In the evening of May 6, 2026, in the Warlaliska area of Deyniile district in Mogadishu, federal government forces began shooting at civilians. The conflict was not instigated by Al-Shabaab but by the government’s own land clearance operations, which have involved forcibly removing residents from both public and private properties across the capital during recent weeks. A three-year-old child named Musamil Yusuf Osman lost his life. Multiple casualties were reported on various sides. Former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed condemned the assault as criminal, stating publicly that a critical line had been crossed and urging Hassan Sheikh Mohamud to cease abusing state authority and plundering public resources.
This event is not an isolated occurrence but rather a culmination. The Deyniile violence represents the predictable outcome of two years of decisions that methodically eroded Somalia’s protective institutions, centralized authority in one individual, distanced the international partners sustaining the state, and established the precise environment for such violence. On May 7, 2026, with just eight days remaining before the presidential term concludes, Somalia confronts a different questionnot whether the crisis is severe, but whether the nation can retreat from the precipice before it falls.
The Policy Behind the Violence
The conflict in Deyniile did not start with weapons but with eviction notices.
Throughout Mogadishu’s districts, the federal government has implemented forced relocations of residents from public lands. Opposition leaders, civil society groups, and affected individuals have recorded this pattern: families being displaced from their properties, including instances of legally documented privately owned land, with the cleared spaces then transferred to individuals associated with presidential business interests. The financial gains from these transactions remain undocumented.
The administration labels this a public land clearance initiative. The people of Warlaliska described it differently. When federal forces arrived to carry out the evictions, residents resisted. A child lost his life in the ensuing crossfire. Sharif Sheikh Ahmed responded without reservation. He characterized the assault as criminal, called for accountability, and directly addressed the president: a critical boundary had been crossed. Halt the abuse of state power. End the plundering of public wealth.
These statements were not those of a politician maneuvering for position. They came from a man who witnessed a child’s death during a government eviction and felt compelled to articulate what he observed.
Expelling the Watchers, Retaining the Funds
To comprehend how Somalia reached this juncture, one must examine what has methodically been dismantled over the past two years.
On June 10, 2025, the Federal Government dispatched a letter via State Minister Ali Omar demanding the disbandment of the C6+. This coalition, comprising the UN, the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union, the African Union, IGAD, Ethiopia, and Kenya, had functioned as Somalia’s principal external accountability mechanism for governance and electoral processes. Ali Omar’s communication described the group as “outdated and counterproductive.” This dissolution occurred months before a planned election with an unresolved framework, precisely when inquiries about the president’s constitutional actions could no longer be avoided.
The C6+ had successfully resolved the 2021-2022 electoral impasse. It posed difficult questions. When those questions became inconvenient, the group was terminated. The questions did not disappear. They remained unanswered.
What renders this decision particularly damaging is its context. Somalia’s 2025 federal budget totals $1.32 billion, with 67 percent$870 millionoriginating from international donors. The AU stabilization mission AUSSOM, which maintains the security barrier preventing Al-Shabaab from reaching the capital, operates on a $166.5 million annual budget. The African Union provides $20 million of this amount, just 12 percent. The remainder comes from Western governments. The EU has contributed nearly €2.8 billion to AU peacekeeping efforts in Somalia over two decades. Norway, the third-largest contributor to the World Bank’s Somalia trust fund, has provided NOK 890 million since 2015 and announced an additional NOK 102 million in April 2026. In December 2023, multilateral creditors canceled $4.5 billion of Somali debt.
This is the partnership Hassan Sheikh Mohamud eliminated oversight of. He dismissed the monitors but retained the funding. He termed this sovereignty. It resembled something closer to its opposite: an administration dependent on external financing, insisting that those providing such resources ask no questions about its utilization.
