Around 1,500 Saudi-Financed Somalian Recruits Reportedly Desert With Weapons

Haatufonline — 29 August, 2026

An estimated 1,500 Somalian army recruits who completed basic military training earlier this month at a camp in Hananbuure,in Somalia’s Galmudug region, reportedly deserted with their weapons on Friday, raising questions over the fate of a newly trained, Saudi-financed force.

Among the deserters were around 1,000 recruits originally drawn from Ethiopia’s Somali Region who are reported to have crossed the border back into Ethiopia with their weapons. Several hundred others are understood to have left the force and returned to their home villages inside Somalia.

The recruits were part of an approximately 5,000-strong force whose training, weapons and other costs were financed by Saudi Arabia with General Sahal Abdi Omer,a former ONLF commander, acting as the liaison officer from the Somalian side.The training was conducted by Ukrainian and Romanian contractors alongside Sudanese instructors associated with the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Al-Baraa bin Malik Brigade.

The programme represented a significant expansion of Riyadh’s security involvement in Somalia. While officially presented as part of efforts to strengthen Somalia’s security forces and support counter-terrorism operations, the force has also increasingly been linked to Mogadishu’s confrontation with Somaliland and to the wider regional rivalry involving Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, Israel and Ethiopia.

On Wednesday, around 500 members of the newly trained force were reportedly airlifted to Las Anod in six flights. Hussein Abdi Kamiin, better known as Abdi Madoobe,the Lasanod & Buhoodle militia commander, linked in UN security reporting to Al-Shabaab,travelled himself to Guri-eel in Somalia’s Galmudug State to receive the troops and oversee arrangements connected with their transfer to Las Anod. Several hundred others were said to have been scheduled to travel overland through Ethiopia’s Somali Region toward areas close to Somaliland’s western border.

The deployment has raised concerns that foreign-funded security assistance said to strengthen Somalia’s armed forces and combat militant groups could instead become entangled in internal and regional political conflicts.

For Somaliland, which has maintained relative peace and institutional stability for more than three decades, the movement of foreign-financed Somalian forces toward its eastern and western borders is likely to deepen concerns over the expanding military involvement of both Riyadh and Ankara in the Horn of Africa.
The reported movement of a sizeable armed contingent from Somalia into Ethiopia also raises potentially serious security and diplomatic questions.In particular,it is likely to fuel speculation over whether the mass desertion was simply the result of poor command and control within the newly formed force, or whether some of the recruits were meant to ultimately be absorbed into armed groups operating against the Ethiopian government.
Nevertheless the scale of the reported movement is likely to prompt scrutiny in Addis Ababa over the recruitment,training and intended deployment of Ethiopian Somali nationals by a foreign-financed force operating from Somalia.