Three decades and eighty-four strikes into a war...

Editor's note: ...that predates most enlisted service members currently fighting it, the US finds itself locked into a Somali counterterrorism campaign with no visible endpoint, no public accounting of its human cost, and an enemy that keeps multiplying rather than shrinking. Remember the humanitarian mission to protect famine relief in Somalia, but spiraled into the October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, where a raid meant to capture a warlord turned into a brutal urban firefight that killed 18 American soldiers? That is how long this has been going on with US involvement in Somalia. 

Then in 2006 as a proxy invasion, when Washington backed Ethiopian forces in toppling the Islamic Courts Union, a coalition that had actually managed to suppress piracy and unify Mogadishu under something resembling order, produced the very insurgency the Pentagon now spends nine figures a year trying to bomb into submission. Al-Shabaab was not an inheritance. It was a creation, born as the militant offshoot of a government the US helped destroy, its first suicide bombing aimed squarely at the foreign troops occupying its capital. That origin story matters, because it suggests a policy pattern that has repeated with grim consistency across the region: intervention produces radicalization, radicalization produces more intervention, and the cycle compounds rather than getting resolved.

 

What makes the current phase of this war particularly troubling is not just its longevity but its opacity. The US AFRICOM quietly stopped disclosing casualty estimates and civilian harm assessments last year, meaning the American public, and more importantly the Somali public living under these strikes, have no reliable way to judge whether the ongoing bombing campaign is degrading al-Shabaab or simply generating fresh grievances in villages like Saacow that most Americans could not locate on a map. Independent trackers like New America now count more strikes than the Pentagon itself publicly claims, a discrepancy that should alarm anyone concerned with transparency and military oversight. A government fighting a war it will not fully describe, against an enemy it helped create, with a body count it will not release, is not fighting a war so much as running it on autopilot.

The emergence of a second, simultaneous air campaign against an ISIS affiliate in Puntland only deepens the sense of mission creep without strategic clarity. That ISIS offshoot itself splintered from al-Shabaab in 2015, meaning the US is now bombing two branches of a militant family tree it planted the roots for. Meanwhile, Somalia's underlying conditions, a federal government that still cannot project authority beyond Mogadishu, a security apparatus fractured along clan lines, and vast ungoverned territory where al-Shabaab functions as a de facto shadow state collecting taxes through extortion, smuggling and administering justice, remain largely unaddressed by an approach built almost entirely around airstrikes rather than governance, reconstruction, or political reconciliation. Three decades of bombing has not produced a stable Somali state. It has produced a war that outlives news cycles, a Pentagon operating independently of America that answers fewer questions each year, and a local population caught between a government it does not trust with the US military delivering bombs they cannot see coming.

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US Africa Command Launches 82nd Airstrike in Somalia Of the Year

AFRICOM said that it targeted al-Shabaab in southern Somalia

by Dave DeCamp | September 15, 2026

US Africa Command on Monday night announced that its forces launched another airstrike in Somalia, as the Trump administration continues its record-shattering bombing campaign in the country.

AFRICOM said the strike targeted al-Shabaab in the vicinity of Saacow, a village in Somalia’s southern Lower Juba region. The command offered no other details about the attack, as it stopped sharing casualty estimates and assessments of potential civilian harm last year.

"Specific details about units and assets will not be released to ensure continued operations security," AFRICOM said in its press release.

Based on AFRICOM's numbers, the attack marks at least the 82nd US airstrike in Somalia this year, though there are signs that the US is not announcing each strike in the country.

The US has also been conducting an air war against an ISIS affiliate in Somalia's northeastern Puntland region, and Drop Site News recently reported that a US strike was carried out in the region on September 3, though it has not been claimed by AFRICOM.

According to numbers from New America, an organization that tracks the air war and also counts airstrikes that are reported but not claimed by the US, the September 8 strike would bring the total number of US bombings in Somalia this year to 84.

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.

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Editor's note: In January 2019 British SAS soldier Christian Craighead's actions at the DusitD2 complex remains one of the most remarkable individual acts of heroism to come out of the "war on terror." He was off duty, freshly showered, and living in Nairobi to train Kenyan army units when a phone call alerted him that the hotel complex nearby was under attack. Within minutes he was in his pickup truck, weapons gear beside him, driving on the wrong side of the highway to reach the scene. What followed was 22 hours of close quarters fighting through smoke filled corridors, shattered glass every where, toxic grenade fumes, and relentless automatic weapons fire, a one man response against a coordinated al-Shabaab assault team infiltrated in from Somalia. By the time it was over, Craighead had killed four terrorists and helped save an estimated 700 people, American, Kenyan, Japanese and European alike, earning him the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross.

The DusitD2 attack exposed a fundamental weakness AFRICOM's bombing campaign still faces today. Al-Shabaab retains the ability to plan complex attacks far beyond Somalia's borders, despite over a decade of drone strikes, AU offensives, and leadership killings. The Dusit attackers had crossed back and forth from Somalia, the same territory the US now bombs dozens of times a year, suggesting airstrikes have degraded the group but never eliminated its ability to project violence regionally. Six years later, both the group and the bombing campaign persist, which argues a purely kinetic approach has produced a stalemate rather than a resolution.

There is also a retaliatory logic connecting the two moments. Al-Shabaab framed the DusitD2 attack partly as a response to US foreign policy, a pattern it has repeated throughout this conflict, consistently citing foreign military presence as justification for its violence, a logic that traces back to its founding as a reaction to the 2006 Ethiopian invasion. Today's bombing campaign runs almost entirely from the air, with no ground presence and minimal public accountability, raising the same question critics have asked since 2006: does each strike degrade the group's capability, or does it simply feed the narrative that fuels its recruitment.

 
What makes Christian Craighead's story even more compelling is what happened after his remarkable skills were displayed that day. For years, Christian Craighead fought to publish his firsthand account of that day, only to be blocked by the UK Ministry of Defence. He pursued a judicial review to try to get the book cleared, and even that was denied, with the courts siding against him and refusing to allow an appeal. A soldier who ran toward gunfire without orders, who saved hundreds of lives with nothing but his own initiative and training, found himself fighting a different kind of battle against his own government simply to tell his story. It raises an uncomfortable question about why an act of such unambiguous heroism would be treated as something to suppress rather than celebrate, and whether institutional caution, image management, or simple bureaucratic inertia was allowed to silence a man who deserved to be heard.

That fight appears to have finally been won. Craighead's memoir, "One Man In," was released on September 15, 2026, through Threshold Editions, giving him the platform he was denied for so long to tell the full, uncensored account of that day in his own words. For a story this extraordinary to have been delayed and nearly buried by red tape says as much about institutional caution as it does about the courage it took to act in the first place. The book's release feels less like a simple publication and more like a long overdue correction, allowing one of the era's genuine acts of individual bravery to finally reach the audience it always deserved. Christian Craighead who met President Trump in 2024 has said he will never return to the UK, claiming he would be arrested if he did, and that he has since fallen in love with America and the life he's built there; if his story inspires you the way it's inspired us, please consider purchasing Christian's book and watching the video below to hear him tell it in his own words:

In many respects the amount of engineering, resources, machinery, energy, electricity and water that goes into making bullets used to kill people is surreal: