Armed Factions in Baidoa Are Killing Children While Families Starve

Children were killed in Baidoa. Children were injured in Baidoa. They were not killed in a statistic or a footnote. They were killed in a city where mothers were already choosing which child would eat that day.

The reporting from the Africa Center for Strategic Studies confirms the core horror: fresh fighting in Baidoa, the capital of Somalia's South West State, has claimed and maimed children in households that were already living on the edge. The city's families were facing severe hunger and a tangle of overlapping crises before the first shot was fired. Now they face bullets and shells on top of empty pots.

We should be precise about what we know. The reporting does not yet give a verified body count for the children killed or wounded, and we will not invent one to make our anger look bigger. But a missing number is not a missing crime. A child who dies in a crossfire is a child who died because someone chose to fight in a place where children sleep, queue for water, and walk to school. Whoever pulled the trigger, the question stands: who decided that Baidoa's children were an acceptable price for the fight?

Consider the arithmetic of a city under pressure. Families who have already sold their livestock, exhausted their savings, and walked away from failed harvests have no buffer left. When fighting breaks out, they cannot simply relocate. They huddle indoors, they miss the few meals that aid and markets provide, and the children who are already malnourished become the first to fall sick. Hunger makes every violent shock deadlier. We have seen this before in Somalia, when the 2011 famine declared in parts of the south killed an estimated quarter of a million people, the majority of them children under five. Baidoa was at the centre of that catastrophe. A generation was scarred by that failure, and the scars have never healed.

Baidoa has also been a battleground for years. Al-Shabaab has fought the Somali state and its African partners across the south since the group's rise in the late 2000s, and the African Union mission now operating in Somalia has repeatedly struggled to fund itself and hold ground. Meanwhile, political rivalry between Mogadishu and regional administrations has repeatedly turned into armed standoffs on the streets of cities like Baidoa. Every time those disputes spill over, the people who pay are not the men in the air-conditioned offices. They are the shopkeepers, the nurses, the widows, and the children.

Here is the uncomfortable truth we must say out loud. Somalia does not lack for foreign attention. It has a crowded field of external actors who are all in the room, all competing for influence on the Horn. Turkey operates a major military training presence in Mogadishu and has invested heavily in the Somali state. The United Arab Emirates has pursued ports, security deals, and political partnerships across Somalia and its breakaway regions. Ethiopia, Kenya, Egypt, and others have their own troops, interests, and rivalries on Somali soil. Each of these powers speaks the language of partnership and stability. Each has its own ledger of influence, trade, and strategic advantage. Not one of them can point to Baidoa's children and say the outcome was the one they were working toward. Africa's sovereignty is not advanced when foreign capitals use Somali territory as a chessboard. It is betrayed. And the new scramble for the Horn, with its ports, bases, and loans, has the same extractive logic as the old one, dressed in the vocabulary of development.

The Somali government, and every faction that carries a gun or a grievance, must answer for the choices that brought fighting to Baidoa. The federal government must explain why a city already in crisis was exposed to armed confrontation. Regional leaders must explain why they will not negotiate in parliament rather than in the streets. Al-Shabaab must be named for what it is: a terrorist movement that taxes the poor, murders civilians, and wages war on the people it claims to rule. Accountability is not a favour that leaders grant their citizens. It is the minimum we are owed.

There is a better way, and Africa has already proven it. Botswana built one of the continent's most durable democracies on transparent public finances, a professional civil service, and a constitutional culture that treats power as something to be earned and surrendered. Mauritius turned a plantation economy into a high-income island through property rights, open trade, and independent institutions. Senegal, whatever its current challenges, has shown that peaceful transfers of power are possible even in the most difficult environments. These are not foreign inventions. They are African choices, made by African citizens who demanded that their leaders be bound by rules.

Somalia needs that same discipline. It needs a federal framework that distributes revenue transparently, so that no faction has reason to fight for control of customs posts and checkpoints. It needs security forces that answer to civilian authority and are paid on time, not in promises. It needs an independent judiciary that can prosecute warlords and corrupt officials regardless of their clan or their patrons. And it needs a private sector freed from the extortion of armed gatekeepers, so that the Somali diaspora's remittances, which flow to the country in the billions of dollars each year, build businesses and schools rather than disappearing into the pockets of whoever holds the road.

So here is what we demand. We demand that the Somali federal government and South West State authorities publicly commit to an immediate ceasefire around Baidoa, protect civilian corridors for food and medical supplies, and release a full, independently verified account of the children killed and injured. We demand that the African Union fund and equip its mission in Somalia properly, instead of leaving troops to fight with inadequate supplies while donors hold press conferences. We demand that the UN Security Council use its existing mechanisms on children in armed conflict to name and sanction every party responsible for grave violations against children in Somalia, regardless of how inconvenient their friends in foreign capitals may find that. And we demand that every foreign government with a stake in Somalia's future tie its aid, its arms, and its investments to clear conditions: no weapons into conflict zones without accountability, no deals that bypass parliament, and no silence when children are killed.

Baidoa's children did not choose this war. They did not sign the agreements, deploy the militias, or divert the aid. They are simply the ones who will be buried if we keep looking away. Ask yourself what you would do if the children in your street were the ones caught in the crossfire, and then ask why we tolerate anything less for them. Share this reporting. Ask your MP, your journalist, your union, your church, and your business association what they are doing about Baidoa. Hold your own government to account for the diplomacy and money it sends into the Horn. The children of Baidoa cannot vote, cannot march on Mogadishu, and cannot demand a seat at the table. We can. The only question left is whether we will.

Based on reporting by UN-NEWS