Somalia's National Security Adviser Told a Doha Forum the Government Has Retaken 55% of Al-Shabaab's Territory in Five Years. The US General Who Helped Take It the First Time Says Somalia Is Fighting to Retake the Same Ground Again.

Abstract: Somalia's national security adviser, Ambassador Aweys Haji Yusuf Ahmed, told the 2026 Global Security Forum in Doha on 22 October that "Somalia has made visible progress in the war against Khawarij and Daesh," using the federal government's official terms for al-Shabaab and Islamic State-Somalia, according to reporting carried by allAfrica, Dawan Africa and Shabelle Media. He said Somalia had retaken more than 55% of the territory militants once held over the past five years, freeing at least 1.5 million people, that militant financing had fallen 35%, and that attacks in major cities had dropped by about 89%, while separately calling for coordinated maritime security cooperation across the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Hormuz. No outlet reviewed for this analysis published a full transcript of Ahmed's remarks, so the figures come from press summaries of the speech rather than a verified text, though three independently reporting Somali and regional outlets converged on the same numbers. Those numbers arrived into a body of independent and allied reporting that describes the opposite trend line. AFRICOM commander Gen. Dagvin Anderson said in July that Somali and US forces were fighting to retake Lower Shabelle River territory that had already been cleared once, between 2019 and 2021, ground Anderson said was lost after attention shifted away from the counterterrorism fight; FDD's Long War Journal reported the same month that al-Shabaab "has been able to take back much of the territory it lost" in the government's 2022-2023 offensive and was "incrementally taking over additional territory," tying the reversal to a domestic legitimacy crisis around President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's administration; and the Africa Center for Strategic Studies had already estimated, in a November 2025 brief, that al-Shabaab controls roughly 30% of Somalia and that the federal government's de facto control is limited to Mogadishu and a handful of satellite towns. Ahmed's upbeat accounting also arrived nine days after UNICEF reported children killed and a health facility damaged in renewed fighting for Baidoa, and as the US funding that keeps the African Union force underpinning Somalia's territorial claims in the field heads toward a scheduled 2027 cutoff that African diplomats have called "irreversible."

What Ahmed actually claimed, and where

The venue mattered as much as the numbers. The Global Security Forum in Doha is an international gathering, not a domestic political rally, and Ahmed's remarks, as reported by allAfrica, Dawan Africa and Shabelle Media, were pitched accordingly: a government official making the case to an international audience that counterterrorism money and diplomatic backing already committed to Somalia are producing results. The figures he offered were specific and, on their face, falsifiable: more than 55% of militant-held territory retaken over five years, at least 1.5 million people freed from that territory, a 35% cut in militant financing, and an 89% drop in attacks on major cities. He also used the trip to press a broader regional security argument, calling for coordinated maritime cooperation spanning the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Hormuz, positioning Somalia as a stakeholder in the same corridor that Saudi Arabia's new multinational naval coalition and the Sudan-Egypt-Eritrea-Somalia Red Sea declaration have each separately staked a claim to this year. What none of the three outlets' accounts included was a baseline: a government claiming to have retaken 55% of something needs a credible figure for what 100% looked like at its worst point, and none of the reviewed reporting cites one.

The reversal Ahmed's own international partners have already documented

The clearest challenge to Ahmed's framing comes not from al-Shabaab's own propaganda but from the US military command that fights alongside Somalia's. AFRICOM commander Gen. Dagvin Anderson said in a July interview that Somali and US forces were once again fighting along the Lower Shabelle River to retake territory that had already been cleared of al-Shabaab, between 2019 and 2021, in an offensive Anderson said he had personally worked on when it reached as far as the town of Mubarak. That ground, he said, was lost specifically because international and Somali attention shifted away from the counterterrorism fight, and he added that capturing territory alone is insufficient without governance, justice and stability following behind it, a prerequisite that has conspicuously not followed in much of the territory federal forces have taken since 2022. FDD's Long War Journal reported in the same month, in an analysis of the US military's renewed focus on Shabaab targets, that "over the last year and a half, Shabaab has been able to take back much of the territory it lost" during the Federal Government of Somalia's 2022-2023 offensive, and that the group was "incrementally taking over additional territory across southern and central Somalia, degrading FGS authority." The same analysis tied the reversal explicitly to a domestic political crisis: the federal government, consumed by disputes over the legitimacy of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's administration, had reduced its focus on Shabaab, giving the group what the article called additional breathing room. The International Crisis Group reached a parallel conclusion in its own brief on the war, describing a government offensive that captured large parts of central Somalia in 2022-2023 only for al-Shabaab to retake most of it in 2025, a pattern Crisis Group characterized as a stalemate rather than the one-directional progress Ahmed described in Doha.

A third-party estimate that predates, and undercuts, the 55% figure

The Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a US Department of Defense-affiliated research institution, published its own territorial assessment nearly a year before Ahmed's Doha remarks. Africa Security Brief No. 45, "Somalia at Risk of Becoming a Jihadist State," written by Matt Bryden and released 17 November 2025, estimated that al-Shabaab controls roughly 30% of Somalia's territory and that the federal government's actual, de facto control is limited to Mogadishu and a few satellite towns, a map of state authority considerably narrower than a government claiming to have liberated a majority of previously militant-held ground. The same brief reported that al-Shabaab had retaken towns, including Mahas, that it had not held for more than a decade, and warned that, absent a major change in direction, the likely near-term outcomes included the federal government's collapse and an al-Shabaab takeover of the capital itself. That warning predates the current fighting season and is not a direct rebuttal of Ahmed's October figures, since it describes the state of the conflict roughly eleven months earlier; but no outlet reviewed for this analysis cites any subsequent assessment, Somali, American or international, that endorses Ahmed's claim of a majority of lost territory recovered.

