US Africa Command on Sunday announced that its forces launched another airstrike in Somalia as the Trump administration continues its record-shattering bombing campaign in the country.
The command said that the strike was launched on July 3 and targeted al-Shabaab in the vicinity of Farsooley, a town about 55 miles west of Mogadishu. AFRICOM offered no further details after it stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments of potential civilian harm early last year.
The US-backed Somali military claimed operations in the same area around the same time that it said were conducted by the Danab, a US-trained and armed special operations unit. The Somali military claimed the operations killed 15 al-Shabaab fighters and wounded 20 others.
Amid a political crisis in Somalia sparked by President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s decision to stay in power despite his term expiring, something he justifies by the changes his government made to the constitution, locals have reported that al-Shabaab has been encroaching on Mogadishu and conducting patrols at night on the city’s outskirts. The patrols have involved al-Shabaab fighters knocking on doors and asking if residents cooperated with the Federal Government’s security forces.
A new report from the International Crisis Group published last week said that the war against al-Shabaab remained at a stalemate and that the group made major advances in 2025 despite a dramatic escalation in US airstrikes since President Trump returned to office.
The US launched a record 124 airstrikes in Somalia in 2025, which, according to New America, an organization that tracks the air war, is more than were conducted during the administrations of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush combined.
The July 3 airstrike marked at least the 70th US airstrike in Somalia in 2026, according to AFRICOM’s numbers, which means the US is on track to break the record set in 2025 if it keeps up the same pace. Besides bombing al-Shabaab in southern Somalia, the US has also been targeting an ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region.
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.
