On Sunday, armed men aligned with the Koonfur Bari administration took control of the district headquarters, the police station and the regional administration office in Marka. They lowered the Southwest State flag and raised their own. No battle was reported. Those buildings are where land titles are registered, disputes are heard and taxes are assessed, so whoever controls them controls the paperwork of Lower Shabelle regardless of what the capital says. Neither Villa Somalia nor Baidoa has recognized Koonfur Bari at any point, and neither had responded publicly by Sunday evening. That silence is now several weeks old. In the first week of August, a Southwest delegation carrying the justice minister, deputy security minister, deputy interior minister and the Lower Shabelle governor reached Ceel Jaalle on Marka's edge and spent four days inside an AUSSOM base while residents demonstrated against letting it enter. Days earlier, a federal delegation led by Cabdullahi Cumar Abshirow, deputy speaker of a parliament whose term has expired, turned back from Gendershe. Read together, those episodes show an eviction carried out in stages: first the ministers were kept outside the town, then the governor could not reach the office he had been appointed to, and on Sunday the flag above that office came down. Koonfur Bari was not improvised on Sunday. Its organizers declared the administration in Marka on 14 May and named the town its capital, and they have asked to be recognized as a federal member state of Somalia on the grounds that the process reflects the will of the people who live there. The claim underneath is a grievance about dispossession. Its spokesmen argue that thirty years of war transferred their farmland and political weight to armed newcomers, that every administration since 1991 ratified the transfer by declining to reverse it, and that the withdrawal of al-Shabaab is the opening to undo it. The land dispute behind the constitutional language is concrete and documented. Biyomaal elders allege coordinated seizures along the corridor between Marka, KM50 and the coastal settlements of Jasiira and Gendershe, and in July their fighters detained a survey team and displayed its equipment, saying it had been mapping the Deexda strip for an acquisition they linked to a major Somali telecommunications company. No evidence for that allegation has been published and the company has never answered it. The claim nonetheless travels widely through Lower Shabelle, and it explains why the sight of a surveyor's tripod now provokes the reaction a rifle would. Violence followed within days. Fighting broke out around Janaale on 4 July and ran for three days, spreading on 6 July to the road linking Janaale to Marka, fought with small arms and pickup trucks mounting heavy machine guns. Banana plantations that give the district its livelihood burned as the fighting moved through them. A ceasefire signed later in July has largely held, which indicates that elders on both sides retain real authority over the fighters, and that such authority now rests with clan structures and nothing belonging to the Somali state. The armed men now in Marka are drawn from the Biyomaal, a Dir clan long established along the Lower Shabelle coast and across the farmland behind it. Their mobilization runs through elders, professionals and diaspora committees as much as through fighters, and it has been assembled in the open, without the concealment that usually attends the raising of a Somali militia. Meetings have been held inside the country and abroad, diaspora associations from Lower Shabelle, Middle Juba and Jamaame have publicly endorsed the project, and reporting from the region puts the sum raised abroad at up to one million dollars. Geographically the effort covers the coastal strip at Marka, Jilib Marka and Lambar 60, together with the irrigated farmland of Shalaambood and Janaale. That arc holds the best agricultural land in southern Somalia and the shortest sea approach to Mogadishu, which is why every armed actor in the region has spent thirty years trying to hold it. Ranged against the Biyomaal are sections of the Hiraab, principally the Abgaal and Habar Gidir, whose elders have said they will defend what they describe as their own territory. The fighting attached to the political project has been attributed to named men. A militia reportedly organized by a figure called Cumareey and assembled at Ismaan Quule was accused of burning a commercial farm at Janaale and destroying property valued at more than two hundred thousand dollars, in what local accounts described as an attempt to frighten other clans off the land. The owner, Xasan Maxamed Fiidoow, appealed to Mogadishu and Baidoa to intervene before a full clan war began. Each side accuses the other of targeting farmers and civilians, and no independent account has established who moved first, which is the ordinary condition of a district where no authority is trusted enough to investigate anything. Earlier military operations were real and against a real enemy. Marka and Jilib Marka were taken by Gorgor commandos and intelligence units, Daarusalaam and Mubarak fell to the national army, and a number of al-Shabaab commanders surrendered around Mubarak, Buulomareer and Jilib Marka after President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud renewed his amnesty offer and announced a final offensive against the group. What followed into the vacated districts was a competition over who would inherit them, and the government that cleared the ground put nothing on it capable of settling a farm boundary or registering a title. The installed Southwest president in Baidoa has told his own ministers he cannot travel the city's outskirts without promising to strike the camps beyond them, which leaves his government holding one contested city and no longer holding the other. The road between the two runs through country where al-Shabaab still moves at will, so Baidoa cannot reach Marka by force even if it decides to try. Inter-clan warfare is rarely reported inside territory al-Shabaab still governs, because the group taxes, adjudicates and punishes through a single chain of command that nobody may appeal. Its courts are coercive and its judgments are enforced by killing, but they are also predictable, a quality Lower Shabelle has not had from any other source in thirty years. Both the Biyomaal and their opponents took their dispute to al-Shabaab mediators earlier this year while the federal government said nothing. Money said to have been raised among Lower Shabelle, Middle Juba and Jamaame diaspora communities is now tied to the question of who controls the land registry and tax offices in Marka. Families in Somalia and the Somali diaspora with farmland claims there will be watching which administration can actually issue titles, because the papers accepted in those offices will decide whose ownership is recognized.