Trump Orders Airstrikes Against ISIS in Somalia

President Trump ordered airstrikes on Saturday against the Islamic State in northern Somalia, the first major U.S. military operation overseas since he took office.

Defense 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 Defense Department officials said.

“This action further degrades ISIS’s ability to plot and conduct terrorist attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners and innocent civilians,” Mr. Hegseth said.

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

On Thursday, the military’s Central Command said a U.S. airstrike in northwest Syria had killed a senior operative in Hurras al-Din, an Al Qaeda affiliate.

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

Mr. 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 harbor for Al Shabab, the terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda, than for the Islamic State. U.S. intelligence officials estimate that Al Shabab in Somalia has roughly 7,000 to 12,000 members and an annual income — including from taxing or extorting civilians — of about $120 million, making it the largest and wealthiest Qaeda affiliate in the world.

However, after an Army veteran’s ISIS-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 al-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 U.S. troop levels from conflict zones,” said Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm based in New York.

President Trump withdrew about 700 U.S. troops from Somalia in January 2021. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. redeployed around 450 of those forces after he took office. It is unclear what Mr. 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 southwestern border to stem the flow of migrants — a top priority for Mr. Trump — could jeopardize other military missions.

Mr. 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.

To be sure, there are threats in northern Somalia, where the Islamic State operates.

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

In January 2023, U.S. 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. American officials said that he was operating in Somalia but that his influence extended across Africa, into Europe and even to the ISIS branch in Afghanistan that carried out the August 2021 bombing at Kabul’s airport that killed 13 American service members.

That raid took place in a remote mountainous cave complex in the Puntland region of northern Somalia, months after American spy networks detected Mr. 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 Mr. al-Sudani’s hide-out that have provided leads in other counterterrorism operations.