---
title: "Two armies, one city: the struggle for Baidoa strands its civilians"
description: "Fighters loyal to Somalia’s ousted South West State president clash with the government troops who replaced him"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-09-28T17:58:11Z
modified: 2026-09-28T22:19:05Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/two-armies-one-city-the-struggle-for-baidoa-strands-its-civi-1fce15
language: en
tags: ["war", "security", "military", "ai", "drones", "mideast", "africa"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Two armies, one city: the struggle for Baidoa strands its civilians

*Fighters loyal to Somalia’s ousted South West State president clash with the government troops who replaced him*

By Jan Sokol · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/two-armies-one-city-the-struggle-for-baidoa-strands-its-civi-1fce15

## In brief

- Intense clashes broke out Monday in Baidoa between government forces and fighters loyal to the ousted regional president
- Thousands of local fighters entered the city in the morning; fighter jets and drones were reported
- The fighting stranded civilians unable to flee or reach hospitals
- The army is defending control of the South West State city it seized earlier this year
- An earlier flare-up this month killed one civilian and wounded 71, the city’s main hospital said

The trouble in Baidoa began, as troubles in such cities often do, in the morning. Thousands of local fighters entered the city in Somalia’s South West State on Monday morning, and as the day went on the hostilities flared — fighter jets and drones were reported overhead. The contest is an intimate one: government forces on one side, and on the other fighters loyal to the region’s ousted president.

Baidoa has known this violence for weeks. The army is seeking to maintain the control it wrested in the city earlier this year, and the loyalties of the man it displaced have not dispersed with him. According to the Somali outlet [Geeska’s account](https://www.geeska.com/en/fighting-baidoa-pushes-somalias-political-breakdown-further) of the dispute, forces loyal to the removed president have been stationed outside Baidoa since his ouster, seeking a way back in, while the federal government has held local parliamentary elections in South West State and is preparing a presidential one. Ballots being counted in one process; bullets in another.

## The people between

Between these two claims to authority stands the population of the city, and it is the population that pays first. The latest outbreak of fighting, Al Jazeera reports, stranded civilians who could neither flee nor reach the hospitals. This is the oldest arithmetic of such battles: the armed men choose their hour, and the unarmed are given no hour at all.

Nor is Monday’s bloodshed the first of this contest. In an earlier flare-up this month, fighting in Baidoa killed one civilian and wounded 71 people, according to the city’s main hospital, in what was then [described as the sharpest clash](https://www.riotimesonline.com/baidoa-fighting-somalia-southwest-2026/) of a dispute that has run for months over who governs South West state.

## The state’s quarrel with itself

A country may have a government and yet not have peace, when the question of who governs is answered differently in the capital and in the street. In Baidoa the question has now been asked with jets and drones and thousands of armed men entering a city at dawn, and the civilians trapped in their homes wait — as civilians everywhere in such contests wait — for someone to win, or, better, to talk.