US Africa Command said in a press release on Tuesday that its forces launched an airstrike in Somalia on April 20, as the Trump administration continues a record-shattering bombing campaign in the country with virtually no US media coverage.
AFRICOM said the strike targeted the ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region and that it was launched in a remote mountain region about 55 miles southeast of the Gulf of Aden port city of Bosaso. The command offered no other details about the strike.
US-backed Puntland forces said in a statement on April 22 that its forces were conducting operations with US air support and claimed that eight ISIS members had been killed in a cave. The Puntland Counterterrorism Operations posted pictures and videos of the bodies of alleged ISIS fighters. It’s unclear if they were killed in the April 20 US strike or if more have been launched since then.
“An air and ground operation in which the Puntland government’s partners in the United States participated in a bombing, targeted a cave where ISIS terrorists were hiding,” the US-backed force said on Telegram. “Initially, the Army found the bodies of 8 ISIS terrorists and weapons in the cave. The operation is still ongoing.”
The April 13 US airstrike brings the total number of US bombings in the country this year to at least 57. The rate of US airstrikes slowed somewhat during the US-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran, but it appears to have picked back up amid the very fragile ceasefire.
AFRICOM is still on track to break its annual record of bombings in the country, which President Trump set at 124 last year, breaking a previous record of 63, which he set in 2019.
The US has also been launching airstrikes against al-Shabaab in southern Somalia, where major battles between US-backed government forces and al-Shabaab fighters have taken place in recent weeks.
The US has been involved in Somalia for decades and has been fighting al-Shabaab since the George W. Bush administration backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2006 that ousted the Islamic Courts Union, a Muslim coalition that briefly held power in Mogadishu after taking the city from CIA-backed warlords.
Al-Shabaab was the radical offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union, and its first recorded attack was a suicide bombing in 2007 that targeted Ethiopian troops occupying Mogadishu. It wasn’t until 2012 that the group pledged loyalty to al-Qaeda. The ISIS affiliate in Puntland started as an offshoot of al-Shabaab and first emerged in 2015.
