Key Takeaways: Somewhere in Ankara, someone should be asking a plain question: what is Turkey trying…
Key Takeaways:
- The author asks what Turkey is trying to win around Baidoa. Southwest officials and residents have for months accused Turkish drones—and at times helicopters and F-16s—of covering federal operations against ousted Southwest president Abdiaziz “Laftagareen.” A night of 3–4 September strike on a Doolow home linked to Gen. Mahad “Shub” is reported locally with deaths; neither Villa Somalia nor Ankara has claimed or explained it. The piece treats that silence as policy.
- It credits Turkey’s 2011-era hospitals, roads, scholarships and flights, then argues the last six months spent that goodwill on an intra-Somali elite fight. Pattern cited: March pressure on Laftagareen’s forces, later Baidoa fighting, now a political opponent’s house far from al-Shabaab lines; flag-burning in Southwest. Framed as trainer-turned-faction air arm, not a state partnership.
- Asks under what deal Ankara may strike Somalis who are not al-Shabaab; wants the text public and parliamentary scrutiny. Satirical “price list” aside, the contrast is Puntland’s 2 August U.S. Bosaso arrangement with a defined counter-piracy mandate. Closing demand: who authorized the Doolow strike, under what law, and to what end.
Somewhere in Ankara, someone should be asking a plain question: what is Turkey trying to win in Baidoa?
The reported facts are sobering enough without embellishment. Southwest State officials and residents around Baidoa have for months accused Turkish drones, and at times helicopters and F-16 fighter jets, of providing air cover for federal operations against forces loyal to ousted Southwest President Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed, known as Laftagareen. On the night of Sept. 3-4, a drone struck the Doolow, Gedo region, home of Gen. Mahad Abdirahman Aden, known as “Shub,” a former federal police commander now politically opposed to Villa Somalia. His family says he survived. Local reporting citing residents at the scene describes deaths and injuries among those present, with one Somali-language outlet citing preliminary information that three people died. None of this is independently confirmed, and neither Villa Somalia nor Ankara has said who ordered or carried out the strike, a silence that has become Turkey’s signature posture in Somalia, the wordless shrug of an ally content to let the smoke answer the questions.
This satire needs no invention. Reality already wrote the punchline: a country that markets itself across the Islamic world and the Global South as patron saint of Somali reconstruction, the airport, the hospital, the scholarships, the flag lowered in Istanbul after every al-Shabab bombing, has become, in the eyes of a growing number of Somalis, a subcontractor in a family feud among Somali elites over who sits in which regional palace.
A Decade of Genuine Goodwill, Spent Recklessly
It is worth remembering, because satire is cheap when it forgets its subject’s real virtues, that Turkey earned its Somali standing honestly. When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan landed in famine-stricken Mogadishu in 2011, at a moment when most of the world calculated the reputational cost of the visit and stayed away, Turkey built hospitals, paved roads, trained a generation of Somali civil servants and soldiers, and did more for basic state functionality than 20 years of Western stabilization missions combined. Turkish Airlines flies where insurers once refused to quote a premium. Turkish scholarships sent thousands of Somali students to Istanbul and Ankara. None of that record is satire, and none of it should be forgotten in the writing of this one.
Which is precisely what makes the last six months so dispiriting. A partnership built on hospitals and scholarships is now being spent, apparently without much internal debate in Ankara, on an open-ended air campaign against Somalia’s own federal member states. Somalia is not the only place this pattern has shown up. Turkey’s military footprint has followed a familiar arc elsewhere, from Libya to northern Syria: enter as trainer and logistics partner, stay as combatant, and eventually become indistinguishable from the faction that invited you in. Somalis who welcomed Ankara as a development partner in 2011 are now watching it graduate into the role of aerial enforcer for whichever man currently occupies Villa Somalia. That is not partnership. That is franchise management, with drones standing in for a compliance department.
The Loyalty Card Trick
The mechanism is simple enough to sketch in a paragraph, which is itself an indictment. Ankara arrives with a training academy, a port concession, an energy exploration deal, and a line of political credit extended personally to whoever occupies Villa Somalia. The relationship is framed publicly as partnership with the Somali state. In practice it functions as a retainer with the man signing the paperwork. When that man’s rivals happen to be state governors he has fallen out with, Turkish drones stop distinguishing between al-Shabab, formally Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahidin, the enemy Ankara was invited to fight, and a Southwest State president whose offense was winning his own region’s election.