The consequences of that calculation are evident. US senators introduced the AUSSOM Funding Restriction Act in 2025. The UN Security Council failed to establish the Resolution 2719 hybrid financing framework by its May 2025 deadline. The operation between Mogadishu and Al-Shabaab continues on temporary funding commitments. An administration that devotes two years to eroding donor confidence while relying on donors for 67 percent of its budget is not navigating a challenging circumstance. It is deliberately creating an even more precarious one.
The Unaccounted Extraction
The Deyniile evictions represent one aspect of a wider pattern of resource exploitation that has proceeded without transparency throughout this administration.
The 2024 energy agreements with Turkey’s state oil company TPAO provide exploration rights to three offshore blocks. Based on multiple reliable sources, TPAO can recoup up to 90 percent of operational expenses before revenue distribution commences. Somalia’s share amounts to approximately five percent. These agreements allegedly contain no signature, development, or production bonuses, and TPAO purportedly receives exemption from local taxation. The Çağrı Bey drillship departed in February 2026 under escort of three Turkish naval frigates, with F-16 fighters already stationed at Mogadishu airport. None of these terms underwent public parliamentary examination. The contract remains unpublished.
Somalia’s offshore resources rightfully belong to its people. An agreement granting five percent in royalties, no bonuses, and likely tax exemptions to a foreign state enterprise, conducted without legislative oversight and without disclosure of its provisions, is not a development arrangement. It is a secretive extraction operation.
The land evictions and the energy agreement follow the same principle: state assets are being transformed into private benefits, bypassing any accountability mechanisms, by a government that has eliminated the systems that typically question financial flows. The energy contract remains unpublished. The parliamentary body that might raise inquiries has been repurposed as a means for endorsing decisions already determined.
Endangering Those It Should Shield
The Defence Minister informed Mogadishu that anyone attempting to arm themselves would face consequences. He specifically referenced the 2021 suppression in which protesters lost their lives. That communication was not a security evaluation. It constituted a threat to the capital’s civilian population, conveyed through a subordinate, directed at individuals whose request was merely for a lawful electoral process.
In September 2025, opposition figures including former President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed visited Warta Nabadda police station in Wardhigley district to support a civilian detainee whose violent apprehension had sparked public indignation. Gunfire broke out. One opposition bodyguard died. Civilians sustained injuries. The Prime Minister characterized this as an insurrection attempt. A former head of state, at a police station, advocating for a detained civilian, was branded a rebel.
Now, in May 2026, this same pattern has resulted in the death of a child in Deyniile.
The progression is clear to observe. An administration that employs military force against civilians to remove residents, that designates a former president’s police station visit as a coup attempt, that makes public threats referencing previous suppressions of protesters demanding elections, has normalized employing state violence against its own populace as a political tool. This normalization is not sustainable. It intensifies. The occurrences of May 6, 2026 do not mark a conclusion. They signal a preview of what will follow if the current course persists.
The International Community: Present, Silent, Complicit
What renders Somalia’s current crisis so perilous is not merely what the president has accomplished. It is what the international community has neglected to address.
Western governments finance 88 percent of AUSSOM. They have contributed billions to Somalia’s reconstruction across three decades. They canceled $4.5 billion of Somalia’s debt in 2023. They are the sole reason the federal administration in Mogadishu functions. And they have observed, predominantly in silence, as the government they support has dismissed its oversight mechanisms, implemented forced relocations, signed non-transparent energy agreements, prolonged a presidential mandate through a parliament of expired terms, and now caused the death of a child during a land clearance operation.
The justification offered for this silence is practical: Somalia cannot face sanctions without collapsing; it cannot be abandoned without delivering a strategic advantage to Al-Shabaab; a compromised administration is preferable to none. This reasoning might have been justifiable at some point. It is indefensible now, with a three-year-old child buried in Deyniile, a mandate expiring in eight days, and no established electoral framework in place.
When international partners finance a government’s security while remaining silent about its governance deficiencies, they do not preserve stability. They signal to every participant in Somali politics that accountability carries no consequences. They inform the president that Western involvement is without conditions. This message serves as the foundation for precisely the anti-Western sentiment that Al-Shabaab requires. The partners sowing that seed through their inaction are not safeguarding their investment. They are gradually undermining it.
