Somalia’s own soldiers are assassinating their commanders, selling Somalia’s energy blocks to the highest bidder. Somalia now faces its most dangerous turning point since 1991. Al-Shabaab is raising flags in major towns while the Somali government sinks deeper into chaos, selling off resources and scapegoating enemies.
Is the capital next?
Somalia isn’t slipping. It’s spiraling. The once fragile federal experiment is now visibly shattering—under the weight of incompetence, corruption, and political betrayal.
Mogadishu’s leadership, led by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, is flailing at the helm. Al-Shabaab grows bolder by the day, releasing prisoners, raising flags, and walking through military bases unchallenged. In a horrifying echo of Afghanistan, Somalia’s own soldiers are assassinating their commanders, and U.S. diplomats are being evacuated. Even the president himself narrowly escaped an ambush. This is no longer counterinsurgency. This is collapse management.
Desperate for Western attention, Hassan Sheikh has chosen a tactic that reeks of neo-colonial pandering: selling Somalia’s energy blocks to the highest bidder, offering the country’s last resources to Trump-linked interests in the hope of buying security. His ambassador’s bizarre social media auction of Somalia’s oil was less diplomacy than a digital clearance sale of a broken state. The response? Silence in Washington. Chaos in the capital.
Meanwhile, Turkish boots are on Somali soil, drones fly overhead, and the African Union’s peacekeepers are now smeared as al-Shabaab sympathizers by Somali officials trying to dodge accountability. Puntland and Jubaland have already walked out of Hassan’s electoral circus. The remaining federal structure is now a skeleton of legitimacy—held together by the optics of registration drives and donor meetings.
And as al-Shabaab captures Aadan Yabaal—the president’s own hometown—Somalis wake up asking a question they hoped they’d never need to again: Can Mogadishu fall?
Somalia has failed at the elite level. Hassan’s government blames everyone—Egypt, Ethiopia, the AU, even UN diplomats—except itself. It ignores the internal rot, the patronage system, the militarized nepotism, and the utter lack of coherent national strategy.
The result? Al-Shabaab no longer hides. It governs. And the state no longer fights back. It tweets.
Quo vadis, Somalia?
Downward. Fast. Unless something radical, honest, and painfully overdue changes now.
