--- title: "Briefing Room 11.6.2026: Somalia Peacekeepers Leave After Devastating Attack, and More." description: "The withdrawal strips Somalia's government of its main security shield just as al-Shabaab presses its offensive. Plus: three more stories shaping the week, in brief." url: https://fronts.co/videos/briefing-room-1162026-somalia-peacekeepers-leave-after-devastating-attack-and-mo.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/briefing-room-1162026-somalia-peacekeepers-leave-after-devastating-attack-and-mo/ datePublished: 2026-11-09T09:44:16.000Z dateModified: 2026-11-09T09:44:16.000Z author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://fronts.co/authors/simon-whistler/ publisher: Fronts image: "https://media.fronts.co/cdn-cgi/image/width=1200,height=630,fit=cover,gravity=auto,quality=80,format=auto/images/articles/briefing-room-1162026-somalia-peacekeepers-leave-after-devastating-attack-and-mo-f2e8072f.jpg" type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 5244 --- Welcome back to the briefing room, the weekly show that endeavours to ask the question, "Yes, Simon, we know it's bad out there, but why is it bad out there?" This week we're travelling first to Somalia, where a major al-Shabaab attack on an elite Somali counter-in-surgeon brigade has delivered a major setback for the nation 's military, even as multiple countries in the region have decided to pull their peace keepers from Somali soil. Then we're zeroing in on the Yemeni city of Taiz, where authorities are raising alarms over famine conditions just weeks into an ongoing siege by the Houthi rebels. And finally we're looking at three deadly attacks on civilians in Ukraine, Myanmar, and Ethiopia to ask the question, what do the offending regimes actually hope to achieve at this stage in each of those conflicts? All of that is to say, well, not a lot of good news this week, but several important stories that deserve a hell of a lot more attention than they're getting. Let's dive in. First up, we're heading to the nation of Somalia, where opposition forces in southwest state have captured several towns recently as they crawl their way toward the de facto regional capital city of Baidoa. Those towns have been the epicenter of fighting between Somali federal forces and the southwest state resistance, which has taken up arms against Mogadishu, after a rupture between the states then-Governor and the Somali federal leadership earlier this year. Recently, after the resistance gained ground, Mogadishu has been beefing up its forces to try and blunt the worst of their momentum. But on the 26th of October, the other insurgent group active in the area, the much larger transnational jihadist group Al Shabab, carried out an ambush that reportedly left hundreds of Somali soldiers dead. The ambush targeted a large convoy of Somali reinforcements, traveling from an airport under federal control toward a town that had recently been overtaken by the southwest state resistance. Somewhere in the region of 2000 soldiers were en route to that town, Burakaba, arriving on over 200 military vehicles, when Al Shabab managed to halt the columns advance near the smaller town of Ligo. There, Al Shabab reportedly deployed several of their suicide bombers to attack the convoy using carbons, freezing the convoy, and killing at least several dozen before bands of jihadist gunmen took advantage of the chaos. The group also used a combination of kamikaze attack drones and drones configured to drop bombs with each of those developments, representing a major technical jump for the jihadists. As of the time of writing, more than a week after the attack took place, the Somali government has yet to release an official death toll, only claiming that its force is killed over 70 enemy militants. But in its own statement in the wake of the attack, Al Shabab claimed what would amount to devastating losses for Mogadishu. 413 soldiers killed, and over 400 others wounded. Of course, Al Shabab's casualty claims should not be regarded as credible by themselves. Local sources, speaking to Somali media outlets, however, confirmed that they believed the death toll to be in the multiple hundreds. That's especially damaging for Mogadishu in this particular case, because an outside share of the fallen soldiers are believed to hail from the Denab Brigade, a high-powered U.S. trained unit that serves a Somali as tip of the spear on combat operations. Denab is a well-respected fighting force, vastly better than the average Somali unit, and the loss of so many soldiers at once will be a bitter blow for the larger Somali war effort. According to Somali outlets, the operations to try and recover survivors have been a shambles with local media suggesting that Turkish airstrikes, ostensibly in support of the federal troops under attack, actually hit those troops by accident. One Somali journalist, Abda Razak, Atosh, claimed that some of the troops who had been routed from the sea were still stranded in remote areas, with no military effort underway to locate and rescue them. Instead, the head of Somali's military corps reportedly traveled to the airbase where the convoy had formed up, and berated troops who had fled, even as some soldiers told higher-ups that their commanders had avoided the danger, and started running from the fight almost as soon as it began. If the most damaging casualty estimates are accurate, then the attack represents several setbacks