Trump Perpetuates Undeclared War in Somalia With Renewed Airstrikes

On February 1, 2025, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), in coordination with the federal government of Somalia, conducted the first airstrikes in the country under the new Trump administration. The strikes targeted the Golis Mountains, a rocky, cavernous region in the northwestern part of the country that is said to be a hub for ISIS-Somalia (IS-S). Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth stated “multiple operatives” were killed in the airstrikes. Two weeks later, additional strikes were carried out in the same region.

In response to the attacks, Trump tweeted: “These killers, who we found hiding in caves, threatened the United States and our Allies … WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!”

IS-S has grown in influence since it was formed in 2015 by a group of al-Shabab defectors. The Defense Department claims recent strikes degrade “ISIS’s ability to plot and conduct terrorist attacks” even as Michael Langley, the director of AFRICOM expressed grave concern about the group’s continued growth. IS-S is now an integral financial and recruitment hub for the global Islamic State network, generating millions of dollars in revenue and growing its ranks with fighters from as far north as Morocco to as far south as Tanzania. What was once an underground movement is now capable of providing resources and training to nascent formations across the African continent. The group’s resilience, despite billions of dollars spent on militarism, call U.S. claims of success into question.

The Sky Is a Front in a Boundless War

The Trump administration’s airstrikes are only the newest chapter in a covert war that has persisted across multiple years, administrations and political parties. The United States has been carrying out operations in Somalia since at least 2002 without a formal war declaration. Shortly after the September 11, 2001, plane attacks, George W. Bush, in accordance with the Authorization for Use of Military Force — which granted the president sweeping powers to conduct military operations against groups that perpetrated the attacks or harbored the 9/11 attackers — sent Special Forces and CIA operatives to Somalia to capture suspected al-Qaeda members. He launched the first airstrike in Somalia in 2007, marking the beginning of an air war that the Obama administration would escalate.

The Obama years saw an unprecedented rise in drone warfare. Despite receiving the Nobel Peace Prize eight months into his tenure, Obama ultimately greenlit more drone strikes during his first year in office than Bush carried out during his entire presidency. During his second term in office, his administration stretched the 2001 war authorization to include al-Shabab in Somalia as a party to the armed conflict, providing legal cover for expanded operations in the name of “counterterrorism.”

During the first Trump administration, large swaths of southern Somalia were designated areas of active hostilities, expanding the parameters of who and what constituted legitimate targets. This weakened civilian protections and the country saw a marked increase in airstrikes. The subsequent Biden administration deployed hundreds of Special Operations forces to Somalia and approved a Pentagon request for standing authority to target suspected al-Shabab leaders.

Two months into his second term, Trump relaxed Biden-era airstrike restrictions, moving away from a strategy focused on high-level operatives. This directive grants commanders greater autonomy to determine targets, including those outside conventional battlefields, signaling a shift toward a more aggressive counterterrorism approach. With a surge in airstrikes in Somalia, including additional ones on February 25, it is clear the country remains a key battleground in this renewed offensive.

The full scale of the air war remains unknown. Much of AFRICOM’s work is shrouded in secrecy, which Brian Castner, Amnesty International’s head of crisis research, calls a “smokescreen for impunity.” The death toll of these operations are also unknown; U.S. claims denying civilian casualties are routinely disputed by people on the ground and the Somali government. A searing report from Amnesty International investigated five airstrikes from 2017 to 2018, which the Department of Defense alleged resulted in no civilian harm. Their findings revealed 14 civilian deaths and eight injuries, exposing a pattern of international human rights law violations.

AFRICOM has also been criticized for the flawed process it uses to distinguish civilians from combatants. They are not required to provide proof that those killed are members of al-Shabab. Abdullahi Hassan, a Somali researcher for Amnesty, speculates that the discrepancies in casualty numbers and the persistent misidentification of civilians stem from either gross incompetence or a deliberate attempt to evade accountability for war crimes.

Since the report’s publication, the number of civilians killed in the air war has increased, but there has been no accountability for their deaths. A 2023 letter authored by 24 Somali and international rights organizations and addressed to the Secretary of Defense says: “Civilian victims, survivors, and their families have yet to receive answers, acknowledgement, and amends despite their sustained efforts to reach authorities over several years.”

One of the people mentioned in the letter, Abubakar Dahir Mohamed, lost his sister Luul and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam in an airstrike on April 1, 2018. The next day, AFRICOM issued a press release claiming that five terrorists had been killed, stating: “We assess no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” It would take a full year for AFRICOM to acknowledge their deaths — the first admission of civilian casualties since the start of the air war. In response to public outcry and pressure, the Pentagon launched an investigation that concluded that the strike had “complied with the applicable rules of engagement.”

