Nearly two decades after first dispatching military personnel to Somalia under African Union peacekeeping frameworks, Uganda has formally launched the long-anticipated pullback of its forces assigned to the continental bloc’s stabilization missions. The first cohort of 109 service members from the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) departed Somalia’s coastal capital Mogadishu on a recent Friday, a move publicly confirmed days earlier by Uganda’s top military commander General Muhoozi Kainerugaba.
As the very first African nation to contribute troops to the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) when the initiative launched back in 2007, Uganda’s military footprint in the Horn of Africa nation has been a cornerstone of regional efforts to fend off violent extremist threats. The original AMISOM mandate was designed to shield Somalia’s fragile transitional government from relentless assaults by al-Qaeda affiliated al-Shabab insurgents, who have waged a brutal, decades-long campaign of violence across the country.
Over the course of the 20-year deployment, Ugandan troops bore the brunt of high casualty counts in joint operations alongside the Somali National Army, leading successful offensives that ousted al-Shabab fighters from Mogadishu and most major urban centers, reclaimed vast swathes of strategic territory, and secured critical government infrastructure to prevent the collapse of Somalia’s state institutions. The UPDF contingent remained embedded in successive iterations of AU-led operations, including the African Union Transition Mission in Somalia (ATMIS), which was structured to gradually devolve full security control to local Somali forces. In 2025, ATMIS was succeeded by the African Union Support and Stabilisation Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), whose core mandate is to build the operational capacity of Somalia’s domestic security agencies to assume full national security oversight.
General Muhoozi announced the commencement of the phased withdrawal in a public post on social media platform X, noting, “As we promised, we have started withdrawing UPDF from Somalia. After 20 years of a lot of blood and sacrifice, we are handing over security to our Somali brothers.” The staggered withdrawal schedule is projected to wrap up completely by August 2027, though the UPDF will not fully exit Somalia entirely: roughly 2,000 Ugandan troops deployed under separate bilateral security agreements between Kampala and Mogadishu will remain stationed in the country, separate from the approximately 4,500 Ugandan personnel currently serving under the AUSSOM banner.
The drawdown announcement comes as AUSSOM grapples with growing fiscal uncertainty, as planned cuts to United States and United Nations financial support for the AU mission loom on the horizon. A 12-month transition period is set to kick off in January, providing the Somali federal government and African Union leadership a window to secure alternate funding streams to sustain ongoing stabilization efforts. Requests for comment from Uganda’s acting military spokesperson Chris Magezi to the BBC went unanswered at the time of publication.