Before dawn on September 3, gunfire tore through several neighborhoods of Baidoa. Residents in Al-Faras, Boonkaay, and Al-Axmaar woke to explosions and stray bullets landing in residential streets. By the time the fighting stopped in the early afternoon, at least one civilian was dead and 71 people had been wounded, according to Bay Regional Hospital.
For anyone following Somali news only in short bursts, this can look like a random flare-up. It isn’t. This was the third major round of fighting in Baidoa in less than six months, and all three trace back to the same unresolved question: who has the right to govern South West State?
Who Is Abdiaziz Laftagareen?
Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, better known by his nickname Laftagareen, spent years working his way through Somalia’s federal government before becoming a regional power broker. He served as a deputy minister of fisheries, later as state minister for trade, and eventually as Minister of Energy and Water Resources under Prime Minister Hassan Ali Khaire.
In December 2018, he was elected president of South West State by the regional assembly, decisively beating his nearest rival. He held that post for more than seven years, longer than almost any other regional leader in Somalia’s federal system, and built a network of loyalty within the state’s security forces and clan structures that would prove difficult to dislodge even after he was formally removed from office.
How the Crisis Began
The roots of the current conflict go back to a broader fight in Mogadishu. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government has spent the past several years pushing constitutional changes aimed at consolidating federal authority, including a shift toward direct “one person, one vote” elections instead of the clan-based indirect voting that regional states have historically used to choose their leaders.
Laftagareen opposed these changes. On March 18, 2026, he quit the president’s ruling party and publicly rejected the new federal constitution. Ten days later, on March 28, he pushed through a rushed, single-day re-election in South West’s regional assembly and declared himself the winner of a new term.
The federal government refused to recognize the vote, calling it unconstitutional. Two days later, on March 30, federal forces and allied militias entered Baidoa. The Somali National Army secured the city within 48 hours. Laftagareen resigned and fled to Nairobi, and Prime Minister Hamza Abdi Barre appointed an interim leader to prevent a power vacuum.
A New President, but an Unsettled Question
Mogadishu treated the March intervention as the end of the matter. It wasn’t. On June 13, 2026, the regional assembly elected Sheikh Adan Mohamed Nur “Madobe” as the new South West State president by a vote of 88 to 2, after rival candidates withdrew and publicly denounced the process as a “one-man election.”
Laftagareen never accepted his removal. From exile, he has continued to describe himself as the legitimate president of South West State. In July 2026, his supporters briefly seized control of the state’s official digital platforms, a symbolic move meant to underline that he had not conceded.
That refusal to accept the political outcome is what turned a political dispute into a recurring armed one.
A Pattern, Not an Incident
Baidoa has now seen violence connected to this dispute on at least four separate occasions in 2026:
- March 30: Federal forces take the city; Laftagareen resigns and leaves for Nairobi.
- May 30: Clashes break out days before scheduled state elections, timed to disrupt the vote.
- August 17-18: The most serious assault before September, with forces loyal to Laftagareen mounting a direct, coordinated attack on the city. Federal troops repelled it, though government and opposition accounts of the casualties still don’t agree.
- September 3: A pre-dawn attack described by Somalia’s Defense Ministry as involving vehicles packed with explosives, launched by what officials called a mix of Laftagareen-loyal militias and al-Shabab fighters.
That pairing, Laftagareen’s forces and al-Shabab, appears consistently in the federal government’s public statements about these attacks. It is worth reading carefully. Somali officials have a long history of linking political rivals to al-Shabab as a way of delegitimizing them. But in South West’s case, security analysts also note that Bay and Bakool regions have seen a genuine resurgence of al-Shabab activity this year, and that the group has shown a pattern of inserting itself into local power vacuums wherever they open up. Both things can be true at once: a political rival distancing himself from the label, and an armed group opportunistically exploiting a fight that already existed.
Why Baidoa Matters Beyond South West State
It would be easy to file this under regional politics and move on. That would miss why Mogadishu, and outside observers, are watching so closely.
Baidoa sits roughly 245 kilometers northwest of the capital and serves as the administrative seat of one of Somalia’s most agriculturally significant regions. Whoever controls the city controls the machinery of that regional government, along with South West’s seats in the federal parliament, one of the largest blocs held by any single state. A prolonged fight for the city is, in effect, a fight over a meaningful share of national political weight.
There’s also a military cost. Every soldier deployed to hold Baidoa against Laftagareen’s fighters is a soldier not available for the federal government’s separate, ongoing campaign against al-Shabab elsewhere in the country, including the intensified US-backed air operations against ISIL-Somalia in Puntland. A federal government fighting on two fronts, one political and one insurgent, has fewer resources for either.
The region’s demographics raise the stakes further. South West hosts hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, many of whom fled earlier rounds of conflict or drought. Renewed fighting risks new displacement layered on top of a population that is already among the most vulnerable in the country, and it complicates the work of humanitarian agencies trying to operate there.
What Comes Next
Nothing about this dispute suggests a quick resolution. Laftagareen has shown no sign of dropping his claim to be South West’s legitimate president, and each failed attack so far has been followed, eventually, by another one. The federal government, for its part, has treated negotiation as a non-starter, framing every clash as a security operation against an illegitimate armed challenge rather than a political dispute that needs a political answer.
Meanwhile, the broader electoral calendar keeps moving. Somalia’s electoral commission has set September 30 for elections in Hirshabelle, another federal member state, and armed militias there have already seized centers designated for voter registration in Beledweyne. South West is not an isolated case. It’s the clearest example yet of a pattern playing out across Somalia’s federal states, where contested elections and unresolved claims to power are turning into armed standoffs faster than Mogadishu can manage them.
For now, Baidoa’s residents are left absorbing the human cost of a political argument that shows no sign of being settled in any courtroom or negotiating table. Until it is, the city is likely to keep finding itself back in this same position: calm for a few weeks, then waking up to gunfire before dawn.
