When international partners fund a government’s security while staying mute on its governance failures, they do not preserve stability. They signal to every political actor in Somalia that accountability has no cost. They tell the president that Western engagement is unconditional. That is precisely the message Al-Shabaab feeds on to build anti-Western sentiment. The partners who are planting that seed through silence are not protecting their investment. They are slowly destroying it.

The African Union Commission, led by Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, has been no more present. The AU was loud and correct when Israel recognised North Western State of Somalia. It has said nothing about the parliamentary term extension, nothing about clan-aligned battalion deployments inside Mogadishu, nothing about unrecorded land revenues and nothing about the evictions that led to last night’s killing. The AU deployed 84 observers to Uganda’s January 2026 elections. Somalia’s collapsing electoral process has received no comparable institutional attention. That silence gives Hassan Sheikh Mohamud continental cover. It tells him there is no African cost to what he is doing.

Silence from partners is not neutrality. It is permission. And permission granted now, in these eight days, will come at a far higher price later.

What Civil War Looks Like Before It Starts

Somalia has been here before. The civil war did not begin overnight. It began with a government that saw power-sharing as a threat, concentrated authority in fewer and fewer hands, used state forces against political rivals and called it governance, alienated its international partners and called it sovereignty, looted public resources and called it development. The country did not collapse all at once. It fell after the social contract crumbled beneath the weight of those choices.

The conditions building in Mogadishu in May 2026 are not identical to 1991. The institutions are different. The foreign presence is different. The political map is different. But the logic is familiar: a government using force to settle disputes that require negotiation, creating enemies faster than it can suppress them, weakening the institutions that might absorb the pressure, and moving toward a confrontation it cannot win cleanly but refuses to avoid.

The elite battalions deployed along sub-clan lines in Mogadishu are not a security architecture. They are a civil war waiting for a spark. The land evictions radicalising civilian populations in Deyniile and elsewhere are not governance. They are recruitment. The unanswered questions surrounding the energy deal and the land sales are not technical oversights. They are grievances being stockpiled for the moment when the political temperature rises high enough to ignite them.

Al-Shabaab advanced to within 50 kilometres of Mogadishu by July 2025. Foreign embassies withdrew non-essential staff to Nairobi. The security gains won in 2022 and 2023 have been rolled back. The resources that should have supported the counter-insurgency were instead redirected toward suppressing domestic political opposition. The biggest outside beneficiary of Somalia’s internal crisis is the very group the international community has spent three decades and billions of dollars trying to defeat.

The president has eight days left on his constitutional mandate. He has no agreed succession process. He presides over a capital where government forces just killed a child during a land clearance operation. He faces international partners whose patience with unconditional engagement is clearly wearing thin. He has an opposition that has been threatened, shot at and branded insurrectionist for demanding elections. He has a national army fractured along clan lines. And he has an African Union that is watching and saying nothing.

This is what a country on the brink looks like. Not after the violence begins. Before it.

What Must Happen Now

The president still has time to change direction. The mandate expires on 15 May. There is still time to convene a real, inclusive process, strike an agreement with the opposition and the federal member states, produce a credible electoral framework and begin a transition that does not require a confrontation no one can afford.

International partners must stop treating silence as the safer option. It is not. Public conditionality — clearly stated, consistently enforced and coordinated across bilateral and multilateral channels — is the only tool with a realistic chance of changing the trajectory before it becomes irreversible. The EU, the UK, Norway, the United States and the AU all have leverage. They have declined to use it. That decision now has a name: Musamil Yusuf Osman, three years old, killed in Deyniile on 6 May 2026 during a government land clearance operation.

The Somali people did not elect this president to evict them from their homes, sign away offshore resources in unpublished contracts, prolong his own mandate through a parliament of expired terms and then open fire on civilians who protest. They elected him to build a country.

Eight days remain. What happens in those eight days will decide whether Somalia steps back from the brink or goes over it. The record of the past two years leaves little reason for optimism. But the alternative to demanding better is accepting what happened last night in Deyniile as the new normal. That is a price the Somali people should not be asked to pay. It is not a price their partners should be willing to fund.

Khadar Afrah