One imagines the internal memo circulating in the Turkish Ministry of National Defense: “Mission: counterterrorism partnership, Federal Republic of Somalia.” One reads the results on the ground: a deposed president’s forces pushed to Baidoa’s edge in March, then pushed back again in more recent fighting, and now a former police commander’s family home struck in Doolow, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest al-Shabab position worth the fuel to reach it. If this is counterterrorism, al-Shabab has disguised itself remarkably well as ordinary Somali federalism.
A Villa Somalia Discount Air Force
The pattern speaks for itself, and it has been building in full view for months. Southwest State’s president was removed from office in March with reported Turkish air support. His forces were pushed back from Baidoa’s outskirts in subsequent fighting under further reported strikes. By September, drones attributed to the same posture hit the private residence of a general whose apparent offense is opposing Villa Somalia politically rather than carrying a rifle for al-Shabab. Southwest State residents did not need this newspaper to notice the pattern; they burned the Turkish flag in the streets weeks earlier, an act of protest pointed enough that it should have forced a serious reckoning inside Turkey’s foreign ministry. Ankara’s answer has been more silence.
That leaves an uncomfortable proposition this newspaper has circled for months, through the M/V LUTUF hijacking and its release dispute, the Garmaal and Jiifle airstrikes, and the SOMTURK ban under Article 54 of Somalia’s provisional constitution: Turkey has drifted from partner against al-Shabab to Villa Somalia’s discount air force against other Somalis. A genuine partner defends a state’s sovereignty against external threat. A discount air force defends whoever pays the retainer against whoever does not, and asks no further questions about clan, constitution, or consent. Ankara has spent a decade of hard-earned goodwill blurring that distinction, and it is doing so faster than most Somalis, or most Turks for that matter, appear to have noticed.
The Doolow Precedent
The Doolow strike deserves gravity, not satire alone. A strike on a private residence that reportedly killed a family member and narrowly spared its intended target, in a case where the target’s apparent offense is political opposition rather than armed insurgency, is precisely the kind of episode international humanitarian law exists to scrutinize. Whether it meets the formal threshold of a war crime is a determination for investigators with access to targeting data Ankara has, predictably, declined to share. What is already clear, and does not require a tribunal to establish, is that a foreign air force striking a political rival’s home inside a sovereign state’s internal dispute is not a footnote to be absorbed and forgotten by next week’s news cycle. It is a precedent, and precedents in the Horn of Africa have a habit of traveling. Garowe could be next. So could Bosaso, the moment a Puntland official falls out of favor with whichever capital happens to be lending the drones that week.
There is also a narrower legal question Somali and international lawyers ought to be pressing now, before it is buried under the next news cycle: under what bilateral instrument, if any, does Turkey’s military presence in Somalia authorize strikes against Somali nationals who hold no rank in al-Shabab and no connection to any listed terrorist organization. If the answer is a training and cooperation agreement negotiated for counterterrorism purposes, then the Doolow strike, and the pattern around Baidoa that preceded it, would appear to fall well outside that agreement’s stated scope. Somalia’s Parliament, what remains of its constitutional standing after more than a year of expired mandates, would be within its rights to demand that text be made public.
A Modest Proposal
If Ankara insists on remaining Somalia’s aerial guarantor of first and last resort, this newspaper offers, in the spirit of Jonathan Swift rather than sincerity, a modest proposal: publish a price list. If a Turkish airstrike is now an instrument available to whoever controls Villa Somalia on a given month, Somalis deserve to know the rate, the terms of service, and whether Somalia’s other federal member states may place competing orders when their own domestic rivals grow inconvenient. Puntland, for its part, has already found a less ambiguous path in its Aug. 2 basing arrangement with the United States at Bosaso, built on a defined counter-piracy mandate rather than an open tab against domestic political rivals. The contrast should embarrass Ankara considerably more than it appears to.
Somalia’s federal member states did not sign up, in any founding document Puntland’s own drafters can locate, for a foreign power adjudicating their internal succession disputes from 15,000 feet. Turkey did not build a decade of genuine Somali gratitude in order to spend it bombing a retired general’s home in Gedo. Somalis of every clan and region are entitled to ask their government, and its foreign patron, the same plain question this newspaper has asked before and asks again today: who authorized this, under what law, and to what end?
The smoke over Doolow will clear. The question will not.
By: Ismail H. Warsame