Polishing the Image of Empire

The vernacular of war is purposefully opaque. Airstrikes are routinely described as precise, targeted, accurate, deliberate, defensive — a linguistic sleight of hand that obfuscates the immense social, psychological, environmental and financial wreckage left in their wake. The Somali people are no strangers to the doublespeak of the U.S. government. American intervention in East Africa has long been a game of smoke and mirrors, predating the so-called “war on terror.”

Since the report’s publication, the number of civilians killed in the air war has increased, but there has been no accountability for their deaths.

After the Somali government collapsed in 1991, civil war and regional drought triggered the collapse of the agricultural sector, resulting in a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. With UN approval, the United States launched Operation Restore Hope; 25,000 troops entered the country under the pretense of securing and distributing aid. The mission was twofold: reinforce U.S. dominance in a post-Cold War unipolar world, and rebrand imperialism as benevolent through “humanitarian intervention,” a doctrine that justified breaches of national sovereignty in the interest of alleviating catastrophic human suffering. What began as a peacekeeping mission escalated into a full-scale military campaign that ended with hundreds of thousands of dead Somalis, proving that there are few forces more catastrophic to the peoples of the world than U.S. imperialism.

The presence of foreign troops in Somalia was inseparable from the country’s recent colonial past. UN peacekeepers enforced their mandate through violence and coercion. In one of the most egregious cases, Canadian troops tortured and killed 16-year-old Shidane Arone, a crime that laid bare the racism underpinning modern peacekeeping. In response to the routine harassment and humiliation at the hands of foreign forces, there were large-scale nationalist mobilizations across Mogadishu. In 1993 two Black Hawk helicopters were downed, felled by both fighters and ordinary citizens, who saw the metal of the warplane as a symbol of colonial domination. A 2025 Netflix docuseries is the latest retelling of the Battle of Mogadishu, one of the deadliest operations for U.S. forces since Vietnam. Like its cinematic predecessors, it centers the voices and experiences of the Americans who led the mission.

Carmen, the wife of Army Sergeant Gary Gordon, tearfully recalls learning of his death. They had a child together. “What do you tell a little boy who’s just turned 6? How do you explain something like that?”

In another scene, Halima Weheliye, only a schoolgirl at the time, recounts wandering the streets of Mogadishu praying to be caught in the hair of a stray bullet because she did not want to live without her family, whom she believed had been killed by the Army Rangers.

In yet another scene, a young girl is bleeding from her eyes after an explosion reduces her house to rubble. She will never regain her vision.

“Where is my father?” she asks.

“He’s dead,” her mother responds. “The Americans killed him.”

The docuseries shows mainstream media clips characterizing the Somalis as thugs and vigilantes. The violence of the native is always primitive. The violence of the Americans is always a political necessity. There is nothing groundbreaking about this narrative.

Grief is not mathematical. It defies the simplicity of quantification. And yet there is a glaring disproportionality in how the series treats both power and pain.

“I didn’t understand how humanity could be so cruel,” Carmen says. Her son grows up to become an Army Ranger, a son following in his father’s footsteps, another tale as old as time.

The stock characters used to manufacture consent for imperialism may change, but the story always ends the same way. In the ‘90s, the mission was sold with the promise to save the starving African child. Today, it is the vow to wipe out the specter of the Islamist militant. Regardless of the medium, whether it is this recent docuseries or the 2001 feature film of the same subject, the Americans are the protagonists and the Somalis are the foil, their suffering merely a vehicle to illustrate the humanity and complexity of U.S. forces. Images of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets and children jumping atop the shell of the burnt Black Hawk like it was a trampoline became the defining images of that failed intervention. The U.S. lost the battle but won the propaganda war at home.

Towards the end of the documentary, Binti Adan recounts the fear that gripped her as explosions rocked the home she sheltered in with her husband and children. Her neighborhood had become, by all definitions, an area of active hostilities.

The world is blood and fire. Her husband is reading the Quran. She tells him they should flee with the children. He is crying. “God is everywhere and there is nowhere to run.”

Three decades later, there is still nowhere to run.

In 2018, Luul and her daughter Mariam were killed by an airstrike while running for their lives. She died cradling her daughter. Her brother gathered the pieces of their mangled flesh. When a fragment of Luul’s skull was found the next day, a gold earring still hung from her earlobe.

With each new airstrike, political pundits speculate on the future of the war on terror in the Horn of Africa, while AFRICOM continues to make bold claims about safety and security. But who will save not just the Somali people, but the world, from the terror of U.S. imperialism?

The Somali people, then and now, are caught between imperialist interests and their own compradorial government, between warring militant factions and their foreign sponsors, between the violence of history and the injustice of how that history is narrated. From Somalia to Afghanistan, Iraq to Libya, the American promise of safety arrives on the wings of drones, its humanitarianism indistinguishable from war.