The African Union Commission, led by Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, has displayed comparable absence. The AU appropriately and forcefully addressed Israel’s recognition of Somaliland. It has expressed no concern about the parliamentary term extension, nothing about clan-based battalion deployments within Mogadishu, nothing about undocumented land revenues, and nothing about the evictions that resulted in last night’s fatality. The AU deployed 84 observers to Uganda’s January 2026 elections. Somalia’s deteriorating electoral process has received no equivalent institutional scrutiny. This silence provides Hassan Sheikh Mohamud continental protection. It indicates to him that his actions carry no African penalty either.
The Appearance of Civil War Before It Begins
Somalia has reached this location previously. The Somali civil war did not commence abruptly. It originated with a government that determined power-sharing constituted a threat, that centralized control in progressively fewer hands, that employed state forces against political adversaries and termed it governance, that distanced its international partners and labeled it sovereignty, that plundered public assets and called it development. The nation did not collapse unexpectedly. It fell after the social agreement fractured under the cumulative burden of those decisions.
The circumstances accumulating in Mogadishu in May 2026 are not identical to 1991. The institutions differ. The international presence differs. The political configuration differs. However, the logic is recognizable: an administration utilizing force to resolve political conflicts that necessitate negotiation, creating adversaries more rapidly than it can suppress them, weakening the institutions that might otherwise contain the pressure, and progressing toward a confrontation it cannot win definitively yet refuses to evade.
The elite battalions deployed along sub-clan lines within Mogadishu do not constitute a security framework. They represent a civil war awaiting a catalyst. The land evictions radicalizing civilian populations in Deyniile and surrounding areas are not governance. They constitute recruitment. The unresolved inquiries regarding the energy agreement and land transfers are not technical deficiencies. They represent grievances accumulating for a moment when the political intensity escalates sufficiently to ignite them.
Al-Shabaab approached within less than 50 kilometers of Mogadishu by July 2025. Foreign embassies relocated non-essential personnel to Nairobi. The security advancements of 2022 and 2023 have been reversed. The resources that should have maintained the counter-insurgency were redirected toward suppressing domestic political opposition. The principal external beneficiary of Somalia’s current internal crisis is the organization the international community has dedicated three decades and billions of dollars attempting to defeat.
The president possesses eight days remaining on his constitutional term. He lacks a confirmed succession process. He governs a capital city where government forces recently caused the death of a child during a land clearance operation. He has international partners whose tolerance for unconditional engagement is visibly diminishing. He faces a political opposition that has been threatened, fired upon, and designated as insurrectionists for demanding elections. He commands a national army divided along clan lines. And he has an African Union observing all this while remaining silent.
This is how a nation appears on the brink of disintegration. Not after the violence commences. Before it.
What Must Occur Now
The president still retains capacity to alter direction. The mandate concludes on May 15. Time remains to initiate a legitimate, inclusive process, to establish agreement with the opposition and federal member states, to formulate a credible electoral framework, and to commence a transition that does not necessitate a confrontation no one can afford.
International partners must cease assuming that silence is safer than involvement. It is not. Public conditionalitiesclearly articulated, uniformly enforced, coordinated across bilateral and multilateral channelsconstitute the sole instrument with genuine potential to modify the trajectory before it becomes irrevocable. The EU, the UK, Norway, the United States, and the AU all possess influence. They have opted not to utilize it. That decision now bears a name: Musamil Yusuf Osman, three years old, deceased in Deyniile on May 6, 2026, during a government land clearance operation.
The Somali populace did not elect this president to displace them from their residences, surrender their offshore resources through unpublished agreements, prolong his own mandate through a parliament of expired terms, and subsequently shoot at civilians who protest. They elected him to construct a nation.
Khadar Afrah