Trump announces air strikes on ISIS cell, commander in Somalia

Skylar Woodhouse, Bloomberg News on Feb 1, 2025

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President Donald Trump said the U.S. military had carried out air strikes on suspected terrorists in Somalia.

Trump didn’t name the members of the Islamic State terror group he said were killed, nor the number killed.

“This morning I ordered precision Military air strikes on the Senior ISIS Attack Planner and other terrorists he recruited and led in Somalia,” Trump said in a social media post. “These killers, who we found hiding in caves, threatened the United States and our Allies.”

Trump said the strikes ‘killed many terrorists, without, in any way, harming civilians,” but he provided no details, except to say that the U.S. military had been tracking a person he called “this ISIS Attack Planner” for years.

The White House’s National Security Council declined to identify the target.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that the action, in the Golis Mountains to the nation’s west, “further degrades ISIS’s ability to plot and conduct terrorist attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians.”

In 2022, then-President Joe Biden authorized fewer than 500 troops to be sent to Somalia on a “persistent” basis to revive a counterterrorism mission that was ended during Trump’s first term. At that time, the U.S. conducted an air strike against al-Qaeda linked al-Shabab terrorists who were attacking Somali National Army Forces, killing 27.