The Largest and Bloodiest U.S. Battlefield in 2025? Somalia

Edited by Sam Thielman

ON SUNDAY, a U.S. warplane, probably a drone, struck a target 50 miles from Kismayo, Somalia. U.S. Africa Command, which conducted the strike and announced it today, said nothing in particular about the strike. It released no casualty information, nor even specified whether there were casualties, nor gestured at the achievement of any objective. The command merely said it "targeted" al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda affiliate that the U.S. has been fighting inconclusively for nearly 20 years. As far as AFRICOM was concerned, it was just another day in Somalia.

That strike was, by my count, the 87th kinetic U.S. military engagement in Somalia that AFRICOM has announced this year. That is likely an undercount of the actual number of strikes. Some of the announcements involve multiple incidents, not only from above, but on the ground as well. The New America Foundation tallies 114 U.S. strikes in Somalia in 2025, some of them not publicized by AFRICOM. Their tally includes an estimate of between 115 and 292 people, militant and civilian and unknown, killed by the U.S. and its Somali proxies this year alone. 

To say this is unprecedented is an understatement. The previous high-water mark for U.S. drone strikes in Somalia in a calendar year was 63 in 2019, back when Donald Trump was president the first time. That was a big escalation from the 47 U.S. strikes in 2018, which was itself a big escalation from the 35 in 2017. (Totals courtesy of REIGN OF TERROR, p. 268 of the paperback edition.) New America tallies 443 U.S. strikes on Somalia since George W. Bush inaugurated the grim tradition. By their count, 333 of them, or 75 percent, have come during Trump's terms in office. 

This means that despite the highly justified focus on the escalating U.S. aggression toward Venezuela and the massive military buildup in the Caribbean supporting it, Venezuela isn't the center of U.S. military activity in 2025. Somalia is. 

A war that has never remotely captured U.S. media attention proportionate to its persistence or intensity has faded so utterly from journalistic and political attention that it can escalate massively and barely make a sound audible to American ears. Such are the wages of normalizing the War on Terror. 

Frankly, we at FOREVER WARS share in this disgrace. We haven't covered Somalia consistently at all. We are depressingly typical, but we will do better. 

While I won't pretend to know the patterns of Somali migration to the United States as a result of the war—we'll have to do some research for a subsequent edition—it is striking to see the Trump administration escalate its domestic assault on Somali-Americans and other Black people in Minnesota while it contributes like never before to the destabilization of Somalia. As with Venezuela, some shake their heads and invoke the irony of the Trump administration contributing to the migrant flows that it decries. This is not ironic to me. Refugee flows, exploited by the right and left undefended or even persecuted by liberals, are a means to power for the nativists. Why would nativists want that flow to stop when they benefit from it continuing?

GUANTÁNAMO BAY'S CAPTIVE migrant population grew by 22 people on Sunday, raising the tally to 730, Carol Rosenberg of the New York Times reports, "the first such arrivals in two months." But these people, sent from ICE custody in Louisiana, may include the first of a new cohort. Five migrants that a defense official described as "high threat," Carol reports, may be caged within the Camp Delta wartime-detention complex, in the now-mostly-fallow War on Terror jails that most people think of when they hear the name Guantánamo. 

Speaking of pattern repetitions of the War on Terror: Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration lacks the authority to detain migrants at Guantánamo as an adjunct of domestic deportation policy (as opposed to the temporary detention of sea-borne migrant arrivals to the U.S.-occupied naval station in southeastern Cuba). But the judge, Sparkle Sooknanan of the D.C. District Court (a Biden appointee, if you were wondering), would not order the closure of the migrant detention facility, a measure sought by the ACLU. Without that order, the finding of exceeded authority carries no consequence. Sooknanan wrote that for 20 years, Guantánamo has been "synonymous with pervasive mistreatment and indefinite detention." Imagine then turning around and saying, Well, I guess the president whom I just observed violating the legal restrictions on his power should continue to be able to use this place to cage people. 

BONDI BEACH. I don't really have the words for the horrific antisemitic massacre in Sydney on Sunday. We lit candles for Hanukkah starting last night—a minor holiday, but also a light in the darkness—and prayed for the dead. As you are likely aware, a Muslim hero named Ahmed al-Ahmed disarmed the murderer. In that act of solidarity we see the pathway to safety and resilience, not only for the Jewish community, but everyone's. That is the light we must keep guiding our path through the darkness.

An earlier version of this post misstated the death toll from US operations in Somalia in 2025. The total figure is between 115 and 292 people, not 1855 and 2558. The latter set of figures represents the total number killed by US operations in Somalia.