at once for the Somali military. For one thing, the loss of so many elite soldiers represents the loss of immense time and resources spent to train them, and the loss of a disproportionately high share of the Somali military's overall combat experience and capability. For another, Mogadishu has been levying allegations for months that al-Shabaab has been coordinating with the southwest state resistance, and although those allegations remain unsubstantiated at this time, the attack does demonstrate that al-Shabaab can use its knowledge of Somali counterinsurgent efforts against southwest state to devastating effect. On top of that, al-Shabaab's use of drones as an offensive weapon suggests that the group is learning from global wars, developing its modern capabilities, and quite likely integrating knowledge and technology gained through an ongoing, secretive-alleged partnership with Yemen's Houthi rebels. Finally, there's just the sheer scale of the loss in what appears to be Somali as most severe defeat at al-Shabaab's hands since at least 2023. But the timing of the attack is even more of a problem because it coincides with decisions made in multiple regional capitals to withdraw support for Somali counterinsurgent efforts. This was already a known evolving problem across the last month after neighboring Ethiopia decided to withdraw over 3,000 troops at the start of October. Those troops were recalled as part of Ethiopia's response to its own domestic crisis, after a coalition of rebel groups renewed their fight against the nation's federal government in a conflict that has continued to escalate ever since. A relatively high share of the troops that Ethiopia withdrew were located in southwest state, and even before this most recent attack, Somali and international experts had warned that their departure would leave a security vacuum for al-Shabaab to exploit. Then on Monday 2 November, Uganda's acting army spokesman Chris McGasey announced that his own country's troops would return home, with a first group of 109 Ugandan troops having already left by the time the decision was announced. Last week, Uganda's military chief Mohussi Kyan Regaba, the son of the nation's current president, and the heir apparent to his father's administration had written on social media, quote, "As we promised, we have started withdrawing UPDF from Somalia. After 20 years, a lot of blood and sacrifice we are handing over security to our Somali brothers," end quote. But given that Kyan Regaba is known to be a rather unreliable narrator, it was this week's announcement by the army spokesman that really set things in stone. According to him, all of Uganda's troops currently deployed to Somalia, roughly 6500 personnel under multiple African Union and bilateral agreements, would be withdrawn from the country by the end of 2027. Taken together, those Ethiopian nyaganza withdrawals are all but guaranteed to leave security vacuum in their wake, and Somalia would have already struggled to fill that vacuum before the latest mass casualty attack by al-Sh abaab. According to the African Union mission to Somalia, international commanders will do their best to rotate troops towards sensitive areas, sending additional peacekeepers to four bases near Mogadishu that Uganda's troops will be vacating. But without new peacekeepers coming in to replace the Ugandans and the Ethiopians, those troops have to come from somewhere else, and the decision to withdraw them toward Mogadishu is a foreboding sign under the current circumstances. Al-Shabaab has long been working to interrupt and challenge federal forces' ability to navigate the countryside, sealing off pockets of territory wherever they can, while simultaneously sending parties of jihadists to creep ever closer to Mogadishu. But retreated to the capital doesn't mean that Somali forces and their international allies are running to a fortified castle and pulling up the drawbridge behind them. Mogadishu remains vulnerable to infiltration. Al-Shabaab is suspected to have many secret tells in the city already, and if Somalia is forced to cede its own countryside, then it will lack the capability to stop Al-Shabaab from finding ways into the capital. From Somalia, let's move across the Gulf of Aden to the Yemeni Southwest, where in the highlands that overlook the Gulf and the Red Sea coast, over a million people remain under siege in the city of Taiz. There, the Iran-backed Houthi rebels are consolidating their control over the roads leading in and out, where a Saudi-backed coalition of Yemeni troops and then militia allies have been unable to break through. Even before the siege began, local authorities and international humanitarian groups were raising alarms over a coming humanitarian crisis if the city were to be subjected to a long-term siege. Yemen has long been dependent on global aid. Millions of people are acutely food insecure, and Taiz, in particular, has been a home for internally displaced civilians, especially after the Houthis launched a lightning offensive to seize the Red Sea coast this September. The city's population swelled by roughly 100,000 people immediately in advance of the Houthis' arrival, due to a combination of poor planning, a fast-moving crisis, and chronically low international aid budgets, authorities were unable to stockpile food or medicine inside the city before the Houthis seized control of the last roads to the de facto capital of Aden. Last