Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the commander of US Africa Command, visited Somalia’s Puntland region late last month and called for the US-backed war against the small ISIS affiliate in the area to be “intensified,” according to a press release from AFRICOM.
The US has dramatically escalated its air campaign in Somalia this year, launching at least 102 airstrikes, an unprecedented number. According to AFRICOM, 59 of those strikes were launched against the ISIS affiliate, which is based in caves in a remote mountainous region in Puntland.
The US supports local military forces in Puntland because the region is not under the control of the US-backed Federal Government, which is based in Mogadishu. During his visit to Puntland, Anderson met with the region’s vice president, Ilyas Osman Lugatoor, and Gen. Adan Abdi Hashi, the chief of Puntland’s Defense Forces.
“He praised Puntland’s maximum-pressure campaign against ISIS in the Golis Mountains – acknowledging their success while stressing the need to intensify operations,” AFRICOM said in its press release.
The Puntland government has come under criticism recently over reports that the UAE is shipping weapons to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) through an airbase in Bosaso, an airbase that’s also used by the US military for its operations in Puntland.
Anderson visited Puntland as a last stop on a trip that took him to Ethiopia and Somaliland, another autonomous region in northern Somalia. During the trip, AFRICOM said that he expressed support for “maximum pressure on ISIS, al-Shabaab, and other violent terrorist organizations.”
The US has provided heavy air support for the Mogadishu-based government in its fight against al-Shabaab in central and southern Somalia. Despite the record number of airstrikes, the US is nowhere near defeating the group. A report published last month by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon-funded think tank, said that al-Shabaab’s seizure of Mogadishu may already be just a “matter of time.”
Back in April, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration was divided on how to handle the al-Shabaab offensive. At the time, State Department officials recommended evacuating the US embassy in Mogadishu as a precaution, suggesting the US believes the city could fall to al-Shabaab.
Other US officials, including Sebastian Gorka, the senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council, pushed for the US to escalate its airstrikes and continue propping up the Federal Government, which would almost certainly collapse without foreign support.
