WarFronts Weekly 11.13.2026: Friday Blitz.
🟨 WarFronts Weekly | Friday Blitz
Fronts Staff • November 13, 2026
Somali Supreme Court Ruling Intensifies Political Crisis:
For months, Somalia has weathered an ongoing political crisis, after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud chose to overstay his mandate with a legally dubious extension of his presidential term. Last week, however, Somalia’s Supreme Court found that Mohamud’s term extension was unlawful, and mandated that the nation hold federal elections within ninety days.
The ruling was a key victory for Somalia’s fractured opposition, where a mix of elected politicians, exiled civil leaders, and resistance leaders representing Somalia’s autonomous federal states and those that have attempted to claim autonomy, have struggled to unify and oppose Mohamud en masse. According to the Supreme Court ruling, Mohamud and the opposition now have thirty days to reach consensus on an election plan.
The Somali federal government, however, has long made clear that it does not intend to respect the opposition’s right to represent Somalis, nor to negotiate on equal terms. Somali forces and law enforcement have disrupted opposition protests, issued restrictions on the movement of opposition leaders, and fought several rounds of open battle against resistance forces.
Ahead of the Supreme Court ruling, Mohamud attempted to fire the court’s Chief Justice, and once the ruling was issued, Mohamud’s Attorney General and Defense Minister each voiced their opposition. Mohamud ordered Somali federal police to take over the Supreme Court, and the Chief Justice has now been removed from office, replaced with a Mohamud loyalist.
The decision to oppose the ruling will likely force Somali federal forces into more direct confrontations with pro-opposition resistance groups, including a powerful new clan faction that took up arms against Mogadishu in late October, in the Hiraan region. There, clan fighters seized the Hiraan regional capital, and according to one of the uprising’s leaders, the clan intends to form a new regional government.
The new clan uprising has led to mass defections across the Somali military, weeks after the partial pullout of Ugandan and Ethiopian peacekeeping troops. As the crisis evolves, the jihadist insurgency al-Shabaab continues to exploit Somalia’s growing political divisions, and the weakening of its federal forces and international peacekeeping deployments.
Introducing DefenseFronts:
The team behind WarFronts, HomeFronts, and Fronts.co is proud to announce the launch of DefenseFronts on YouTube.
On DefenseFronts, our team takes a close look at the global defense industry, focusing on the tech, the tactics, and the cutting-edge innovations that shape modern battlefields. From changing alliances to future flashpoints, we know that today's global military-industrial complex is a window into tomorrow's geopolitics. With Simon at the helm, and a growing team of experts and Fronts-universe veterans working behind the scenes, we know you'll love DefenseFronts, so check it out.
Around the World:
The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have launched a new series of attacks against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) near the city of El-Obeid, where the SAF has already recaptured several villages and the larger town of Umm Sumayma. The area is particularly important to the SAF because, by capturing it, the military can secure a key highway route into the RSF-controlled west, and threaten the RSF’s position in the West Kordofan region. In a second prong of the new offensive, however, SAF forces were beaten back by the RSF in the town of Kazgil, where the SAF appears to have taken significant losses.
State media in Myanmar claimed that government forces have seized a critical resistance command headquarters and ten other bases in the nation’s south, in a border zone between Mon State and the region of Bago. Local rebel factions have not yet challenged the claim. The captured command headquarters was run by the pro-democracy People’s Defense Forces, a group with a nationwide presence, while the other bases were mostly held by the Karen National Liberation Army, a prominent ethnic militia. In the nation’s west, meanwhile, the rebel Arakan Army launched a new assault on a key government-held naval base near the Rakhine State capital of Sittwe, where some seven thousand government troops are massing in advance of a large-scale defense of the city.
Overnight on Thursday evening and Friday morning, Ukraine fired at least 1,198 drones at targets across Russia, according to Russian Defense Ministry claims, impacting targets including an industrial zone in Volgograd, where four people were killed. On the prior evening, Russia had claimed credit for a large overnight wave of attacks against alleged military facilities across Ukraine, although Ukrainian authorities noted the death of one person, and injuries to five others, when a drone hit a nine-story apartment building.
Also this week, a car bombing on Thursday near St. Petersburg killed a colonel of the Russian Aerospace Forces, who reportedly played a key role in local air defense. On Friday, a former spokesman for Ukraine’s pro-Russian ex-Prime Minister Mykola Azarov was hospitalized after another car bombing, near his residence in Moscow. On Thursday, the Finnish military confirmed that unidentified projectiles had struck a small Russian missile-carrier ship in the Gulf of Finland, with the ship now having returned to port in St. Petersburg. In a suspected friendly fire incident, meanwhile, Russia is believed to have shot down at least two of its own helicopters—including a Ka-52 attack helicopter—and a MiG-31 fighter jet.
Militants ambushed a convoy of police vehicles in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on Wednesday, killing at least ten officers in an extended gunfight. Local authorities reported the deaths of at least two senior officers, in an attack that was likely the work of the Pakistani Taliban. The group has not yet claimed credit. On Friday, the Pakistani military reported that it had killed forty-three militants across several raids in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and another thirty-one militants in the southwestern province of Balochistan, where local insurgents continue to challenge Pakistani control of natural resource deposits.
Israeli warplanes hit Gaza’s Nasser Hospital in an airstrike on Thursday, where the Israeli military alleged that it targeted a senior Hamas commander. Local medics claimed that the strikes killed a surgeon and a teenage boy, along with four other adults, and injured twenty others. According to Israel, Hamas has converted Nasser Hospital into a base of operations. Later on Thursday, an Israeli airstrike on a car in Gaza City killed at least two people, and Israeli gunfire in a central Gaza refugee camp killed another person.
Continued after the break...
Peace & Progress:
Ukraine and Russia agreed to a large prisoner swap this week, after a set of talks in Abu Dhabi that were otherwise unproductive. While officials have not yet disclosed the number of prisoners-of-war set to be released from either country, the agreement is a rare sign of limited cooperation between Moscow and Kyiv. US envoy Jared Kushner claimed that the exchange will be “the biggest humanitarian release of prisoners” in the war to date.
The foreign ministers of Syria and Jordan held a meeting in Damascus this week to repair ties and sign eleven new cooperation agreements, after Jordanian airstrikes killed civilians in southern Syria in October. The two nations pledged a joint investigation into the strikes, in which Jordan claimed to have targeted Islamic State militants with connections to an attack on a Jordanian church where seven civilians, including three children, were killed.