United States forces carried out air strikes against Islamic State targets in the Golis Mountains of northeastern Somalia after President Donald Trump ordered an operation aimed at a senior attack planner and other members of the group. US officials said the strikes hit caves used by the militants and killed multiple operatives, but no names or confirmed casualty total were released.
Trump announced the operation on social media, saying the targeted fighters posed a threat to the United States and its allies. He claimed the caves were destroyed and that civilians were not harmed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said an initial assessment also found that multiple Islamic State operatives had been killed with no civilian casualties. Both Reuters and the BBC said they could not independently verify those assertions.
Somalia's federal authorities confirmed they had been informed of the operation. The office of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud welcomed continued US support against extremist threats and described the strike as part of the security partnership between the two countries. An official in the Somali presidency separately said the government supported the action while its effects were still being assessed. Puntland's regional government thanked international partners involved and said high-ranking members of Islamic State had been killed.
The Somali branch of Islamic State emerged in 2015 after members split from al-Shabab, the larger al-Qaeda-linked organization operating in Somalia. According to the cited reporting, the branch has been associated with extortion and intermittent, generally smaller-scale attacks. The mountainous terrain in the north has featured in earlier US counterterrorism operations, including a 2023 raid in which US forces said Islamic State leader Bilal al-Sudani and ten operatives were killed.
American administrations of both parties have authorized periodic strikes in Somalia. A US operation coordinated with Somali authorities in the previous year killed three Islamic State members, according to the US military. The February 2025 action was among Trump's first military operations after returning to office, following his late-first-term decision to withdraw hundreds of US troops from Somalia. President Joe Biden later reversed that withdrawal to maintain a continuous American presence.
Hegseth said the new strikes were intended to reduce the group's capacity to plan attacks and demonstrate that the United States would pursue those threatening Americans and partners. The supplied evidence supports the location, declared target and official rationale. It does not independently establish how many people died, whether the senior planner was among them, the scale of damage to the cave network or the no-civilian-harm assessment. The operation also continued a pattern of coordination in which Somali authorities were notified and publicly endorsed American action against the group.
