MOGADISHU (Somaliguardian) – Ethiopian troops serving under the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM) have withdrawn from Burhakaba, a strategic Bay region town ringed on every side by Al-Shabaab, handing security responsibility to the Somali National Army after nearly twelve years in place — a transfer that lands squarely inside the most precarious funding crisis the mission has faced since its founding.
AUSSOM said in a statement that it had, with support from the UN Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), officially handed over the mission’s forward operating base in Burhakaba to the 60th Division of the Somali National Army on 8 August. The base had been held since 2014 by Ethiopian National Defence Forces under AUSSOM’s Sector 3 command. The mission described the handover as a step toward Somalia assuming lead responsibility for its own security, part of a gradual transfer of duties to national forces.
Burhakaba sits roughly 185 kilometres northwest of Mogadishu on the road linking the capital to Baidoa, the interim capital of South West State. Every direction out of the district is held by Al-Shabaab, a geography that has fuelled concern the town could fall to the insurgency now that the force that anchored it for over a decade has gone. Somali officials in the region have voiced doubts about whether national forces are yet equipped to hold the line alone, and there is concern that the withdrawal could disrupt supply routes feeding the AUSSOM units that remain.
Somali journalists reported on social media that Ethiopian peacekeepers withdrew overnight overnight in the hours following the base handover, with a number of Somali officials said to have accompanied them out of fear of insurgent attack. Somali Guardian has not independently verified these reports.
Separate accounts suggest Ethiopian forces intend to vacate several more Bay region towns that are similarly besieged, part of what Radio Dalsan has reported will be a handover of at least three major towns to Somali forces in the coming weeks. The Federal Government of Somalia has asked for a two-year delay to the withdrawal of foreign troops, but the mission’s funding shortfall has made that request increasingly difficult to accommodate. AUSSOM’s current mandate runs out on 31 December 2026, and any extension depends on a UN Security Council decision and on funding that, at present, does not exist.
A summit that confirmed the crisis it was meant to resolve
The retreat from Burhakaba comes amid a diplomatic reckoning in Kampala. The Second Extraordinary Summit of AUSSOM’s troop-contributing countries and the Federal Government of Somalia convened in Uganda’s capital on 31 July, following the United States Mission to the African Union’s notification to the AU Commission on 1 July that Washington would not support extending UNSOS – the UN-funded logistical backbone of AUSSOM – beyond the mission’s current mandate, which expires at the end of December. Washington indicated it would not object to AUSSOM’s mandate itself being renewed, but that it would oppose any Security Council resolution preserving UNSOS.
According to Amani Africa, the Addis Ababa-based think tank that closely tracks the AU Peace and Security Council, the summit’s outcome exposed rather than closed the gap between what AUSSOM needs to function and what troop contributors can currently deliver.
Contributing states — Burundi, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda — endorsed a communiqué calling on the Security Council to extend the mission for 18 to 24 months. But Amani Africa, in an analysis published under the title “With no viable collective plan emerging from the AU and Kampala summit, it falls on each AUSSOM TCC to plan for saving itself individually,” judged that framework unmoored from any financing or logistics plan that actually exists. Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces used the gathering to press for what he called African-led alternative arrangements to sustain the mission beyond 2026, a proposal Amani Africa noted depends entirely on the United States reversing a decision it has shown no sign of reversing. Absent that reversal, the think tank argued the more honest planning horizon is not 18 to 24 months but a compressed six-to-twelve-month wind-down run alongside a replacement security arrangement, such as bilateral deployments, rather than the longer transition the summit has no visible means of funding. The communiqué did direct troop-contributing countries’ foreign ministers to form a joint task force and pursue a donors’ conference in search of predictable financing — an effort that remains at an early stage.
The UN starts selling the furniture
A second, quieter signal of the mission’s trajectory emerged this week from UNSOS itself. On 6 August, the UN Support Office in Somalia posted a request for expressions of interest on the UN Global Marketplace, seeking licensed auctioneers to run the commercial sale of a wide inventory of UN-owned property in Somalia — computers, phones and other IT equipment, shipping containers, security watchtowers, wastewater treatment plants, vehicles, generators, prefabricated accommodation units, and medical and laboratory equipment among the items listed. The initial contract would run three months, with three optional three-month extensions. Submissions close on 11 August, a strikingly narrow five-day window that has itself drawn comment among observers watching the mission’s finances unravel.
It is not yet clear whether the pace of the Ethiopian drawdown in Bay region is calibrated, at least in part, to pressure Washington into reconsidering before December. Analysts who track the mission say that if Al-Shabaab is seen visibly reclaiming towns across southern and central Somalia as international forces pull back, the Trump administration could find itself pulled toward the deeper involvement it has so far tried to avoid.
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