Oh, look. Another afternoon in the Horn of Africa, and another patch of scrubland in the Lower Shabelle region has been watered with the blood of ten people who likely had nothing better to do than die for a cause that won’t outlive the week. In the village of Yaaq Bariweyne—a place the average global citizen couldn't find with a GPS and a divine revelation—heavy fighting has broken out. It is the kind of 'heavy fighting' that news tickers treat as background noise, right between weather reports and celebrity fashion disasters. But let us peel back the layers of this particular onion of human failure, shall we? This wasn't just a random skirmish. No, this was a carefully choreographed disaster involving the Somali National Army, the South West State Dervish troops, and—this is the punchline—an 'armed group previously sentenced by a military court.'

Pause for a moment and savor the sheer, unadulterated absurdity of that last detail. In a functioning society, a 'sentence' usually involves a cell, a guard, and a lack of access to heavy weaponry. In the Kafkaesque theater of Somalia, apparently, a military court sentence is merely a polite suggestion that you should go back to the bush and wait for the bailiff to arrive with a technical and a belt-fed machine gun. The Somali government, an entity that exists primarily as a way for international NGOs to turn donor money into high-end Mogadishu real estate, decided it was time to collect on that debt. The result? Ten dead, several wounded, and a village that now serves as a grim monument to the fact that in this part of the world, the law is only as strong as your trigger finger.

Let’s discuss the combatants, because the nomenclature alone is a masterclass in irony. On one side, we have the 'Dervish' forces. Historically, the Dervishes were the followers of the 'Mad Mullah,' Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who spent decades fighting the British, Italians, and Ethiopians with a fanaticism that was, at the very least, impressive. Today, the brand has been diluted into regional militias that act as the personal muscle for local power brokers. It’s like naming your neighborhood watch the 'Templars' while they spend most of their time arguing over who gets to extort the local charcoal merchant. They are joined by the Somali National Army, a 'national' force in the same way that a collection of cats is a 'pride.' They are trained by the Americans, funded by the Turks, and ignored by the very people they are supposed to protect.

On the other side, we have the 'sentenced' group. One has to wonder what the sentencing hearing looked like. Was there a gavel? Did a judge in a dusty robe explain the nuances of the penal code before the defendants shrugged, picked up their rifles, and walked out the back door? The fact that a group of men already condemned by the state was capable of engaging in 'heavy fighting' tells you everything you need to know about the reach of the central government. Mogadishu’s authority ends where the city’s concrete barriers begin. Beyond that, it is a landscape of shifting loyalties where the only thing more common than a 'military court' is the total lack of anyone to enforce its rulings.

Naturally, the international community will respond with its usual cocktail of performative concern and strategic apathy. The Left will write long-form essays about the 'legacy of colonialism' and 'structural instability,' as if citing a history book from 1960 provides a bulletproof vest for the villagers of Yaaq Bariweyne. They will argue that more 'dialogue' and 'capacity building' is needed, conveniently ignoring that 'capacity building' is just code for 'giving more guns to people who will eventually use them against us.' Meanwhile, the Right will grumble about 'failed states' and 'endless pits for tax dollars' while quietly wondering if there’s any untapped natural gas under the blood-soaked sand. Both sides are equally allergic to the truth: that this is a self-sustaining ecosystem of violence, fueled by an endless supply of cheap ammunition and a total lack of viable alternatives.

Ten more souls have been subtracted from the census. In the grand ledger of human history, they don’t even qualify as a rounding error. They are just more proof that the 'State' is a fiction we tell ourselves to feel better about the chaos of existence. In Yaaq Bariweyne, the fiction has been burned away, leaving only the reality of the AK-47. The Somali government will claim a victory, the 'sentenced' group will regroup in the next thicket of acacia trees, and the military court will continue to issue decrees that carry the weight of a wet napkin. It is a carousel of stupidity, and the music never stops. Why would it? There’s too much money to be made in the maintenance of misery, and too many 'non-journalists' like myself who find the whole thing more annoying than tragic. Sleep well, world; your apathy is the only thing truly holding this farce together.