The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) reported that, in January, U.S. military forces launched at least 25 air strikes in Somalia, a country AFRICOM carried out at least 124 air strikes against in 2025, more than the total bombs dropped on Somalia by the administrations of Joe Biden, Barack Obama and George W. Bush combined.
A February 2025 strike on a cave complex south of Bosaso launched from the USS Harry S. Truman dropped 125,000 pounds of munitions—the largest air strike ever launched, involving ten times more tonnage than the Hiroshima atom bomb.[1]
The Trump administration’s expanded war over Somalia has followed from its attempts to exploit public backlash over a fraud scheme perpetrated by a small number of Somali-Americans living in Minnesota.
A report in The New York Times by Ernesto Londoño in late November explained the fraud scheme by which the culprits set up companies that billed state agencies for social services that were never provided.
One non-profit organization called “Feeding Our Future” filed invoices claiming they had fed tens of thousands of underprivileged children when the owners of the organization, instead, spent the money on luxury cars, mortgages and real estate investments abroad.[2]
Fifty-nine people were convicted to that point in this and other related schemes, which resulted in the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to the Department of Justice.[3]
Inflaming his hate-filled base, President Trump called Minnesota “a hub of fraudulent money-laundering activity” and said that Somali-Americans were people with “low IQ” who “turned Minnesota into a hell hole” and should be sent “back to where they came from.”[4]
Calling Somali-American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar a “piece of garbage,”[5] Trump stated that “their country stinks” and was “not actually a country,” as it “barely has a government” and was good at only one thing: “pirates—but that they don’t do that anymore because they get the same treatment drug dealers get—boom, boom, boom.”
Trump’s distasteful comments have angered many Somali-Americans and liberals who said that the entire Somali-American community was being maligned for crimes perpetrated by a small group.[6]
In a November 2025 article in the City Journal[7] titled “The Largest Funder of Al-Shabab is the Minnesota Taxpayer,” Ryan Thorpe and Christopher Rufo claimed that money from Minnesota’s fraud was funding al-Shabab, a terrorist organization in Somalia fighting against U.S.-backed warlords.
That claim first emerged in 2018, but there has been no solid evidence to substantiate it, and none of the federal fraud cases has featured a link to terrorism.
Thorpe and Rufo cite law enforcement sources who allege that Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions of dollars through a network of “hawalas,” informal clan-based money traders, that have wound up in the coffers of al-Shabab.
However, this has nothing to do with the fraud scheme and does not provide direct proof of anything, since it is impossible to track all the money sent back to Somalia and how it is being used, and some Somali-Americans invariably have members of al-Shabab in their families.
Even if, at some point, the latter gained access to some money that was sent from the U.S., it does not mean that that money was directed to al-Shabab as an organization, which Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective cited as the main source in the article, acknowledges.[8]
Unacknowledged Dirty War
While The New York Times has done a good job covering the fraud issue and Trump’s attacks on Somali immigrants, the “newspaper of record” has failed to make any connection between domestic and foreign policy.
Over the last year, the Times has in fact provided virtually no coverage at all of the U.S. war on Somalia, recalling John Steinbeck’s assessment of his stint as a reporter during World War II: “Correspondents weren’t liars, but it is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.”[9]
The untruth in the case of Somalia includes U.S war crimes and political manipulation that have contributed to the country’s evolution into a “failed state.”
In February 2023, I published an article in CovertAction Magazine, which highlighted the Biden administration’s redeployment of 450 U.S. troops to Somalia and AFRICOM’s two drones strikes that allegedly killed 32 al-Shabab fighters.
In the past, Amnesty International found that some of the Somalis killed by U.S. air strikes who were reported to be al-Shabab terrorists were, in fact, civilian farmers.
A citizens’ tribunal focused on the complicity of top defense companies in war crimes, detailed incidents where drone missiles made by Lockheed Martin and other “merchants of death” killed farmers digging an irrigation canal north of Mogadishu, a prominent businessman in middle Juba, and an 18-year-old girl and her two sisters and grandmother in Jilib after their home was struck while they were eating dinner.
