US carries out airstrikes against Islamic State in Somalia

Washington: President Donald Trump ordered airstrikes on Saturday against the Islamic State group in northern Somalia, the first major US military operation overseas since he took office.

Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a statement that the military’s initial assessment was that “multiple operatives” in the remote Golis Mountains in the country’s north were killed in the strikes, and that no civilians were harmed.

The strikes were conducted by Navy and Air Force warplanes, including F/A-18 fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman operating in the Red Sea, three Defence Department officials said.

“This action further degrades ISIS’ ability to plot and conduct terrorist attacks threatening US citizens, our partners and innocent civilians,” Hegseth said, using an alternative name for the Islamic State group.

The strikes were more symbolic than substantive, several US military and defence officials said, meant more to burnish Trump’s image as a commander in chief protecting the country from terrorists in the early days of his administration than to neutralise a serious threat.

On Thursday, the military’s Central Command said a US airstrike in north-west Syria had killed a senior operative in Hurras al-Din, an al-Qaida affiliate.

The strikes in Somalia on Saturday were a much larger operation, military officials said, and the fact Trump had to approve them meant that at least one of the operatives was probably a senior leader of the Islamic State group in the African country.

US Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth.Credit: Bloomberg

Trump said in a message on social media that the strikes had killed a “senior ISIS attack planner and other terrorists he recruited” who were “hiding in caves”.

Somalia, though, is better known as a harbour for al-Shabab, the terrorist group linked to al-Qaida, than for the Islamic State. US intelligence officials estimate that al-Shabab in Somalia has 7000 to 12,000 members and an annual income — including from taxing or extorting civilians — of about $120 million, making it the largest and wealthiest Qaida affiliate in the world.

However, after an army veteran’s Islamic State-inspired attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day and amid fears of a resurgent Islamic State in Syria after the fall of President Bashar Assad’s government, counterterrorism specialists have warned the new administration that it needs to take such threats seriously.

“For Trump, this is important to show a muscular response, especially if he plans to draw down US troop levels from conflict zones,” said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York.

A picture provided by the US military command after the news of the air strikes in Somalia was announced.Credit: AP

Trump withdrew about 700 US troops from Somalia in January 2021. President Joe Biden redeployed about 450 after he took office. It is unclear what Trump might do this time. Those troops provide training to Somali forces and do not conduct counterterrorism operations, Pentagon officials said.

The strikes on Saturday also aimed to counter critics who say that rushing active-duty troops to the south-western border to stem the flow of migrants – a top priority for Trump – could jeopardise other military missions.

Hegseth said on Saturday that the United States “stands ready to find and eliminate terrorists who threaten the United States and our allies, even as we conduct robust border-protection” missions.

There are threats in northern Somalia, where the Islamic State operates.

In May, the military carried out an airstrike against fighters in a remote area south-east of Bosaso, Somalia, and killed three. Some analysts thought the strike had killed a Somali militant believed to be the head of the Islamic State’s worldwide operations. That assessment proved incorrect, counterterrorism officials said.

In January 2023, US Special Operations commandos killed a senior Islamic State leader in an early morning helicopter raid in a remote area of northern Somalia.

The Pentagon identified the leader, one of the terrorist group’s top financial operatives, as Bilal al-Sudani. US officials said that he was operating in Somalia but that his influence extended across Africa, into Europe and even to the Islamic State branch in Afghanistan that carried out the August 2021 bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed 13 US service members.

That raid took place in a remote mountainous cave complex in the Puntland region of northern Somalia, months after US spy networks detected al-Sudani’s hidden headquarters and monitored the location to study his movements.

The commandos scooped up laptop computers and hard drives, cellphones and other information from al-Sudani’s hideout that have provided leads in other counterterrorism operations.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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