By Khadar Afrah
On the evening of 6 May 2026, in the Warlaliska neighbourhood of Deyniile district in Mogadishu, federal government forces opened fire on civilians. The clashes were not triggered by Al-Shabaab. They were triggered by the government’s own land clearance operations, the forced removal of residents from public and private land that the federal administration has been conducting across the capital in recent weeks. A three-year-old child, Musamil Yusuf Osman, was killed. Casualties were reported on multiple sides. Former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, condemning the attack as a criminal act, warned publicly that a dangerous threshold had been crossed and called on Hassan Sheikh Mohamud to stop abusing state power and looting public assets.
This is not an isolated incident. It is a destination. The Deyniile clashes are the foreseeable endpoint of two years of decisions that have systematically dismantled Somalia’s institutional safeguards, concentrated power in a single man’s hands, alienated the international partners keeping the state alive, and created the conditions for exactly this kind of violence. The question Somalia faces on 7 May 2026, eight days before the presidential mandate expires, is no longer whether the crisis is serious. It is whether the country can pull back from the edge before it goes over.
The Policy Behind the Killing
The fighting in Deyniile did not begin with guns. It began with eviction notices.
Across Mogadishu’s districts, the federal government has been conducting forced removals of residents from public land. Opposition figures, civil society organisations, and affected residents have documented the pattern: families are removed from plots, including in some cases privately owned land with legal documentation, and the cleared properties are subsequently transferred to individuals with business connections to the presidency. The proceeds are unaccounted for.
The government calls this a public land clearance programme. The residents of Warlaliska called it what it was. When federal forces arrived to enforce the removals, they fought back. A child died in the crossfire. Sharif Sheikh Ahmed did not equivocate in his response. He described the attack as criminal, demanded accountability, and said directly to the president: a dangerous threshold has been reached. Stop abusing the power of the state. Stop looting the assets of the people.
Those are not the words of a politician positioning himself. They are the words of a man who watched a child die during a government land clearance operation and felt obliged to name what he saw.
This is the government Hassan Sheikh Mohamud has built. Not the government he was elected to build. The government that exists tonight in Mogadishu.
Expelling the Monitors, Keeping the Money
To understand how Somalia arrived at this moment, it is necessary to understand what has been systematically 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 group comprising the UN, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the African Union, IGAD, Ethiopia, and Kenya had served as Somalia’s primary external accountability mechanism for governance and electoral conduct. Ali Omar’s letter called it “outdated and counterproductive.” The dissolution came months before a scheduled election whose framework remained unresolved, at the precise moment when questions about the president’s constitutional conduct were becoming impossible to ignore.
The C6+ had helped end the 2021-2022 electoral crisis. It asked hard questions. When those questions became inconvenient, it was ended. The questions did not go away. They went unanswered.
What makes this decision so damaging is what it was paired with. Somalia’s 2025 federal budget stands at $1.32 billion. Sixty-seven per cent of it — $870 million — comes from external donors. The AU stabilisation mission AUSSOM, which provides the security buffer keeping Al-Shabaab from the capital, runs on a budget of $166.5 million a year. The African Union contributes $20 million of that. Twelve per cent. The rest comes from Western governments. The EU has contributed nearly €2.8 billion to AU peacekeeping in Somalia over two decades. Norway, the third-largest donor to the World Bank’s Somalia trust fund, has contributed NOK 890 million since 2015 and announced NOK 102 million more in April 2026. In December 2023, multilateral creditors cancelled $4.5 billion in Somali debt.
This is the partnership Hassan Sheikh Mohamud dismantled the oversight of. He expelled the watchers and kept the cheques. He called it sovereignty. It was something closer to its opposite: a government that cannot function without external financing, demanding that the people providing that financing ask no questions about how it is used.
The cost of that calculation is visible. US senators introduced the AUSSOM Funding Restriction Act in 2025. The UN Security Council failed to lock in the Resolution 2719 hybrid financing framework by its May 2025 deadline. The mission between Mogadishu and Al-Shabaab is running on contingency pledges. A government that spends two years undermining donor confidence while depending on donors for 67 per cent of its budget is not managing a difficult situation. It is manufacturing a worse one.
The Looting That Has No Paper Trail
The Deyniile evictions are one face of a broader pattern of resource extraction that has operated without accountability throughout 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 can recover up to 90 per cent of operational costs before revenue-sharing begins. Somalia’s royalty is approximately five per cent. The agreements reportedly include no signature, development, or production bonuses and TPAO is said to be exempt from domestic taxation. The Çağrı Bey drillship departed in February 2026 escorted by three Turkish naval frigates, with F-16 fighters already positioned at Mogadishu airport. Not one of these terms was subject to published parliamentary scrutiny. The contract has not been made public.
Somalia’s offshore resources belong to the Somali people. A deal that delivers five per cent in royalties, no bonuses, and probable tax exemption to a foreign state company conducted without parliamentary oversight and without disclosure of its terms is not a development agreement. It is an extraction arrangement negotiated in the dark.
The land evictions and the energy deal share the same logic: state assets are being converted into private value, outside any accountability framework, by a government that has removed the mechanisms that would normally ask where the money went. The energy contract is unpublished. The parliamentary chamber that might ask questions has been converted into a vehicle for ratifying decisions already made.
Threatening the People It Is Supposed to Protect
The Defence Minister told Mogadishu that anyone who attempted to take up arms would regret it. He explicitly invoked the 2021 crackdown in which protesters were killed. That statement was not a security assessment. It was a threat to the civilian population of the capital, delivered through a subordinate, aimed at people whose demand was nothing more than a legitimate election.
