In the summer of 2022, a remarkable thing happened in central Somalia. The Somali National Army, backed by clan militias operating under the Macawisley umbrella, drove Al-Shabaab out of large portions of Hiraan and Middle Shabelle regions. Towns that had been under insurgent control for years fell in a matter of weeks. President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud called it a turning point. International donors pointed to it as proof that a Somali-led security model could work. The African Union Transition Mission in Somalia, ATMIS, cited it as validation of the handover timeline.
By late 2023, Al-Shabaab had retaken significant portions of what was cleared. The Macawisley militia ran short of ammunition, pay, and the political support from Mogadishu that had made the offensive possible. Federal government supply lines proved unreliable. The Somali National Army units left to hold cleared areas did not have the logistics, the numbers, or the institutional capacity to sustain the presence the offensive had established. Al-Shabaab returned, as it has returned after every major clearing operation in the eighteen years since it emerged as a serious force.
This pattern is the central problem of the ATMIS handover. The mission is withdrawing on a schedule determined by diplomatic and financial considerations rather than a realistic assessment of Somali security force readiness. Al-Shabaab is watching, adapting, and in several areas already retaking positions it was pushed from during the high point of the 2022 offensive. The question of whether Somalia can hold its own territory without sustained AU support is the most consequential security question in the Horn right now, and the honest answer is that no one with authoritative knowledge of the Somali National Army's actual capabilities is giving a confident yes.
What ATMIS was, and what it was always trying to do
ATMIS replaced the African Union Mission in Somalia, AMISOM, in April 2022. AMISOM had been the mission that stabilised Mogadishu after 2011 and drove Al-Shabaab out of most major urban centres across the south. Its replacement by ATMIS reflected both a changed political environment, with increased international pressure to hand responsibility to Somali institutions, and a genuine aspiration to create a mission explicitly oriented toward transition rather than indefinite presence.
ATMIS was designed around a phased withdrawal: from an authorised strength of around 19,000 uniformed personnel to zero by December 2024, later extended to December 2025, and subsequently extended again. Each extension reflected the same underlying reality: the conditions for a responsible handover did not exist on the original timeline. The extensions bought time but did not fundamentally alter the dynamics that made each deadline unachievable.
The core dynamic is straightforward. The Somali National Army exists on paper in numbers that look adequate. In practice, it is riddled with ghost soldiers, meaning personnel who exist on payroll but not in operational units, with poor logistics, with clan-based command structures that undermine unified operations, with equipment that is outmatched by Al-Shabaab's improvised explosive device capabilities, and with officer corps that has been built more on political loyalty to Mogadishu than on military competence. These are not new problems. They are the same problems that have defined Somali security sector development since the internationally supported rebuilding effort began in earnest in the mid-2000s, and they have proven remarkably resistant to the training, funding, and mentoring that the AU mission, the United States, the European Union training mission, and Turkey have all provided.
Al-Shabaab's strategic patience
Al-Shabaab has demonstrated for fifteen years that its core strategic capability is patience. The group does not need to win engagements. It needs to outlast coalitions. It has watched AMISOM come and go. It has absorbed major offensives, dispersed under air pressure, and reconstituted in areas where security force presence thinned. It has maintained revenue streams through taxation of the agricultural economy in areas it controls and extortion of businesses in areas it does not formally hold but can threaten. It has maintained judicial and administrative functions in contested areas that give it a governance legitimacy that the Somali federal government cannot consistently match.
The 2022 clearing operation was a genuine setback for Al-Shabaab, not a decisive defeat. The group lost control of territory and experienced higher attrition than usual. But it did not lose its command structures, its financing, or its ability to recruit from the same population of young men for whom joining Al-Shabaab remains an economically and socially meaningful option in the absence of alternatives. When the Macawisley momentum stalled and federal support thinned, Al-Shabaab read the situation accurately and began the patient work of returning.
The ATMIS withdrawal provides Al-Shabaab with exactly the kind of environment it has historically exploited: a transition period in which multiple actors are recalibrating, supply lines are uncertain, and the political will to sustain difficult operations competes with the political pressure to declare success and move on. The group has no incentive to mount major operations during the withdrawal period when it can simply wait and consolidate in areas that ATMIS leaves and Somali forces cannot credibly hold.
What the Somali government has and has not built
Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's government has made the security handover a political priority and has invested genuine effort in the National Consultative Council process designed to bring federal member states into a unified security architecture. The politics of this process are complicated because the security forces of Somalia's federal member states, particularly Puntland and Jubbaland, have their own command structures, their own relationships with international partners, and their own interests that do not always align with Mogadishu's direction.