Fitting Steinbeck’s maxim, none of these incidents was ever reported in The New York Times or other U.S. media, with the exception of The Intercept, which has done some good reporting on U.S. war crimes in Somalia.[10]
My February 2023 CAM article rooted the origins of the Somalia conflict to the Cold War, when the U.S. provided more than $1 billion in military aid to dictator Mohamed Siad Barre (1969-1992) in an attempt to curry his favor and pry him away from the Soviet orbit.
In 1992, President George H. W. Bush deployed 25,000 U.S. troops to Somalia after the country had descended into clan warfare.
The intervention ended in the infamous 1993 Black Hawk Down incident, when Mogadishu militia fighters loyal to Mohamed Farrah Aidid—whom the U.S. initially supported but then turned against when he spurned U.S. oil interests—shot down two Black Hawk helicopters using rocket-propelled grenades.
A study by sociologists Laura L Miller and Charles Moskos found that U.S. combat personnel largely perceived Somalis negatively, made derogatory comments toward them (not unlike those of Donald Trump) and used excessive force against them.[11]
Causing large-scale civilian deaths, U.S. military intervention fueled greater clan divisions and instability that lasted until 2006 when the Islamic Court Union (ICU) took over.
Its leader, Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, sent a letter to George W. Bush stating that he would cooperate with the U.S. in fighting terrorists.
The Bush administration was unconvinced, however, and sponsored an Ethiopian invasion that destabilized the country further and led to the rise of al-Shabab, a Salafist jihadist group linked to al-Qaeda, which presented itself as the heir to Islamic fighters in Somali history who had fought outside powers.
In recent years. Al-Shabab’s political strength has been enhanced by U.S. meddling to support a de facto coup in May 2022 that elevated Hassan Sheikh Mohamud as Somali president over Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed aka Farmaajo.
Serving previously as Somali president from 2012 to 2017, Mohamud was especially friendly to U.S. oil investors and wanted to wage war against al-Shabab more aggressively.[12]
When Mohamud gave a speech in Minneapolis, protesters gathered outside the auditorium to denounce him as tribalist and corrupt.
Dr. Abdiwahab Sheikh Abdisamad, Executive Director of the Institute for Horn of Africa Studies, wrote in Black Agenda Report in January 2023 that “President Mohamud is not a disaster waiting to happen; he is a disaster that has already happened to Somalia. He is accused of swindling Somalia’s fortune during his first term (2012-2017), when he suddenly became one of the wealthiest men in Africa, in a country where more than half of the population rely on aid agencies for food, water, and medicine. It is difficult to predict what kind of chaos and destruction he will leave behind by the time he finishes his [latest] term in office.”
The critical back story of U.S intervention and empowerment of corrupt leaders is missing in the small number of articles published about the Somali conflict in The New York Times and other media outlets, which reinforce racist stereotypes of Somali backwardness and savagery.
These outlets fail to explain the motives behind U.S. foreign policy intervention in Somalia, which center on controlling trade through the Suez Canal and Red Sea, accessing offshore oil and having military bases in the African Horn region.
To help advance the latter goals, the Obama, Trump I, Biden and Trump II administrations have sent commando teams and mercenaries, paid off local warlords known for torture and other brutalities, financed frontline Somali troops and launched large numbers of drone strikes.
The Obama administration equipped the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), led by a Ugandan contingent, which was accused of indiscriminate shelling of civilians and gang rape of girls as young as twelve.[13]
A favored CIA-backed Somali warlord profiled in Jeremy Scahill’s 2013 book Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield, Yusuf Mohammed Siad (aka Indha Adde) was known as a “butcher” who ran drugs and weapons trafficking operations from the Merca Port and had past ties to al-Qaeda.
A UN official told Scahill that the Bush administration had ferried arms and suitcases filled with cash to Adde and other Somali warlords in violation of a UN arms embargo.[14]
Calling the U.S. masters of war, Adde acknowledged that the CIA and U.S. government were the aggressors in Somalia and that al-Shabab was part of a growing struggle to reclaim Somalia from foreign-backed warlords.[15]
Al-Shabab provides social services and has shown superiority to the government in fundraising, financial management, tax collection and upholding the legal system, according to CAM journalist Nick Alexandrov.
