The United States has significantly stepped up military airstrikes in Somalia since President Donald Trump was re-inaugurated, launching 111 attacks against armed groups and killing civilians, according to the New America Foundation, which monitors operations.

In the latest attack, U.S. Africa Command conducted an airstrike on December 14 about 50 kilometers (31 miles) northeast of the city of Kismayo, targeting members of the Somali armed group al-Shabaab.

The escalation began in February, when the Trump administration launched its first strike in Somalia. Months later, a top U.S. Navy admiral said the U.S. conducted “the largest air strike in the history of the world” from aircraft carriers, marking a sharp departure from the previous administration’s approach.

This year’s strike total already exceeds those under the three presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined, putting Trump on track to even surpass his own first-term record of 219 strikes.

The intensified campaign targets both al-Shabab, an al-Qaida offshoot that has been fighting the Somali government since 2007 and controls swaths of south-central region, and the Islamic State (SIS) in Somalia, a smaller affiliate concentrated in the northeast with an estimated 1,500 fighters.

Somalia’s war with armed groups was Africa’s third deadliest war last year, killing 7,289 people, according to the U.S.-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

The United States has been allied with Somalia’s federal government, training elite troops and conducting airstrikes to support operations there. U.S. troops are also already stationed in the country.

The surge in attacks comes after U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a directive that overturned Biden-era restrictions requiring the White House to authorize strikes outside combat zones, giving AFRICOM commanders greater authority to launch strikes.

David Sterman, senior policy analyst at the New America Foundation, told Al Jazeera that “the White House is sending signals that it is asking for escalation” and is “willing to allow for more overt offensive use of strikes with less scrutiny and oversight.”

Sterman, who has been monitoring strikes, has identified two main drivers behind the increase.

More than half of the attacks were in support of U.S.-backed operations against the Islamic State in Somalia’s autonomous region of Puntland, which launched the operation after attacking a military convoy in December 2024.

Sterman added that attacks had shifted from occasional targeting of senior figures to an ongoing campaign targeting members of the group who had barricaded themselves in caves in the mountains of northern Somalia.

The rest of the focus is on al-Shabab’s offensive against Somali government forces in the south, as U.S. attacks support the Somali National Army, which has suffered setbacks on the ground this year.

The February 1 operation kicked off the campaign when 16 F/A-18 Super Hornets launched from the USS Harry S. Truman in the Red Sea and dropped 60 tons of munitions on a cave complex in the Golis Mountains. The attack killed 14 people, according to Africa Command.

Somali civilians come under US artillery fire

However, the intensified operations have raised concerns about civilian casualties.

The investigative media outlet Drop Site News reported in December last year, citing witnesses, that the U.S. and Somali forces launched an airstrike during an operation in the Lower Juba region on November 15, killing at least 11 civilians, including seven children.

Africa Command confirmed it carried out the attack in support of Somali forces but did not respond to Drop Station’s request for comment on the civilian deaths.

The U.S. military recently stopped providing civilian casualty assessments in its attack bulletins.

According to the military publication Stars and Stripes, the current pace of operations even exceeds what the United States claims is a counter-narcotics crackdown in the Caribbean.

Meanwhile, Trump launched a racist verbal attack on Somali immigrants in the U.S. state of Minnesota earlier this month as federal authorities prepared to launch a massive immigration crackdown on hundreds of undocumented Somalis in the state.

His comment has been scold A few blocks from Mogadishu to Minneapolis.