At the centre of the crisis is a dispute over political authority in South West Somalia and over the terms by which that authority is claimed, extended or transferred.

Competing sides have advanced competing accounts of legitimacy. Each account is presented by its own supporters as lawful, and by its opponents as unlawful. This documentation does not adjudicate which claim is legally correct; it records that the dispute exists, that it is unresolved in public, and that it has had consequences beyond politics.

Public debate around the crisis has repeatedly referenced the federal leadership under President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, the South West administration associated with Abdiaziz Hassan Mohamed Laftagareen, and figures aligned with Adan Madobe, alongside Jubaland-aligned officials and other regional actors.

Naming an actor in public debate is not the same as establishing that the actor ordered, authorised or carried out a specific act. This publication names actors only as participants in a public dispute, and separately identifies which specific actions the available evidence establishes.

The most consequential feature of this crisis is the movement of political competition out of negotiation and into the space where armed forces operate.

When armed formations become instruments of political positioning, the ordinary safeguards that separate civilians from political conflict weaken. Roads close. Markets empty. Neighbourhoods become terrain. Young men in uniform are placed in positions where they may be asked to use force in a dispute that is not theirs.

This is a structural observation supported by the pattern of events recorded in the timeline. It is not an assertion that any named individual issued a specific military order.

This documentation records four confrontation dates in 2026 — 30 March, 30 May, 17–18 August and 3 September — together with a separate reported incident in Doolow, Gedo, on 4 September.

The timeline sets out each date individually, with what is established, reported, alleged and still unknown kept apart. Read together, they describe a crisis that recurred rather than resolved.

Armed confrontation inside or near a populated city does not remain confined to the people who carry weapons. It reaches households, schools, clinics, markets and transport.

This publication does not publish casualty figures it cannot verify. Inventing numbers would damage the very people this project exists to serve. What it records instead is the category of harm: displacement, interruption of livelihoods, interruption of education, fear, bereavement, and the slow erosion of civilian governance.

This publication does not claim to know who fired first in each confrontation, who authorised each deployment, or what private calculations preceded each decision.

It does not describe any conduct as a war crime or a crime against humanity, because such conclusions require legal determination by a competent body on evidence this project does not hold.

It does not attribute responsibility on the basis of political benefit. The fact that an outcome advantages a party is not evidence that the party caused it.