Despite a number of foreign actors, including the United States, using kinetic military strikes and contributing military resources to Somalia for the past many years in an ostensible effort to improve the Somali security situation, both ISIS and al-Shabaab are expanding their territory and continuing to threaten the country’s peace and security.
Years of heavy bombardment have failed to eliminate the security threat, and have instead helped spark collaboration between these groups and the Houthis, which are now contributing resources to help the terrorist organizations advance their goals in Somalia. All the while, the conflict is turning into a diplomatic mess, creating new scuffles amongst regional actors.
During the early days of his administration, President Trump broadened the definition of who can be targeted by American airstrikes, signaling a potential increase in American counterterrorism activities overseas.
This more aggressive posture has taken hold in Somalia, where U.S. air and drone strikes have increased precipitously since Trump’s inauguration. Despite internal divisions within the Trump team on whether the United States should extend or reduce its military presence in Somalia, the administration has thus far been aggressive in its counterterrorism activities in the country.
In the first six months of 2025 alone, the United States conducted 36 official air and drone strikes in Somalia, compared to just 10 under President Biden in all of 2024. At this rate, the United States will conduct 70 airstrikes across the country by the end of the year and 288 by the end of Trump’s second term — a substantial increase from the 156 he conducted during his first term in office.
These U.S. strikes are targeting the resurgent ISIS and al-Shabaab terrorist organizations, which have continued to seize land from the Somali government in recent years.
The United States' involvement in Somalia has waxed and waned over the last decade. Although Trump conducted dozens of airstrikes a year during his first term, in 2020 the president ordered the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia, reducing American ground presence while maintaining training and support missions from outside the country.
In 2022, the Biden administration reintroduced U.S. troops to Somalia “to maximize the safety and effectiveness of our forces and enable them to provide more efficient support to our partners.” And in 2024, the United States built five military bases to be used for training and military operations for the Somali National Army and Danab — an elite Somali special operations force.
The Somali-U.S. relationship has been further complicated during Trump’s second term. In February the administration announced a global foreign aid freeze, halting all military aid to Somalia.
Today, the United States has 500 to 600 troops spread throughout Somalia, conducting a combination of training and support missions.
The United States, though, is far from the only foreign actor engaged in the security situation in Somalia.
Turkey has maintained close relations with the government in Mogadishu since 2011. As the flame of the Arab Spring caught fire across the region and took the world’s attention with it, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan began focusing on Somalia, a country that was being forgotten in the midst of the regional tumult. It was then when Turkey began investing in the country’s humanitarian infrastructure in the wake of widespread droughts that left 12 million people facing starvation.
For Erdogan, forming a close Turkish relationship with Somalia is useful for geostrategic reasons, in part due to Somalia’s critical location on the Horn of Africa along the Red Sea, through which about 15% of the world’s maritime trade travels annually.
The two countries took a significant step toward enhancing their relationship via military cooperation in 2017, when the Turks opened a military base in Mogadishu — its largest outside Turkey. In the years since, Turkey has provided training and military equipment to Somali forces in support of the fight against jihadi groups.
This past April, the relations between the two countries expanded further with the signing of an agreement that allows Turkey access to oil and gas off Somalia’s coast in exchange for increased security support. That same month, Turkey sent an additional 500 troops to the country.
Another notable regional actor involved in Somali security operations is Egypt, which has sent weapons to the Somali government since August 2024 to use in its counterterrorism operations. The Egyptian-Somali relationship has grown over their shared animosity of Ethiopia.
For years, Ethiopia has been constructing a dam on the upstream portion of the Blue Nile River. This dam constricts the flow of water downstream through Egypt, creating water shortages for the country, angering the Egyptian government.
Somalia’s relationship with Ethiopia is no better. Landlocked Ethiopia, looking for access to the Red Sea, signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Somaliland in early 2024 — a semiautonomous region that claims independence from Somalia. The MOU affords Ethiopia access to a Red Sea naval port on Somaliland’s coast for 50 years in exchange for formally recognizing Somaliland as an independent country, which would make Ethiopia the first nation in the world to do so.
This MOU has also strained Ethiopia’s relationship with Turkey, which controls much of the Somali coastal waters that Ethiopia is seeking to access.
Other countries have engaged with the security situation in Somalia through peacekeeping operations. The current peacekeeping force in the country is the African Union Support and Stabilization Mission in Somalia (AUSSOM), which took over in January 2025 for the previous AU peacekeeping mission.
The countries that have provided troops to AUSSOM include Uganda with 4,500 troops, Ethiopia with 2,500, Djibouti with 1,520, Kenya with 1,500, and Egypt with 1,091 troops. After initially stating that Ethiopian forces would not be allowed to enter the new AU mission due to Ethiopia’s MOU with Somaliland, the Somali government eventually relented, agreeing to allow Ethiopia to participate in the new peacekeeping effort.
None of that has deterred U.S. military involvement in Somalia or made the security situation in the country much better. Although Trump has long decried endless wars and bottomless American military activities, his actions thus far in Somalia are engaging the U.S. in exactly that — an endless conflict that no amount of airstrikes is likely to end.
The United States should refocus its foreign policy toward conflicts where American diplomatic leadership could actually bring about a lasting peace.
After successfully brokering a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, ending — on paper, at least — a three-decades-long war between the two factions, Trump’s team is now working to achieve a diplomatic end to the civil war raging in Sudan.
The administration should drop the waste of engaging in kinetic counterterrorism activities in Somalia, and instead concentrate its foreign policy resources on ending the war in Sudan and implementing the peace deal between the DRC and Rwanda.
