AUSSOM-Somalia in crisis as peace enforcement faces global retreat

By Simon Mulongo

The African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), launched on January 1, now teeters on the edge of operational failure. 

Conceived as a successor to ATMIS with a phased transition plan to Somali national security leadership by 2028, AUSSOM has, within four months, been stripped of its essential personnel and institutional coherence. 

Driven by funding paralysis, donor disengagement and internal fragmentation, the mission’s backbone has fractured at a time when the insurgent threat is intensifying.
 
By the end of March, nearly all AU-contracted civilian staff, Individual Police Officers (IPOs) and Military Staff Officers (SOs) were dismissed, following the expiry of non-renewable contracts. 

The Special Represetative of the Chairperson of African Union Commission (SRCC) departed, leaving only the deputy SRCC and five UN-supported staff in Mogadishu. 

This has gutted the mission’s civil-military interface — undermining the principle of unity of effort, which demands synchronised operations across military, policing and civilian governance domains. 

What remains is a skeletal framework incapable of sustaining even minimal mission tempo. 

This implosion is not an isolated African crisis — it is the downstream effect of systemic disengagement by global actors once central to Somalia’s stabilisation framework. 

The US, under the Trump 2.0 administration, has withdrawn support from the UNSOS financing mechanism, cutting off funding lines for allowances, medical support and compensation.

Washington maintains a rhetorical stance against terrorism, but materially, it has left the AU mission exposed. US airstrikes in towns like El Baraf offer tactical disruption, but do not replace the strategic scaffolding of a comprehensive mission. 

The European Union, once a key pillar of AU peace operations, has shifted its attention to internal security consolidation and Ukraine’s recovery. 

With the European Defence Union and new spending commitments toward continental resilience, Africa’s stabilisation efforts have been downgraded. 

Simon Mulongo

The forthcoming donor conference in Qatar remains uncertain and even a projected $50m injection from a reviewed UNSOS budget falls dramatically short of AUSSOM’s $500m annual need.

Into this vacuum steps al-Shabaab. Since  February, the group has mounted its most complex and synchronised campaign in years, conducting coordinated assaults in Hiraan and Middle Shabelle. 

On February 26, insurgents overran Bal’ad — just 23km from Mogadishu — liberating detained operatives and undermining state authority. These offensives are not symbolic — they are operational thrusts designed to reassert control over strategic corridors along the Shabelle River and fracture the state’s logistical depth. 

The Somali National Army (SNA), overstretched and under-resourced, is now engaged in asymmetric counter offensives. With clan militias disjointed and Burundian forces — long stationed in Middle Shabelle — phasing out due to insufficient troop allocations and lack of logistical guarantees, the terrain advantage is gradually shifting toward insurgents. 

The implications are stark: al-Shabaab is reconstituting operational depth and projecting strategic intent — just as AUSSOM is being unmade from within. 

The spectre of Afghanistan looms large. The rapid collapse of the Afghan government in 2021, after NATO’s withdrawal, was not the result of a decisive battlefield defeat, but a structural unraveling of institutional support and strategic cohesion. 

Somalia, too, now risks entering that zone of irreversible fragility. The difference? al-Shabaab does not seek a one-time military victory — it is executing a protracted war doctrine, fusing territorial control with social governance and financial autonomy through taxation networks. 

To salvage the mission, the AU must immediately operationalise a direct UN-assessed contribution mechanism to support Troop-Contributing Countries (TCCs). 

Modular re-engagement of IPOs and civilian officers through short-term deployments is imperative to restore institutional depth. 

Somalia’s current seat on the UN Security Council must be leveraged to reframe the discourse on stabilisation — not as donor benevolence, but as global self-interest. 

Philosophically, AUSSOM’s collapse is not merely a logistical failure — it is a moral failure of collective responsibility. Peace enforcement, if reduced to tactical containment, forfeits the strategic legitimacy it requires to endure. 

Missions without funding, personnel, or political capital are not transitions; they are retreats. AUSSOM’s fate should not be resigned to the pattern of forgotten missions. 
If peace enforcement is to remain a credible tool of global order, its architecture must be protected — not dismantled mid-mandate.

The writer is a governance and security consultant, EMANS Frontiers Limited.