Baidoa Has Been Attacked Three Times in Six Weeks, Fighter Jets Included. Ethiopia, the City's Main Military Backer, Now Wants Over 3,000 Troops Out to Fight a War of Its Own.

Abstract: Ethiopia is preparing to withdraw more than 3,000 troops from Somalia and redeploy them against the Tigray-led offensive and allied Fano insurgents fighting its own government at home, Bloomberg reported on 30 September, citing people familiar with the plan who said the pullout could begin within days or weeks. A Somali defence ministry official said Mogadishu had not been formally notified. WardheerNews reported separately that Ethiopia has asked the African Union to accelerate the redeployment of its troops serving under the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia specifically, a request that would force the AU to revisit a force-contribution timetable it had only recently settled. The timing is what makes the report consequential rather than merely procedural: most of Ethiopia's troops in Somalia, bilateral and AUSSOM-badged alike, sit in forward bases around Baidoa, the South West State capital that forces loyal to ousted president Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen have attacked three times since 17 August, most recently on 28 September in a battle that drew in fighter jets and drones and left 148 people wounded across four medical facilities, according to the Red Cross. Ethiopian troops had already quietly handed their forward operating base in nearby Burhakaba, held continuously since 2014, to the Somali army on 8 August, a withdrawal regional analysts warned at the time could open a corridor for Al-Shabaab, a group the United States says has deepened its ties to Yemen's Houthi movement, in a district surrounded on every side by areas under the group's influence. Neither Ethiopia, Somalia nor the African Union had, as of this writing, issued any public statement confirming, denying or detailing the wider withdrawal Bloomberg's sources described.

A plan Mogadishu says it only read about

Bloomberg reported on 30 September, citing people familiar with internal Ethiopian planning, that Addis Ababa intends to withdraw more than 3,000 of its troops from Somalia and move them to the north, where Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government is fighting a renewed war against the Tigray People's Liberation Front and the wider Ethiopian People's Forces Alliance for Survival, the coalition of Tigrayan, Amhara Fano and other armed groups that resumed fighting federal forces on 23 September. The sources did not specify whether the troops being withdrawn serve under AUSSOM, the bilateral security arrangement between Addis Ababa and Mogadishu, or both, and Bloomberg's report, echoed by Hiiraan Online, Somali Guardian, Axadle Times, Shabelle Media and Somali News Today Live in the days that followed, said the withdrawal could begin "in the coming days or weeks." A Somali defence ministry official told reporters Mogadishu had not received formal notice of any such plan, and as of this writing neither government, nor the African Union, had issued a public statement either confirming the report or clarifying which units it covers.

A separate, more specific request to the African Union

WardheerNews reported a related but more specific development: that Ethiopia has asked the AU directly to accelerate the withdrawal and redeployment of its troops serving under AUSSOM, a request that would require the AU's Peace and Security Council to revisit a force-contribution and redeployment timetable it had only recently agreed with troop-contributing countries. That request, if accurate, narrows the ambiguity in Bloomberg's broader report: it suggests Addis Ababa is not simply reconsidering its bilateral deployment at its own discretion, but is actively pressing the multilateral body that governs AUSSOM's own force structure to let it go faster than the mission's existing plan allows. WardheerNews framed the request as a direct consequence of what it called Ethiopia's "seven-front war," the spreading set of internal conflicts, in Tigray, Amhara, Afar and elsewhere, that is forcing Addis Ababa to reconsider, in the outlet's words, how many troops it can afford to keep deployed abroad at all.

Why Baidoa is where this would be felt first

The geography of Ethiopia's deployment in Somalia concentrates the risk in one place. The bulk of Ethiopia's roughly 8,000 troops in the country, a figure that spans both AUSSOM-badged units and forces under the bilateral arrangement, sit in forward bases across the Bay and Bakool regions, anchoring the defence of Baidoa, the capital of South West State. That city has had an unusually violent six weeks even without any change to Ethiopia's presence: forces loyal to Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen, the South West State president federal troops ousted from Baidoa in March, attacked the city on 17 August, again on 3 September, and a third time on 28 September, the last of which Al Jazeera and Arab News reported involved fighter jets and drones on both sides, left three dead and 69 wounded at Bay Regional Hospital according to Doctors Without Borders, and 148 wounded across four facilities in total according to the Red Cross, prompting a curfew. Laftagareen's side has accused Turkey, which has emerged as President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's principal air-power partner and which FIKIR Institute has tracked deploying armed drones elsewhere in Somalia, of flying the F-16 sorties that helped federal forces hold the city. A city that has needed foreign jets to hold off a hostile force three times in six weeks is, by definition, a city whose ground defence cannot currently absorb the loss of its largest single foreign military contingent without a replacement plan Mogadishu says it has not even been shown.