The Somali National Army's operational readiness varies significantly by unit and by region. Some units, particularly those that have trained with US special operations forces under the Danab programme, have demonstrated genuine capability in direct action operations. Danab brigades have conducted effective raids and maintained operational security at levels that other SNA units have not. But Danab is a small force. It is designed for targeted operations, not for the sustained territorial holding that ATMIS has provided across multiple sectors. Expanding Danab's model to the full SNA is a project of years, not months.
The logistics and sustainment picture is worse than the operational picture. Somali forces in forward positions regularly run short of food, ammunition, and fuel because the supply chain between Mogadishu and forward operating bases has not been built to the standard that sustained territorial control requires. When supply runs short, units pull back. When units pull back, Al-Shabaab fills the space. This is not a problem that training addresses. It is a problem that requires administrative systems, accountable financial management, and a culture of institutional reliability that Somalia's federal government has not yet built across its security sector.
The regional stakes
A failed ATMIS handover is not primarily a Somali problem. It is a regional problem with direct consequences for Kenya and Ethiopia in particular, and for the broader Horn security architecture.
Kenya has the most direct exposure. Al-Shabaab has conducted attacks inside Kenya for over a decade, targeting Nairobi, the coast, and the north. The attacks are not random: they are operationally linked to Al-Shabaab's ability to move personnel and material across the Somalia-Kenya border in areas where state presence on both sides is thin. A Somalia in which Al-Shabaab has consolidated control of larger territorial areas is a Somalia from which Al-Shabaab can project across that border with less constraint than it currently faces. Kenya's government understands this, which is why the Kenya Defence Forces have maintained a presence in Jubbaland and why Nairobi tracks the ATMIS withdrawal with concern it does not always articulate publicly.
Ethiopia's exposure is different but significant. Ethiopia has historically been a major contributor to AMISOM and ATMIS and has strategic interests in a stable Somalia as a counterweight to the Eritrea-Egypt-Somalia alignment that has been forming around opposition to Addis Ababa's regional assertiveness. A Somalia consumed by a resurgent Al-Shabaab is a Somalia less capable of being a meaningful partner in any regional architecture and more capable of being a vector for instability into Ethiopia's Somali region, where Al-Shabaab has long-standing networks.
The United States, which has maintained a Special Operations presence in Somalia and has conducted hundreds of air strikes against Al-Shabaab since 2017, has signalled that it will continue counterterrorism operations independent of the ATMIS withdrawal. That commitment provides a ceiling on how badly the security situation can deteriorate in the near term. But US air power does not hold territory, does not provide governance, and does not address the economic and administrative conditions that sustain Al-Shabaab's recruitment and revenue. It is a tool for degrading Al-Shabaab's senior leadership, not for resolving the underlying security challenge that the ATMIS handover is supposed to address.
What a responsible transition would require
A responsible transition from ATMIS to full Somali security responsibility would require three things that are currently not in place. First, it would require an honest assessment of which territories Somali forces can credibly hold, as distinct from which territories they can formally receive in a handover ceremony, and a phasing of the withdrawal that matches the former rather than the latter. Some areas that ATMIS currently covers should not be handed over on any near-term timeline because the forces to hold them do not exist. Acknowledging this is politically difficult. Ignoring it is operationally catastrophic.
Second, it would require a sustained, multi-year commitment to Somali security sector logistics that goes beyond training and focuses on the administrative systems, financial accountability, and supply chain management that operational readiness actually depends on. The international community has funded training. It has not funded, at adequate scale, the harder and slower work of building the institutional infrastructure that makes trained soldiers operationally effective.
Third, it would require a political settlement between Mogadishu and the federal member states over the command and financing of security forces that gives frontline units a reliable chain of supply and authority. The National Consultative Council process is an attempt at this, but it remains incomplete, and the political incentives for federal member states to maintain autonomous security structures are strong enough that a unified national security architecture is not achievable on any short timeline.
None of these requirements are met as of April 2026. The ATMIS withdrawal is nonetheless proceeding. Al-Shabaab is not waiting for the requirements to be met. The gap between what is being handed over and what can actually be held is real, it is documented, and it is being absorbed into the diplomatic language of transition milestones and capacity assessments rather than addressed in the operational reality on the ground. That is the honest picture of where the Somalia security handover stands, and it matters for the entire region that it is seen clearly.