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Somali federal forces say they have driven attackers out of Baidoa after a day of street fighting

By Staff Writer  |  18 August 2026

Fighters loyal to the former president of South West State attacked before dawn on Monday. The defence ministry says 30 attackers were killed and the city held. The attackers say they took it. Neither claim has been independently checked.

Somali federal forces say they have pushed armed opponents out of Baidoa after a day of fighting in the centre of the largest city in South West State. The attack began before dawn on Monday, when fighters loyal to the former state president, Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen, moved on positions held by federal troops. The defence ministry says the attackers used vehicles laden with explosives and that 30 of them were killed before the assault was repelled.

The armed militias attacked Baidoa this morning, we are pushing them back....there are casualties as stray bullets enter houses

Captain Osman Abdullahi, an officer of the Somali federal military

The other side gives an opposite account. A spokesman for the attacking forces, Ugas Hassan, said they had taken the city outright and called on residents to come back onto the streets, and a further spokesman for the same camp posted that federal troops should surrender. Neither claim has been verified independently, and by Monday evening the fighting had subsided into sporadic gunfire in parts of the city.

A city that cannot afford this

Baidoa sits roughly 250 kilometres from Mogadishu and has a population above a million. It hosts international peacekeepers, humanitarian agencies and hundreds of thousands of people displaced by war and drought. A survey carried out in July by Medecins Sans Frontieres, which runs facilities in the city, found that one child in four at the displacement sites there is severely malnourished.

Residents told reporters the clashes were the fiercest since March, and described heavy weapons used inside a built up area. One shopkeeper said he had seen two civilians killed in their houses by stray rounds.

Casualty figures beyond the ministry's count of 30 attackers have not been issued by either side, and no independent tally of civilian deaths exists. A medical charity operating in Baidoa reported casualties arriving at its hospital and fighting on two fronts.

How the dispute got here

The two accounts of how Mr Laftagareen left office differ, and both are on the record. One holds that the federal government removed him in March and installed a former speaker of the national parliament, Aden Madobe, in his place. The other holds that federal forces seized Baidoa in March after his administration announced it was cutting ties with Mogadishu, and that he then resigned. What is not disputed is that he had led South West State for more than seven years, and that fighters loyal to him have attacked the city repeatedly since, including an attempt to retake the region in May.

The wider dispute runs back to constitutional amendments adopted under President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, which extended his own term by a year and altered the power sharing arrangement written into the 2012 provisional constitution. The amendments prompted clashes in several parts of the country. The defence ministry has also accused Mr Laftagareen's forces of fighting alongside al-Shabab, an allegation that camp has not addressed.

What Monday produced was two claims of control over one city and no agreed count of the dead. The people of Baidoa have had a month of that already.