United States President Donald Trump ordered military airstrikes on a senior Islamic State attack planner and others from the organization in Somalia.
“These killers, who we found hiding in caves, threatened the United States and our Allies,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Saturday, February 1, 2025.
“The strikes destroyed the caves they live in, and killed many terrorists without, in any way, harming civilians.” he added.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. Military coordinated with Somali authorities in carrying out the strikes.
“At President Trump’s direction and in coordination with the Federal Government of Somalia, I authorized U.S. Africa Command to conduct coordinated airstrikes today targeting ISIS-Somalia operatives in the Golis mountains,” Hegseth wrote in a press release.
“Our initial assessment is that multiple operatives were killed in the airstrikes and no civilians were harmed.
This action further degrades ISIS’s ability to plot and conduct terrorist attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians and sends a clear signal that the United States always stands ready to find and eliminate terrorists who threaten the United States and our allies, even as we conduct robust border-protection and many other operations under President Trump’s leadership." he added.
Somalia has long been a hotbed of islamic extremism due to the nation’s decades-long instability.
It is the primary operating base of the Al-Shabaab jihadist group, which is a formal Al Qaeda affiliate. The group’s membership is estimated anywhere between 7,000 and 10,000 members as of 2025, most of whom operate in Somalia and East Africa.
Al-Shabaab has carried out dozens of deadly terrorist attacks in East Africa, including the 2013 Westgate Hotel attack in Kenya. The U.S. has intervened militarily against the militant group on numerous occasions.
The Islamic State has also ramped up its presence in East Africa in recent years, as evidenced by Saturday’s airstrikes.
In West Africa, the Nigeria-based Boko Haram militant group officially merged with ISIS in 2015 and has been responsible for hundreds of deadly terrorist attacks and a number of insurgencies in Nigeria, Chad, Mali, Niger and Cameroon. The ISIS presence in East Africa is not as pronounced, though it has been growing in recent years.