In September 2025, opposition leaders including former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed visited Warta Nabadda police station in the Wardhigley district to advocate for a civilian detainee whose violent arrest had caused public outrage. Gunfire erupted. One opposition bodyguard was killed. Civilians were injured. The Prime Minister called it a coup attempt. A former head of state, at a police station, speaking for a detained civilian, was labelled an insurrectionist.
Now, in May 2026, the same pattern has produced a dead child in Deyniile.
The trajectory is not difficult to read. A government that deploys armed force against civilians to clear land, that labels a police station visit by a former president a coup, that issues public threats invoking past crackdowns against protesters who ask for elections, is a government that has normalised the use of state violence against its own population as a political instrument. That normalisation is not stable. It escalates. The events of 6 May 2026 are not an endpoint. They are a warning of what comes next if the direction does not change.
The International Community: Present, Silent, Complicit
What makes Somalia’s current crisis so dangerous is not only what the president has done. It is what the international community has failed to do about it.
Western governments fund 88 per cent of AUSSOM. They have contributed billions to Somalia’s reconstruction over three decades. They cancelled $4.5 billion of Somalia’s debt in 2023. They are the reason the federal government in Mogadishu functions at all. And they have watched, largely in silence, as the government they finance has expelled its accountability mechanisms, conducted forced evictions, signed opaque energy deals, extended a presidential mandate through a parliament of expired mandates, and now killed a child in a land clearance operation.
The argument offered for this silence is pragmatic: Somalia cannot be sanctioned without collapsing; it cannot be abandoned without handing a strategic victory to Al-Shabaab; a compromised government is better than none. That calculation may have been defensible at some point. It is not defensible tonight, with a three-year-old buried in Deyniile and a mandate expiry eight days away and no agreed electoral process in sight.
When international partners fund a government’s security and say nothing about its governance failures, they do not maintain stability. They communicate to every actor in Somali politics that accountability has no price. They tell the president that Western engagement is unconditional. That message is the seed of exactly the anti-Western sentiment that Al-Shabaab needs. The partners planting that seed with their silence are not protecting their investment. They are destroying it slowly.
The African Union Commission, under Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, has been equally absent. The AU spoke correctly and loudly when Israel recognised Somaliland. 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 produced last night’s killing. The AU deployed 84 observers to Uganda’s January 2026 elections. Somalia’s collapsing electoral process has attracted no comparable institutional attention. That silence gives Hassan Sheikh Mohamud continental cover. It tells him that what he is doing carries no African cost either.
Silence from partners is not neutrality. It is permission. And permission granted now, in these eight days, will be paid for at a far higher price later.
What Civil War Looks Like Before It Starts
Somalia has been to this place before. The Somali civil war did not begin suddenly. It began with a government that decided power-sharing was a threat, that concentrated authority in fewer and fewer hands, that used state forces against political opponents and called it governance, that alienated its international partners and called it sovereignty, that looted public resources and called it development. The country did not fall suddenly. It fell after the social contract collapsed under the accumulated weight of those decisions.
The conditions accumulating in Mogadishu in May 2026 are not identical to 1991. The institutions are different. The international presence is different. The political configuration is different. But the logic is recognisable: a government using force to resolve political disputes that require negotiation, creating enemies faster than it can suppress them, degrading the institutions that might otherwise contain the pressure, and moving towards a confrontation it cannot win cleanly but refuses to avoid.
The elite battalions deployed along sub-clan lines within Mogadishu are not a security architecture. They are a civil war waiting for a trigger. The land evictions radicalising civilian populations in Deyniile and beyond are not governance. They are recruitment. The unanswered questions about the energy deal and the land sales are not technical failures. They are grievances being stored for a moment when the political temperature rises high enough to ignite them.
Al-Shabaab advanced to less than 50 kilometres from Mogadishu by July 2025. Foreign embassies withdrew non-essential staff to Nairobi. The security gains of 2022 and 2023 have been reversed. The resources that should have sustained the counter-insurgency were redirected into suppressing domestic political opposition. The greatest external beneficiary of Somalia’s current internal crisis is the organisation 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 successor process. He has a capital city where government forces just killed a child in a land clearance operation. He has international partners whose patience with unconditional engagement is visibly exhausting. He has a political opposition that has been threatened, shot at, and labelled insurrectionist for asking for elections. He has a national army fractured along clan lines. And he has an African Union that is watching all of this and saying nothing.
This is what a country looks like on the verge of collapse. Not after the violence starts. Before it.
What Must Happen Now
The president still has the ability to change course. The mandate expires on 15 May. There is still time to convene a genuine, inclusive process, to reach an agreement with the opposition and the federal member states, to produce a credible electoral framework, and to begin a transition that does not require a confrontation nobody can afford.
International partners must stop calculating that silence is safer than engagement. It is not. Public conditionality — clearly stated, consistently enforced, coordinated across bilateral and multilateral channels — is the only tool that has a realistic chance of altering the trajectory before the trajectory becomes irreversible. The EU, the UK, Norway, the United States, and the AU all have leverage. They have chosen not to use it. That choice 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 their offshore resources in unpublished contracts, extend his own mandate through a parliament of expired terms, and then shoot at the civilians who object. They elected him to build a country.
Eight days remain. The choices made in those eight days will determine whether Somalia steps back from this edge or goes over it. The evidence of the past two years leaves little room for optimism. But the alternative to demanding better is accepting what happened last night in Deyniile as the new normal. That is not a price the Somali people should be asked to pay. It is not a price their partners should be willing to fund.
Khadar Afrah
