Blog London Review of Books, 10.09.2026 Tom Stevenson
Over the past twenty months, the US has launched airstrikes in Somalia using MQ-9 Reaper drones and sometimes manned aircraft at an average rate of more than twice a week. Donald Trump may have described it as ‘not even a country’ but objectively Somalia has been one of the US military’s higher priorities since his return to the White House. Even while engaged in large military operations in Venezuela and Iran, the US found the resources to conduct waves of airstrikes in Somalia.
The US has been running military operations in Somalia since 2003 and launching drone strikes there since 2011. But the current air campaign is larger than at any time during the war on terror. In his eight years as president Obama ordered 48 airstrikes on Somalia. During Trump’s first term there were 219. Biden ordered 51. Since the start of Trump’s second term in 2025 there have already been more than two hundred. Most US Africa Command (Africom) press releases this year have been announcing air strikes in Somalia.
Officially, US strikes are conducted at the request of the government in Mogadishu, but Trump says the country doesn’t have a government. Most of the drones are likely to be launched from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the main US military base in Africa. Some take off from Camp Simba in Kenya. In February 2025 the US used an aircraft carrier in the Red Sea to bomb the Golis mountains in the autonomous province of Somaliland, but the war in Iran means carriers are now in high demand.
The US is really running two air campaigns in Somalia, one against al-Shabaab in the south and centre of the country, and another in the north against Islamic State Somalia, which split off from al-Shabaab in 2015. Most of the strikes this year appear to have been at targets in central Somalia, along the Shabelle river north of Mogadishu.
Part of the reason for the scale of the strikes is that the Pentagon has been given full targeting authority in Somalia, relaxing the requirement of prior political approval for individual strikes. They are not always single strikes against small targets. The raid in February 2025 by 16 F/A-18 Super Hornets was (erroneously) described by the then chief of naval operations, James Kilby, as ‘the largest airstrike in the history of the world’.
It’s difficult to know the death toll from the air campaign because the US military doesn’t usually acknowledge civilian deaths in Somalia and Africom no longer provides casualty estimates of any kind. Independent monitors estimate there were around seven thousand conflict deaths in Somalia last year, most of them in local ground fighting. Last November at least twelve civilians, including eight children, were reported killed in Jamaame, in a US drone strike supported by a government ground operation.
Islamist violence has been linked to as many as fifty thousand deaths in Somalia over the last decade. Those figures include people killed by militants, the government and the US. In East Africa as a whole, ACLED has recorded more than ten thousand reported deaths in ‘Shabaab-related violence’ over the past 18 months.
Operating from its southern stronghold, Jilib, al-Shabaab has a presence in most of the country south of Galkayo. In some places it operates as a quasi-state, collecting taxes and dispensing justice. In Mogadishu it runs extortion rackets and in the countryside it collects tolls at roadblocks.
Trump is not completely wrong about the government in Mogadishu. It claims control of the capital and a couple of towns near the coast but beyond that its authority is thin. Somaliland has been essentially autonomous since the civil war in 1991. Puntland has been semi-autonomous since 2024. Jubaland doesn’t recognise the government in Mogadishu either. President Hasan Sheikh Mohamud’s second term was supposed to end in May but there have been no elections and he has simply remained in place.
His government is sustained by twelve thousand African Union peacekeepers funded by the United Nations. The AU troops that pushed al-Shabaab out of the capital in 2011 were supposed to hand over to national armed forces four years ago but that never happened. They have effective legal immunity in Somalia and have been responsibility for plenty of abuses, including occasional field executions.
At the beginning of July the US announced it would block UN support for the AU force in Somalia from the beginning of next year because of the government’s inability to contain al-Shabaab. And last month Africom – now led by General Dagvin Anderson, a former head of special operations in Africa who spent time on the ground in Somalia – signed an agreement with the president of Puntland to set up a military base in the northern city of Bosaso. ISS operates in the mountains in Puntland, but the US is probably just as interested in beefing up its presence on the Gulf of Aden.
That doesn’t explain, though, why the US has been so committed to drone strikes in Somalia. Reaper drones have been in demand for attacks on Iran, and thanks to the IRGC there are now fewer of them to go around than there were last year. But even the war on Iran hasn’t put a damper on the air campaign: strikes slowed somewhat at the height of operations in May, but picked up after the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding in June.
Neither the Trump administration nor the Pentagon has articulated much of a case for the expansion of the air campaign in Somalia. When pushed, Africom will talk of ‘threats to the homeland’, but David Sterman at the New America think tank, one of the few US organisations that pays attention to Somalia, believes the Pentagon is also concerned with managing regional security, which has become more complicated since the failure of US military operations against the Houthis in Yemen.
The air campaign in Somalia has been one of Trump’s signature interests, or at least a signature interest of his army chiefs, across both his presidential terms. It doesn’t seem to have had much effect on either al-Shabaab or ISS. The temporary advances that Mohamud’s government made against al-Shabaab in 2022 occurred during a lull in US airstrikes, and the group has already won back much of the territory it lost. If funding for the African Union force isn’t found, another al-Shabaab offensive against Mogadishu seems likely.
