US Africa Command announced on Monday that its forces conducted another airstrike in Somalia on July 15 as the Trump administration continues its record-shattering bombing campaign in the country, which is ignored by US media.
AFRICOM said that the attack targeted al-Shabaab and was launched about 62 miles north of the southern port city of Kismayo. It offered no further details about the strike, having stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments of civilian harm in its Somalia operations last year.
US-backed Somali government forces also didn’t release any statements about military operations in the area that day. The Somali Defense Ministry did say that its forces launched a joint operation with “international partners” that included an airstrike on July 17, suggesting AFRICOM will soon announce another airstrike.
The US attack on July 15 marked at least the 76th US airstrike in Somalia this year, according to AFRICOM’s numbers, as AFRICOM is on pace to break the record for annual US airstrikes in the country, which it set at 124 in 2025 as President Trump oversaw a massive escalation in the air war after he loosened the rules of engagement.
According to New America, an organization that tracks the air war, the 124 airstrikes launched in 2025 were more than were conducted during the administrations of Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and George W. Bush combined. Besides the bombing campaign against al-Shabaab, the US has also been launching airstrikes against an ISIS affiliate in Somalia’s northeast 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.