The U.S. media obscure this fact and leave out the U.S.’s critical role in provoking war, empowering corrupt rulers and destabilizing the country, including by supporting secessionist forces in the Puntland and Somaliland regions.[16]
Even liberals who rightfully deplore Trump’s racist attacks on Somali-Americans and draconian immigration policies are largely silent about the escalation of the U.S. dirty war in Somalia, which ironically has been a factor fueling a lot of Somali migration to the U.S.
Trump’s Attacks on Ilhan Omar May Be a Disgrace, But Omar Is No Hero
Liberal-progressives certainly have reason to be disgusted by Donald Trump’s attempts to denigrate Ilhan Omar and to regard her as a brave woman, particularly after she withstood an attack by a right-wing agitator who sprayed her with some kind of chemical liquid at a town hall.[17]
Omar has supported progressive legislation in Congress; however, scrutiny of her record on Africa by Black Agenda Report journalist Ann Garrison shows her to be a disappointment.
In a February 2023 article entitled “Ilhan Omar Is Not Mama Africa,” Garrison noted: “During the devastating two-year Ethiopian civil war…[Omar] supported the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a long-time U.S. puppet, who declared war on Ethiopia. Like all the rest of the Western world, she excoriated Ethiopia’s ally, Eritrea, ‘the Cuba of Africa.’”
With regard to her native Somalia, Omar, Garrison emphasized, “helped engineer defeat of the popular President Mohammed Abdullahi Mohammed, aka Farmaajo, voted against debt relief, and called for the “carrot-and-stick” coercion she claims to oppose. Her overall impact in the Horn has been in line with the U.S. goal of undermining the Tripartite Agreement for regional cooperation between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, which had been cause for great hope in the region in 2018, before the TPLF started the war that raged for the next two years, draining that nation’s resources and Eritrea’s.”
Garrison continued: “With regard to Rwanda and DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], she took a state-sponsored junket to Rwanda, then served as an advocate for the Kagame regime despite its 27 years of war crimes and plunder in DRC and its brutal repression of the Rwandan people. On…the very same day that Ilhan tweeted her claim to be the voice of the voiceless continent, she also tweeted a photo of herself with AFRICOM’s new commander and said, ‘It was a pleasure to talk with General Michael E. Langley, the sixth commander of the U.S. Africa Command about counterterrorism and diplomacy.’ Langley is AFRICOM’s second Black commander.”
In another article, Garrison noted Omar’s close connection with Somalia President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, who appointed her ex-husband, Ahmed Hirsi, as a political adviser.
In a December 2022 trip to Somalia where she was feted as a celebrity, Omar congratulated Mohamud and his government on its success at fighting al-Shabab and called for further U.S. collaboration in the fight.
Additionally, Omar voiced approval for Joe Biden’s decision to redeploy U.S. troops to Somalia, even though they had a long record of brutality in the country and were part of a dubious neo-colonial enterprise now being expanded upon by the Trump administration.
Some 14 ISIS operatives were allegedly killed in the strike, including Ahmed Maeleninine, an ISIS recruiter and operations leader who allegedly led efforts to deploy jihadists into the U.S. and Europe. In preparation for further escalation, the Trump administration has begun a $70 million military construction project to expand a runway at the Manda Bay Airfield in Kenya near the Somali border. A top U.S. aid recipient, Kenya is ruled by William Ruto, who gained notoriety last year for crushing protests resulting from crippling austerity measures. ↑
Other frauds involved the theft of funds that were supposed to be directed toward meals, housing and autism therapy for needy people. Feed Our Future had threatened state agencies by claiming they would file a race discrimination lawsuit if they did not get approval for their applications. A report by Minnesota’s nonpartisan Office of the Legislative Auditor about the lapses that enabled the meals fraud later found that the threat of litigation and of negative press affected how state officials used their regulatory power. Minnesota’s Somali-American community is also a core supporter of the Democratic Party and there was fear of political backlash. ↑
The New York Times put the total of the fraud schemes at around $1 billion, more than the annual budget of the Minnesota Department of Corrections. Margaret Kimberley wrote in Black Agenda Report that the Trump administration and media were inflating the total amount of the frauds in Minnesota, which she estimated to be around $162 million. ↑
Trump falsely claimed that 88% of Somalis were on welfare. Trump also said that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) was “seriously retarded” for welcoming Somali immigrants. Continuing with the hate-filled rhetoric, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said she recommended that President Trump enact “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” ↑
Robert Pape, a professor at the University of Chicago who studies political violence, noted in reference to Trump’s calling Omar “garbage” that: “you’re not thinking of something that is human, you’re thinking of it as something that can be easily thrown away, so that is exactly the kind of metaphor we have just found for really decades is likely to increase support for violence.” Black Agenda Report columnist Margaret Kimberley noted the anemic official pushback against Trump’s vile attacks on Omar. Kimberley wrote: “One would expect editorial pages, pundits, and members of congress, to vocally and emphatically jump to the defense of Ilhan Omar and Somali immigrants. Yet a combination of the acceptance of racism and fear of Trump’s vindictiveness has made what should be a scandal a mere blip on the screen of corporate media. Omar’s colleagues in the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) did issue a statement in her defense, but it read more like typically bland Democratic Party talking points criticizing Trump policies rather than making it clear that racism was behind the attack.”
