The US Department of War insisted on Tuesday that it’s not waging a “forever war” in Somalia despite the fact that the Trump administration has shattered the record for annual airstrikes in the country.
Liam Cosgrove, a reporter for ZeroHedge, noted during a Pentagon press briefing on Tuesday that the US has launched 101 airstrikes (now 102) in Somalia and that US troops reportedly conducted a recent ground raid, and asked why the US military is still in the country.
“I can assure you this is an America First Department of War and president, so we aren’t conducting forever wars in Somalia, we aren’t seeking regime change, and we’re not nation building,” Pentagon spokeswoman Kingsley Wilson said in reply.
The Trump administration has dramatically escalated the US war in Somalia, launching more than 10 times the number of airstrikes that the US conducted in 2024, and more than the combined total of airstrikes launched during the 12 years that Presidents Obama and Biden were in office. Despite the unprecedented scale of US strikes, Kingsley described the campaign as “narrowly scoped.”
She told Cosgrove, “I will say that this Department’s narrowly scoped, intelligence-driven, counterintelligence operations in places like Somalia, alongside our partners, allow us to protect the American homeland from terrorist threats and to protect our interests.”
US airstrikes this year have targeted a small ISIS affiliate based in caves in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region and al-Shabaab in southern and central Somalia. The US has been fighting al-Shabaab since it backed an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006, which ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition of Muslim groups that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the capital from CIA-backed warlords.
Al-Shabaab was the radical offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union and claimed its first attack in 2007, which targeted Ethiopian troops occupying Mogadishu. In 2012, al-Shabaab declared loyalty to al-Qaeda, after years of fighting the US and its proxies. The ISIS affiliate in Somalia first emerged in 2015 as an offshoot of al-Shabaab, and is believed to have only a few hundred members.
