Museveni says Uganda’s Somalia mission was solidarity with Ethiopia, not Somalia

MOGADISHU (Somaliguardian) – President Yoweri Museveni has said Uganda’s nearly two-decade military deployment in Somalia was driven primarily by solidarity with Ethiopia – whose forces invaded Somalia in 2006 to remove the Islamic Courts Union from power in Mogadishu – rather than by any direct stake in Somalia’s own stability.

Museveni made the remarks last month at the Second Extraordinary Summit of Heads of State of Troop-Contributing Countries to the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), held at Speke Resort Munyonyo in Kampala.

“Uganda does not have a border with Somalia. When, therefore, we decided to involve ourselves in Somalia it was out of principle and strategy,” Museveni told the summit. He cited opposition to what he called “Islamic chauvinism” spreading from Somalia and Sudan as a first reason, and solidarity with Ethiopia as a second, explaining that Addis Ababa had faced attacks linked to the countries.

Uganda became the first country to deploy troops to Somalia in 2007, under what was then the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), the predecessor to AUSSOM.

The remarks came as the summit’s participants – Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti, Egypt and Burundi – confronted a funding crisis threatening the mission’s survival. The United Nations Support Office in Somalia (UNSOS), which supplies logistics for AU peacekeepers, is set to end its mandate on December 31, 2026, after the United States informed the African Union on July 1 that it would not support renewal of the mission’s mandate at the UN Security Council.

Uganda’s Chief of Defence Forces, Gen. Muhoozi Kainerugaba, told the summit’s military chiefs’ session that “these are difficult circumstances, but they also call for our unity, creativity, and resolve,” and urged urgent preparation for an African-led alternative to UNSOS support.

African Union Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf said the AU remained committed to mobilising the political, diplomatic and financial resources needed to sustain the mission. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud thanked Museveni for convening the summit and described Uganda as “one of Somalia’s strongest pillars.”

The summit was not without friction. Analyst Rashid Abdi of Nairobi-based Sahan Research said Mohamud pressed successfully to have language on dialogue with Somali opposition figures softened in the summit’s final communique, calling it evidence Mohamud “knows how to get what he wants” through pressure tactics — a separate dispute that surfaced during the same three-day gathering.

Museveni’s solidarity remarks have circulated widely on Somali social media, where they have drawn criticism from users who describe Ethiopia’s 2006–2009 presence in Somalia as an occupation, rather than a stabilisation effort, responsible for thousands of civilian deaths and widespread destruction of property and numerous human rights abuses. Current Somali federal officials have previously used similar language to describe that period.

Neither Somalia’s federal government nor the African Union Commission has issued a formal response addressing Museveni’s solidarity framing specifically.

Why Museveni’s Words Matter More Than He May Have Intended

Nineteen years and, by conservative estimates, billions of dollars into an AU mission whose principal financiers — the United States and European Union — have consistently framed their support around building a stable, democratic Somalia free of Al-Shabaab, Museveni’s Kampala remarks are the clearest on-record admission yet that troop-contributing states and Western donors were never rowing in the same direction.

Regional publication Horn Review, assessing the same remarks, described Museveni’s framing as a “diplomatic miscalculation” that exposed “the instrumental nature of Uganda’s commitment” at precisely the moment Mogadishu was seeking reassurance of a Somalia-centred partnership — concluding that Uganda–Somalia relations are now more likely to be marked by tension than restored trust for the remainder of the mission’s lifespan.

That assessment matters beyond bilateral optics. Researchers who track Al-Shabaab’s propaganda apparatus — including studies conducted for the UN mission in Somalia — have long documented the group’s core recruitment narrative: that Somali government forces and their AU allies are proxies serving foreign interests rather than genuine partners in Somali sovereignty. Ethiopia’s 2006 invasion is widely cited among regional security analysts as a catalytic moment in Al-Shabaab’s own rise, having scattered the Islamic Courts Union and handed its hardline, sharia-driven nationalist wing — the faction that would become Al-Shabaab — a grievance narrative it has never relinquished. A senior AU troop-contributing head of state now explicitly linking his own twenty-year deployment to solidarity with that same invasion supplies that narrative fresh, unforced material — delivered not by a militant spokesman but by an allied president at an official summit.

For Washington and Brussels, the timing sharpens an already difficult calculation. Both are weighing whether to keep underwriting a mission now facing the loss of its UN logistics backbone at year’s end. Museveni’s own account of his government’s motives raises a question donors will now find harder to avoid: if the coalition’s troop contributors were never unified around Somalia’s stated recovery goals, what — after nineteen years, thousands of Somali and peacekeeper deaths, and no completed handover to Somali national forces — was the funding actually building toward.

This analysis reflects the assessment of Horn Review and independent research on Al-Shabaab’s propaganda methodology; it does not represent the editorial position of Somali Guardian.