Thursday, the governor of Taiz and the surrounding province, Nabil Shamsan issued a stark warning, quoting, "The city is in famine, not on the brink of it." According to Shamsan, the city is only able to fulfill a small fraction of its drinking water needs. Taiz has been reliant on the shipment of water from other areas, and the Houthis have now cut off those routes and seized other water sources nearby. So too have the Houthis completely strangled the flow of cooking gas, forcing families to rely on wood-burning cookfires that are dangerous and becoming harder to fuel in a city that was never known for an abundance of burnable wood in the first place. According to Shamsan, emergency services can't function properly in the city, as they've been routinely hit with sniper fire, while local hospitals have all but run out of oxygen supplies. Between the elderly, the disabled, malnourished children, pregnant women, and others, tens or hundreds of thousands of people in the city have a heightened need for health services and support not to mention the war wounded. By Shamsan's figures, at least 271 people have been killed and 1,129 wounded since the offensive against Taiz began, although it's not clear how many of those dead and wounded are civilians. 120 health centres have now been shut down, schools are closed indefinitely, and by Shamsan's count, over 64,000 newly displaced families are trying to survive there. Global aid groups have been trying to amplify concerns about the state of the city, with human rights watch issuing warnings that Houthi action may amount to the use of weaponised starvation as a means of waging war. The World Food Programme recently acknowledged that its stocks of wheat flour have nearly been exhausted, and that it is unable to make contact with over 600,000 people in the city who were already dependent on humanitarian aid before access was cut off. While Saudi Arabia has continued to support many fighters with airstrikes, the airspace around the city remains far too dangerous to attempt large-scale air drops of aid, which would rely on large, slow, tactical and strategic airlifters that the Houthis have the means to target and shoot down. The Houthis, meanwhile, are in control of the area's mobile data networks according to the governor and are eavesdropping on conversations while imploring the people of Tahed and their resistance. In areas that the Houthis have recently captured, the group has forced large numbers of civilians to sign loyalty pledges, adhering to the Houthis' zaidi religious sect and formally joining the group. Houthi local commanders are accused of pressing children into frontline service with dozens of children brought out from individual villages. The Houthis, of course, deny any wrongdoing with the organization's leader, Abdul Malik al-Huthi, claiming, quote, "the way is open for food, medicine and humanitarian aid to enter the city, and even for Saudi-backed groups to do so. Anyone who wants to verify that there is no siege on the city of Taiz could go to the city and see," end quote. Those claims, of course, run directly contrary to something called reality. You may have any efforts to liberate the city are ongoing, but they have yet to achieve any real success. Government forces have claimed control over a sensitive area west of the city called Al-Dbarb, and they've managed to consolidate their control of that zone, which should prevent the Houthis from accessing the most important strategic overlooks on the neighboring Mount Han. Saudi aircraft have continued to target concentrations of Houthi troops and military vehicles, wherever possible, and local sources report ongoing artillery battles east of the city, while infantry units have engaged the Houthis in several days of close quarters fighting along the city's southern edge. But those efforts are only enough to stop the Houthis from progressing further, and while the group has reportedly taken heavy losses around Taiz, it remains completely committed to the siege. In fact, the group has so many fighters to spare that it's advancing along another nearby axis. On Monday 2 November, Reuters reported that according to several Yemeni military sources, the Houthis are now within 80 kilometers, or 50 miles of the city of Aden. The Houthis latest push, along the main road that links Aden and Taiz, forces Yemeni troops to stretch even further, and so, as long as the Houthis are comfortable advancing toward the capital, it's abundantly clear that Yemeni forces won't break the siege of Taiz from that direction. And finally, we're going to take a look at a wave of global air attacks against civilians in several conflict zones across the past week. Those include a Russian double- tap strike against a school in a Ukraine's Zaporojiji or a blast that was being used as a distribution point, a wave of strikes against a maternity hospital, a school and other targets in rebel-controlled areas of Myanmar, and an Ethiopian drone strike against a camp for displaced people in the Amara region. In Ukraine, at least 33 people were killed in the Zaporojiji or attack, where a school that hasn't hosted students in years due to its proximity to the front line, has instead functioned as a known, well-documented aid distribution point. That is to say, the constant presence of civilians at that school is no secret. Moscow had no reason or excuse not to know that civilians would be present there, and any routine