US Africa Command on Tuesday announced that its forces launched an airstrike in Somalia on October 17, as the Trump administration continues a bombing campaign in the country that receives virtually no US media attention.
AFRICOM said in a press release that the strike targeted al-Shabaab near the Dhooble Airport, near the Kenyan border in Somalia’s Lower Juba region, approximately 112 miles northwest of the southern port city of Kismayo.
As usual, AFRICOM offered no other details about the strike, as it stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments of civilian harm, and there have been no statements from US-backed forces about military operations in the area that day.
The attack marked the first airstrike in Somalia that AFRICOM announced this month, though despite the apparent lull, the US has still launched a huge number of airstrikes in the country this year, relative to previous years.
According to AFRICOM’s numbers, the October 17 strike marked at least the 87th US airstrike in Somalia this year, more airstrikes than the US ever launched in Somalia before 2025, when President Trump shattered the previous record for annual US strikes by launching 124. The previous record, which he set in 2019, was 63.
New America, an organization that tracks the air war, has put the number of airstrikes at 89, as its count includes credible media reports of US attacks that haven’t been reported by AFRICOM. For example, Drop Site News reported that the US launched an airstrike in Somalia’s northeastern Puntland region against an ISIS affiliate on September 3, but it was never acknowledged by AFRICOM.
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 emerged as 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.