Ilhan Omar (D-MN) noted that “we do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community.” ↑
The City Journal is published by the conservative Manhattan Institute. ↑
The article largely follows the model of 19th century yellow journalism in its reliance on unidentified sources. ↑
Steinbeck quoted in Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 135. The quote came from Steinbeck’s book, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (New York: Viking Press, 1942). In a search of The New York Times webpage for Somalia, the only article that I found in the last ten months that even mentioned the war in Somalia was by a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Cameron Hudson, who claimed that the U.S. was intent on “stabilizing the Horn of Africa” when U.S. involvement there has achieved precisely the opposite. ↑
Journalist Nick Turse conducted an investigation of an April 2018 U.S. drone attack on Somalia that killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her four-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. AFRICOM had announced at the time that it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike,” which was a lie. ↑
Jonathan Carroll, Beyond Black Hawk Down: Intervention, Nation-Building, and Insurgency in Somalia, 1992-1995 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2025), 104; Laura L. Miller and Charles Moskos, “Humanitarians or Warriors?: Race, Gender, and Combat Status in Operation Rescue Hope,” Armed Forces & Society, 21, 4 (Summer 1995): 615-37. Troops denigrated Somalis by calling them “skinnies.” Little importance was attached to establishing good relations with the locals. In one incident, unfortunately not isolated, a Marine officer pointed a loaded grenade launcher at an unarmed crowd while screaming at the top of his voice. In another incident, a Marine fatally shot a child approaching his Humvee carrying a box that he mistakenly thought was a bomb. ↑
Guled Hagi Hersi provides a critical view of Farmaajo in his article “The Rise and Fall of Farmaajo,” Wardheer News, July 6, 2018, as does Guled Ahmed in “Somali President Farmaajo Attempts a Silent Coup,” The National Interest, January 19, 2021. Ahmed points out that Farmaajo employed former Trump adviser Roger Stone as a lobbyist and, like Trump, had a dangerous autocratic bent. Ikran Tahlil Farah, a young Somali civil servant working in the National Intelligence and Security Agency disappeared after allegedly discovering the illegal transfer of Somali conscripts to Eritrea, and Farmaajo blocked any investigation into her disappearance/death. Farmaajo was further accused of attacking Ahlu Sunna Waljama’a, the most successful Indigenous group fighting al-Shabab, in order to sideline competition. ↑
See also Jeremy Kuzmarov, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2019). ↑
Jeremy Scahill, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (New York: The Nation Books, 2013), 191-209. ↑
Scahill, Dirty Wars, 197. ↑
Earlier this year, U.S proxy Israel became the first country to recognize Somaliland as an independent country. Somalia’s government criticized what it called an “unlawful step” by Israel and said Somaliland, which was a British colony until 1960 when the rest of Somalia was colonized by Italy, was “an integral, inseparable, and inalienable part” of Somalia. Somaliland has, for years, cultivated ties with Republican lawmakers, conservative policy groups and former officials in the Trump administration, many of whom have urged the U.S. to recognize Somaliland. ↑
The agitator, Anthony Kazmierczak, allegedly wrote on social media: “When will descendants of slaves pay restitution to Union soldiers families for freeing them/dying for them, and not sending them back to Africa?” Trump accused Omar of staging the attack on herself. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