Baidoa, tested against the 89% claim

Ahmed's claim that attacks on major cities fell by roughly 89% sits uneasily next to the specific, repeated fighting this year for Baidoa, the capital of South West State and one of Somalia's most significant regional cities. Federal forces took control of Baidoa on 30 March after South West's president, Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed "Laftagareen," who had governed the state since 2018, resigned following the takeover. The city has not been quiet since. Fighting between federal forces and Laftagareen's loyalists, whom the federal government has alleged fought alongside al-Shabaab, flared again on 17 August in what residents described as the fiercest clashes since the March takeover, with the army saying it killed roughly 30 attackers and hospital officials reporting nearly 100 wounded. Renewed clashes followed on 3 September, and again on 28 September, when thousands of local fighters entered the city and Médecins Sans Frontières reported three deaths, including a healthcare worker. Two days later, on 30 September, UNICEF said it was "deeply concerned by reports that children have been killed and injured in recent clashes in Baidoa" and that a health facility had been damaged, part of a national picture in which roughly two million children are acutely or severely malnourished and an estimated 26,000 people in Baidoa itself face catastrophic, IPC Phase 5 food insecurity. A city that has seen four distinct rounds of fighting serious enough to draw UN and NGO statements between March and September is a difficult data point to square with a national claim of an 89% drop in major-city attacks, even allowing that Baidoa's violence is substantially internal, between the federal government and an ousted regional administration, rather than solely a government-versus-al-Shabaab contest.

The force Somalia's gains depend on is being defunded

Ahmed's appeal in Doha for international maritime security cooperation came as the ground-level security architecture underpinning Somalia's land war faces its own crisis, one with a harder deadline than anything in his territorial claims. Washington told the African Union in a 1 July letter that it would end funding for the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), which supplies logistics to roughly 11,826 uniformed personnel, 680 police officers and 85 civilian staff deployed across 49 locations in support of the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), beyond the mission's current authorization, which expires 31 December 2026. The US said it would not use its Security Council veto to block a mandate renewal for AUSSOM itself but would block any further UN logistical or operational support for it, prompting an emergency AU meeting in early July at which one senior African diplomat reportedly called the decision "irreversible" and the mission "finished." Reuters reported in September that Washington would accept a 12-month drawdown followed immediately by liquidation of UNSOS, with the countdown beginning in January 2027, and an ACLED analyst warned that, without alternative international funding, AUSSOM "faces imminent operational collapse heading into 2027." Uganda's army has separately signaled, though not through any official government statement, a full troop withdrawal after nineteen years in the mission. None of Ahmed's Doha remarks, as reported, addressed this funding collapse directly, even though the territorial gains he described, to whatever extent they hold, depend substantially on the AU force whose logistics are now scheduled to be dismantled within roughly fourteen months of his speech.

What to watch

Three signals will indicate whether Ahmed's Doha figures reflect a genuine inflection point or an international-facing narrative running ahead of ground conditions. First, whether the federal government or any international partner publishes a methodology, a baseline map, or any underlying data for the 55%, 35% and 89% figures, which so far rest entirely on press summaries of a speech rather than a published assessment; their continued absence would leave the claim unsubstantiated by the government's own documentation, the same gap FIKIR Institute has flagged in other unverified official claims across the region this year. Second, whether Baidoa settles into the stability the federal government's March takeover was meant to produce, or continues generating fresh rounds of fighting at the pace of the past seven months, a concrete, checkable test of the "major cities" claim specifically. Third, whether any credible path emerges to replace UNSOS's logistics funding before the scheduled 2027 drawdown begins, since a collapse of AU logistics would make the current territorial balance, whichever side's account of it is closer to accurate, considerably harder for Mogadishu to hold regardless of this week's messaging.

Policy implications

For Somalia's federal government, presenting an optimistic, specific accounting of counterterrorism progress to an international forum serves an obvious diplomatic purpose, sustaining donor confidence and military partnerships at the exact moment the AU mission underwriting much of that progress faces defunding, but a claim this far out of step with its own principal military partner's public assessment risks the same credibility cost FIKIR Institute has documented in other unverified government claims across the region this year. For the United States and AFRICOM, Gen. Anderson's own account of fighting to retake previously cleared ground sits in direct tension with the messaging Washington's security partner delivered in Doha, a gap that matters because it is Washington's own funding decisions on UNSOS that will shape whether any ground retaken in the next year can be held. For the Africa Center for Strategic Studies and independent trackers such as Crisis Group and FDD's Long War Journal, the recurring finding that gains made in 2022-2023 have since been substantially reversed suggests that whatever territorial arithmetic the government is now presenting needs to specify which year's baseline it is counting from. For civilians in Baidoa and other contested cities, the gap between an 89% claimed reduction in major-city attacks and four rounds of serious fighting in a single regional capital in seven months is not a rhetorical question but a lived one, with UNICEF's own statement on children killed in the fighting standing as the most immediate rebuttal to the week's official numbers.