investigation of the school for Russia to even select it as a target in the first place would certainly have turned up that information. That, however, didn't matter on Monday the 2nd of November, when an initial wave of strikes rained down upon the distribution side during a weekly distribution period routinely scheduled for Mondays at that time. A large portion of the school was destroyed, with civilians inside, and then Russian warplanes returned to launch a second series of strikes, with at least two rescue personnel and four police officers killed in the double-tap strike. The death toll is expected to rise further in the coming days, with nearly 50 people currently listed as missing. That attack came on the heels of a Sunday wave of air strikes in Myanmar, with most devastating strikes targeting a part of Western Raqin state that's under the control of the rebel Iraqi army. The timing was hardly an accident. Right now, the Iraqi army has been advancing toward the regional capital, Citay, at one of the few places where Myanmar's military forces have managed to hold out over the last several years. But the regime's latest strikes didn't target the Iraqi advance, nor did they focus on any other military targets. Instead, at least 15 people were killed in the weekend's air strikes, which targeted a school, a maternity hospital, a bridge, and other clearly civilian and dual-use infrastructure. At the maternity hospital, in Raqin state, five people were killed, including four healthcare workers, and one week old infant, who was due to return home with her family the following day. The strike on the school came a day earlier, in another rebel-held area, in Kaya state near the Thai border. There, the attack came during the day's classes, and three students were killed with another five wounded. According to local rights groups and civil leaders, a fighter jet and a transport plane worked together to drop over 20 bombs on the school, in an area where there had been no nearby military movements and no nearby fighting. Seven other civilians were killed across the country. Finally, in Ethiopia, a series of drone strikes targeted an internally displaced camp called Jari II, where roughly 1, 700 people had been living temporarily prior to the attack. Like the situation in Mar-Mar, local authorities and witnesses noted that there had been no fighting in the area, in the Amharah region, and no nearby militant activity. Nevertheless, the camp was targeted with three to five strikes or even more, according to various witness statements. At least 15 people were killed in the strikes, including five children, along with at least 36 people who were injured. Locals described a drone circling the camp the day before the strikes, suggesting the use of a higher-altitude reusable drone, something that Ethiopia's federal government has access to, but that rebels in the area haven't gotten their hands on. The Ethiopian government did not immediately respond to a request for information from writers, but these kinds of strikes against civilians and other actions punish civilians in rebel-held or rebel- friendly areas, are hardly unusual from Addis Ababa. In each case, a government with a known history of stunning brutality against civilians, Russia's Mar-Mar, and Ethiopia's respectively, chose to launch attacks against clear civilian targets, where there really isn't a way to cred ibly claim that the forces responsible might have failed to understand the nature of their target. But that, not its own, isn't that much of a surprise. The world has watched for years as each of these governments use similar tactics. And although they all deny it, the basic thinking that guides their decisions is transparently obvious. By targeting vulnerable civilians, these governments hope to raise the costs and the pain of resistance, demonstrating to the civilian population that they're better off complying than supporting a rebel movement, or in Ukraine's case, a national government facing full-scale invasion. But the really notable thing, in each case, is that these tactics just don't work. Ukrainians have been fighting back against Russia for the better part of five years now, and they've survived several successive winters marked by comprehensive Russian destruction of their energy infrastructure. Ukrainian citizens remain fundamentally opposed to the idea of capitulation to Moscow, and there is no indication that the resolve of the war-weary population is anywhere near a breaking point. In Mar-Mar, the nation 's many rebel groups have largely secured control of their own ancestral homelands, in areas that the military has virtually no chance of taking back within the next decade or more. In Ethiopia, and particularly the Amharah region, resistance to Addis Ababa has shown no sign of slowing down, and ret ributive air strikes against civilians have failed to produce any meaningful change in rebel behavior. So it's all the more telling that as these same regimes choose to prosecute these same wars, trying to stamp out resistance that has virtually no chance of going away, they continue to fall back on the same tactics, despite the lack of any sign that those tactics work. Instead, they are a bitter reminder of the impotence of the national leaders and military commanders who choose to employ them, trying and trying to break a population's will to fight, but instead, hardening their resolve even further. Thank you for watching.