Somalia's Soldiers Are Blocking Their Own Capital's Roads Over Unpaid Wages — And the Government Has Gone Silent

Armed troops have taken positions around the Ministry of Justice, the central prison, and the seaport in Mogadishu. They are not insurgents. They are not rebels. They are government soldiers who have not been paid  and this crisis has a history that makes it far more dangerous than it looks.

What is happening right now

Armed government soldiers have blocked a major road in Mogadishu's Xamarweyne district, a strategically sensitive area that links the Ministry of Justice, the central prison, and critical zones near the seaport. Witnesses reported armed personnel taking positions around buildings in the area, with no clarity on when the situation would resolve. Movement in one of the capital's most important corridors has been disrupted.

The soldiers' demand is elemental: they have not been paid their salaries, and they want the government to acknowledge that and fix it. There has been no official response from Somali government authorities. No statement. No timeline. No minister speaking to the press. Just silence  which is, in many ways, the government's default response to a crisis it has faced so many times before that it has stopped pretending to be surprised.

This is not new. This is a pattern.

What is happening in Xamarweyne today is not an isolated incident. It is the latest chapter in a recurring breakdown that has played out across Somalia for over a decade, at every level of the security apparatus.

In June 2020, soldiers from the 27th Battalion blocked the main road leading to the Presidential Palace, Villa Somalia, saying they had not received wages in a year and nine months. They had recently been in direct combat with Al-Shabaab militants. The government of President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo had no immediate response. Turkish-trained Haramcad special forces staged a similar protest, firing indiscriminately into the air and putting civilians at risk, accusing the outgoing administration of Hassan Sheikh Mohamud of failing to pay them. In 2017, soldiers seized the headquarters of the Defence Ministry itself. In Puntland, troops blocked roads to the presidential palace after going months without pay  some having not received wages for half a year or more.

The soldiers doing the blocking today in Xamarweyne are part of a military that has been chronically underpaid for its entire modern existence. This is not an exaggeration. It is documented history.

Why salaries keep going unpaid  and where the money actually goes

Somalia's military funding is one of the most dysfunctional financial arrangements on the continent. The Somali National Army does not primarily fund itself  it relies on contributions from international partners including the United States, the European Union, and other donors. Those contributions are often pledged for limited periods and for specific numbers of soldiers. When the money runs out, the soldiers do not get paid. When donor disbursements are delayed  as they frequently are  the soldiers do not get paid.

But the international funding gap is only part of the story. A significant and well-documented problem has been corruption within the military chain of command itself. Ghost soldiers  names on payroll lists for soldiers who do not exist, who deserted years ago, or who died  have siphoned enormous sums from salary budgets. The Somali government, under pressure from international donors, moved to biometric registration of soldiers precisely because commanders were collecting salaries on behalf of men who were no longer in service and pocketing the money. Even after the biometric system was introduced, soldiers protesting on the streets have repeatedly said their commanders were intercepting their wages.

In one particularly stark example documented by the Associated Press, hundreds of Somali soldiers trained with US tax dollars deserted because their monthly wage of one hundred dollars was never delivered. Some of those deserters joined Al-Shabaab  the very group they had been trained to fight. The EU's own political adviser on Somalia said it plainly at the time: soldiers need to be paid every month. Otherwise they have to find other solutions.

The strategic danger nobody wants to say out loud

The Xamarweyne incident is not simply an employment dispute. It is a security event taking place in a capital that is already under pressure from every direction.

Al-Shabaab launched a major offensive in early 2025, exploiting gaps left by the drawdown of African Union forces. By late 2025, the group had retaken multiple districts in Lower Shabelle and Middle Jubba. A February 2026 bombing near Mogadishu International Airport killed over 30 people. The Somali National Army  the force responsible for holding the line against this resurgence  is the same force whose soldiers are currently blocking roads in the capital because they have not been paid.

This is the connection that demands attention. A military that feels betrayed by its own government is a military that is vulnerable  to desertion, to radicalization, to quiet accommodation with the enemy, and to active mutiny. Al-Shabaab has historically exploited precisely these moments. They watch. They wait. When government soldiers lose faith in the institution they are supposed to defend, the militant group gains a recruiting opportunity that no amount of foreign training or airstrikes can easily reverse.

The soldiers in Xamarweyne today are not enemies of the Somali state. They are people who signed up to defend it and were left waiting for a payment that never came. But the longer that situation persists  and the longer the government responds with silence  the more the line between a frustrated government soldier and a former government soldier begins to blur.

The government's silence is a message

That there has been no immediate official response from government authorities is, at this point, a statement in itself. Somali governments at every level have a documented history of not responding to salary protests until the situation either resolves itself or escalates to the point where it cannot be ignored. The absence of a statement is not a communications failure. It is a strategy  a calculation that ignoring the protest is less costly than acknowledging a systemic failure for which there is no quick fix.

But the calculation assumes the soldiers will go home eventually. Historically, many have. The protests tend to end when someone makes a promise, a partial payment is made, or external pressure forces a response. What does not end is the underlying problem  the structural inability of the Somali government to consistently pay the men it sends to war on its behalf.

What needs to happen

The soldiers in Xamarweyne deserve to be paid. That is the beginning and end of the immediate demand, and it is reasonable. But payment alone will not fix what is broken.

Somalia needs a transparent, audited military payroll system that removes commanding officers from the chain of salary distribution entirely. It needs a salary structure that does not depend entirely on whether international donors release funds on schedule. It needs a government that treats soldier welfare as a strategic priority rather than an administrative inconvenience. And it needs to understand  before Al-Shabaab teaches it the lesson again that the fastest way to lose a war is to stop paying the people fighting it.

The roads in Xamarweyne are blocked. The government is silent. And somewhere, people who want Somalia to fail are watching this unfold with considerable interest.
https://www.maatribune.co.ke/2026/05/somalias-soldiers-are-blocking-their.html