The US launched an airstrike in Somalia on August 7, according to a press release from US Africa Command, as the Trump administration continues its record-shattering bombing campaign in the country.
AFRICOM said in a press release that the strike targeted al-Shabaab near Jilib, a village in southern Somalia that’s about 200 miles southwest of Mogadishu. As usual, the command offered no other details about the strike, and there were no comments from the US-backed Somali Defense Ministry about military operations that day.
“Specific details about units and assets will not be released to ensure continued operations security,” AFRICOM said. The command has stopped releasing casualty estimates and assessments on potential civilian harm since last year.
The bombing marks at least the 78th airstrike the US has launched in Somalia this year, according to AFRICOM’s numbers. The Trump administration massively escalated the war in Somalia last year and shattered the record for annual airstrikes, launching 124 in 2025, more than 12 times more than were conducted in 2024, yet the conflict receives virtually no coverage in US media.
Besides bombing al-Shabaab in southern Somalia, the US has also been conducting an air campaign against an ISIS affiliate based in caves in a remote mountain region in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region. Last week, a visiting US military delegation signed a deal with the Puntland government to expand a US military base in Bosaso, a port city on the Gulf of Aden, signaling a further escalation of the US war in Somalia. The base could also be used for operations against Yemen’s Ansar Allah, known as the Houthis.
The US backs both the Mogadishu-based federal government and the local Puntland government, though both sides have been clashing in recent weeks amid a political crisis in the country. Just over the past week, Puntland forces have seized three military bases from federal-backed troops in northeast Somalia.
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.
