Somalis burn Turkish flag as resentment grows over Ankara airstrikes

MOGADISHU (Somaliguardian) – A video circulating on social media this week shows Somalis in the country’s Southwest state setting fire to the Turkish flag while holding aloft the state’s own banner, a striking act of defiance that captures a rapid souring of public sentiment toward a country long regarded as one of Somalia’s closest allies.

In the footage, a group of men and women can be seen burning the flag and accusing Turkey of bombing rural communities, killing livestock and, they allege, children – grievances they say have become unbearable.

The anger traces back to late March, when federal forces removed Southwest state President Abdiaziz Laftagareen in a military offensive that, according to local media reports, Turkey backed with air support, logistics, equipment and forces it had trained. Turkish drones have since carried out strikes near Baidoa, the regional interim capital, in areas where fighters loyal to the ousted leader are positioned – part of what has become a low-level guerrilla campaign against federal troops.

For two decades, Somalia’s international security partners confined their military role to the fight against Al-Shabaab, steering clear of intra-Somali political disputes. Analysts say Turkey’s direct involvement in ousting a sitting regional president marks a break from that precedent – one they view as unprecedented and destabilizing.

“We and Turkey are not neighbours. Why are they bombing us? We are not terrorists, and we are not at war with Turkey,” said Abdi Ahmed Libow, a former Somali federal state minister of labour, who called on Ankara to withdraw its forces and urged the international community to press Turkey to halt the strikes.

Laftagareen’s forces have continued to resist from rural positions around Baidoa. The ousted leader has vowed to fight on, describing the federal troops that removed him as clan militias, and argues that President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s own mandate has lapsed and that he no longer has constitutional standing to lead the country – a dispute that sits at the heart of Somalia’s wider political crisis.

Accusations of a “neo-colonial agenda”

The Southwest backlash has fed into a broader current of criticism among Somali political and academic figures accusing Turkey of overreach. Prominent among them is Abdi Ismail Samatar, a Somali senator and professor, who has published a series of essays – including one titled “Türkiye’s Neo-Colonial Agenda in Somalia” – accusing Ankara of using its military relationship with Mogadishu to secure control over Somalia’s natural resources.

Samatar alleges that Turkish vessels are exploring and drilling for oil in Somali waters under a defence and petroleum arrangement he says has never been made public, telling followers that “the Somali Parliament has yet to see the texts of the two ‘agreements.'” He has also accused the Turkish leadership of proceeding with exploration despite what he describes as full awareness the deals are improperly constituted – language he has used to brand Ankara a “resources pirate.”

Samatar has further argued that Ankara’s military support has propped up what he calls a deeply unpopular administration in Mogadishu whose constitutional term ended, saying Somalis “will not forget Türkiye’s” role.

In his writing, Samatar goes further still, stating that Mohamud will, in his words, be remembered as the worst president in Somalia’s history, and accusing him of using Turkish military material to entrench what Samatar describes as a personal dictatorship rather than pursue an inclusive political transition – including, he has said, by deploying security forces against opposition demonstrations in Mogadishu.

Samatar frames Turkey’s broader objective as the creation of what he calls a client state through which Ankara can extract Somalia’s natural resources and strategic value, and has said Turkish leaders are proceeding with resource agreements he characterizes as fraudulent.

In June, opposition figures accused Turkey of supplying suicide drones and weapons used in raids on compounds linked to former president Sharif Sheikh Ahmed and former Premier Hassan Ali Khaire. Both men said they survived “assassination” attempts , which touched off clashes between their guards and federal security forces. Turkish officials have not publicly responded to the allegation of direct involvement in those raids.

A documented strike, and a wider pattern

Independent of the political allegations, one incident involving Turkish drones has been formally documented: on March 18, 2024, a strike in the village of Baghdad in the Lower Shabelle region killed 23 civilians, including 14 children, and wounded 17 others, according to Amnesty International, which said the incident could amount to a war crime and called for an investigation.

Turkey has not claimed responsibility for that strike or issued a public accounting of it. Somali analysts describe the pattern of Turkish drone operations that has followed as the deadliest campaign of aerial bombardment Somalia has experienced in close to two decades of air war in the country – a period that has also included U.S. and other international counterterrorism strikes against Al-Shabaab-held territory.

Security analysts warn that Turkish air operations targeting Somali political and clan constituencies, rather than Al-Shabaab positions, carry a compounding risk: they thread directly into the fault lines of Somalia’s clan politics, and analysts caution that strikes perceived as favoring one clan over another could deepen the same rivalries already driving the country’s civil conflict, from Mogadishu’s political standoff to the dispute over Southwest state’s leadership.

Civilian casualties from airstrikes, they note, are widely understood to harden local sympathy against the forces responsible for them and to feed the recruitment pipelines of militant groups – a dynamic that risks handing Al-Shabaab a propaganda opening, and one that could, in the analysts’ assessment, set back rather than reinforce Somalia’s broader stabilization effort.

Those analysts also caution that Turkey’s deepening involvement in Somalia’s internal political disputes risks eroding two decades of investment by Western partners, principally the United States and the European Union, in funding the African Union peacekeeping mission, building state institutions, and training and equipping Somali forces. They argue that a unified Somali political leadership – rather than competing foreign-backed factions – is the precondition for defeating Al-Shabaab, and that Turkey’s willingness to take sides in domestic power struggles complicates rather than reinforces that effort.

They also note the scale gap: Turkish-trained Somali units, known as Gorgor, were driven out of the strategic river-crossing towns of Awdheegle, Barire and Sabiid by Al-Shabaab earlier this year and were unable to retake the towns until African Union forces, backed by U.S. air support, intervened – underscoring how dependent Somalia’s security gains remain on the Western-backed AU mission rather than on Ankara’s more recent and narrower military footprint.

Turkey is reported to be expanding Baidoa’s airport to accommodate F-16 fighter jets, a move that would extend its strike capability in a region already marked by acute clan sensitivities, given that the federally installed regional leader hails from a different clan than the ousted Laftagareen. Local officials told Somali Guardian that Turkey also intends to pursue mineral and rare-earth resources in the region, adding a further economic dimension to Ankara’s expanding footprint in the Southwest – though the officials did not describe the basis of any such arrangement.

Some Somali commentators have drawn a pointed historical parallel, comparing the current campaign to the aerial bombardment of northwestern Somalia by the regime of Siad Barre in the 1980s – a campaign widely cited by historians as a catalyst for the state’s eventual collapse. Samatar, among the most vocal critics, has argued that President Mohamud is repeating that history “the second time as farce,” accusing him of using Turkish military support to block an inclusive political transition in the same manner that, in Samatar’s account, Barre once refused to accept a peaceful transfer of power.

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