Burhakaba was the preview, seven weeks early

Ethiopia has already demonstrated, on a smaller scale, what an unreplaced withdrawal from this stretch of Somalia looks like. On 8 August, AUSSOM formally handed its forward operating base in Burhakaba, a Bay region town on the main road linking Mogadishu to Baidoa, to the Somali National Army's 60th Division, ending a continuous Ethiopian military presence there dating to 2014, according to Hiiraan Online, Garowe Online, Radio Dalsan and Kulanpost. Burhakaba's geography is precisely what makes the handover a warning rather than a routine rotation: every direction out of the district sits under some degree of Al-Shabaab influence, and Horn Review's analysis at the time, published four days after the handover, asked directly what the group would do with the opening, noting that Somali officials in the region had voiced doubt about whether national forces could hold the line alone and that the withdrawal risked disrupting the supply routes feeding the AUSSOM units still in place nearby. Two months on, no reporting reviewed for this analysis has documented an Al-Shabaab assault on Burhakaba itself, but the pattern Bloomberg's sources describe, a further 3,000-plus troops leaving on a compressed timeline, at Ethiopia's own request rather than as part of AUSSOM's agreed drawdown schedule, would repeat the Burhakaba handover at a scale an order of magnitude larger and in a sector already under direct attack.

A corridor al-Shabaab's Houthi ties make a regional problem

The stakes of a security gap in Bay and Bakool are not purely local. US officials have told reporters, in accounts carried by allAfrica on 29 September and examined in detail by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, that al-Shabaab has deepened its contacts with Yemen's Houthi movement over the past two years, with estimates that as many as 1,500 Somali fighters have travelled to Houthi-run training facilities in Yemen and returned with instruction in drones and explosives; Eurasia Review reported on 3 October that al-Shabaab has gone further and is now actively seeking armed drones from the Houthis rather than only training. FIKIR Institute has separately tracked the Houthi movement's own escalating control of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait this year, including its capture of Perim Island, the choke point that corridor runs through. A Somali insurgency with improving drone capability and an open supply relationship to the group that already threatens Red Sea shipping is not a contained counter-insurgency problem; it is the overland half of the same maritime security crisis this outlet has covered from the Yemeni and Eritrean coastlines, and a security vacuum in the towns Ethiopian troops currently hold is one of the more direct routes by which that overland half could widen.

The declaration Somalia signed while its defender pulls out

The withdrawal report also lands inside a diplomatic realignment FIKIR Institute has covered closely. On 4 October, Somalia's President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud joined Egypt, Eritrea and Sudan in signing the El Alamein Declaration, a text that, among other provisions, called on international and regional partners to fund AUSSOM on an "adequate, sustainable and predictable" basis, as this outlet reported. Somali News Today Live's own analysis of the declaration noted that it addressed Red Sea governance, Nile water rights and AUSSOM funding together, and separately reported that Ethiopia's reported troop withdrawal itself has become entangled with the wider Egypt-Eritrea alignment against Addis Ababa, a dynamic that gives Mogadishu's calculus an added layer: the government whose declaration calls for more predictable funding for its own peacekeeping mission is, in the same fortnight, facing an unannounced reduction in that mission's single largest troop contributor, from the one regional government not party to the declaration it just signed.

What to watch

Three signals will show whether this report describes a managed drawdown or an improvised one. First, whether Ethiopia, Somalia or the African Union issues any public statement specifying which units are leaving, on what timeline and with what, if any, replacement plan for the Bay and Bakool positions Ethiopian troops currently hold; continued silence more than a week after Bloomberg's report first surfaced would itself indicate the withdrawal is proceeding faster than any coordinated planning around it. Second, whether the AU's Peace and Security Council responds publicly to the accelerated-redeployment request WardheerNews reported, since a formal AU statement would convert a sourced report into an acknowledged policy change. Third, whether Laftagareen's forces or al-Shabaab test Baidoa or the wider Bay-Bakool sector again before any Ethiopian withdrawal is replaced, which would answer, more directly than any statement could, whether the city's defence depends on the Ethiopian troops Addis Ababa now wants back.

Policy implications

For Ethiopia, redeploying troops from a neighbouring counter-insurgency mission to its own civil war is a measure of how seriously Addis Ababa now rates the threat from the Tigray-led alliance and the Fano insurgency, but doing so without, as of this writing, any public coordination with Mogadishu or the AU risks converting a domestic necessity into a regional liability it will be blamed for regardless of its own justification. For Somalia's federal government, the gap between a declaration it just signed calling for predictable AUSSOM funding and an unannounced reduction in its most consequential bilateral troop contributor is a reminder that diplomatic guarantees from Cairo, Asmara and Khartoum do not substitute for the ground forces currently holding Baidoa, Burhakaba's old positions and the rest of Bay and Bakool. For the African Union, a troop-contributing government reportedly asking to accelerate its own exit, on its own timeline, tests whether the Peace and Security Council's redeployment framework can hold under pressure from the inside, not only from Washington's funding cuts this outlet has already tracked. For outside powers concerned with Red Sea security, a Somali insurgency gaining drones and training from the same Houthi movement that already threatens Bab-el-Mandeb shipping gives a Bay-Bakool security vacuum consequences that extend well past Somalia's borders, and well past the timeline any single government's internal war is likely to resolve on.