Baledogle airfield (Wanlaweyn)

Where and what

Baledogle airfield, also called the Wanlaweyn airstrip, lies in Lower Shabelle about 90 km north-west of Mogadishu and is described as the largest military air base in Somalia (Wikipedia, Baledogle Airfield). OurAirports places it at 2.671° N, 44.793° E, at 297 feet above sea level, with the code HC01 (OurAirports). The UN Logistics Cluster publishes a specification sheet for aid flights (Logistics Cluster).

The Republic's air base

Known then as Beledal Amin, it was built in part by the Soviet Union for the Somali Air Force, and in 1975 its runway was paved and lengthened to 10,500 feet (Wikipedia). A parachute school opened there in the early 1970s when Somalia's first paratrooper unit was formed (same source). See Somali Air Force.

Changing hands, 1991 to 2012

Wikipedia, drawing on US Army, UN and press records, lists the holders after 1991 (Wikipedia):

• January 1991: the Somali Patriotic Movement, allied to the United Somali Congress, seized it days before Siad Barre left Mogadishu. Barre's forces, regrouped as the Somali National Front, took it back in April 1992.
• 13 December 1992: 450 soldiers of the US 10th Mountain Division and 230 Marines secured it by air assault during the UN-backed intervention (US Army chronology). Heavy transport landings broke up the runway, which had been built for fighters, and C-141B flights stopped in mid-January 1993.
• 1995 to 2002: after UN forces left it was held by Mohamed Farah Aidid's Somali National Alliance, which lost it to a rival alliance on 25 July 1996 and retook it three days later. On 14 February 2001 Air Somalia landed a 160-seat airliner there.
• 2002 to 2006: held by local armed factions, with about nine aircraft a month and an estimated $319,200 a year in landing and cargo fees. In October 2003 President Abdiqasim Salad Hassan was the target of an assassination attempt at the airfield.
• 2006 to 2012: the Islamic Courts Union, then the Transitional Federal Government, then al-Shabaab, which used it as a training centre by 2009. A UN report said eyewitnesses saw child soldiers being recruited and trained there in 2008.

Since 2012

African Union troops from Uganda captured the airfield in October 2012 (Wikipedia). US forces then operated from it, and from 2014 the Somali commando Danab brigade was trained by the US military and headquartered there (Stars and Stripes). In 2018 the US Department of Defense awarded an emergency runway repair contract of more than $12 million (Air Force Times, October 2018). On 30 September 2019 al-Shabaab attacked the base with car bombs and gunmen; US officials said the attackers did not breach the perimeter (BBC; Reuters). A Ugandan aviation unit of 140 personnel and 4 helicopters deployed to the base by December 2020 (Wikipedia).

In October 2026 US troops were reported to have left. AFRICOM's deputy commander, Lt. Gen. John Brennan, said the runway surface "was declining to the point where it was becoming dangerous to land aircraft there" (Wikipedia). Turkish military officials visited on 30 October 2026; the Somali National Army and Ugandan troops under the African Union mission hold the airfield (same source). See Foreign forces in Somalia.