Somali Civil War: Timeline & Latest Developments

Somalia’s civil war has run in one form or another since January 1991, when President Siad Barre’s government collapsed under a coalition of clan-based militias and the country fragmented into competing fiefdoms with no functioning central authority. The 1990s brought famine, the failed US-UN intervention remembered in the United States as the “Black Hawk Down” battle of Mogadishu, and a succession of weak transitional governments that controlled little beyond parts of the capital. A more stable Islamist administration, the Islamic Courts Union, briefly unified much of southern Somalia in 2006 by promising order after 15 years of chaos, before Ethiopia invaded that December to remove it, fearing an Islamist government on its border. That invasion is the hinge point this page treats as the start of the conflict it tracks in detail, because the Islamic Courts Union’s armed youth wing did not disappear with it. It regrouped as Al-Shabaab, and has been Somalia’s central security threat ever since.

Al-Shabaab spent its first years, 2007 through 2011, expanding rapidly against a threadbare Transitional Federal Government and the newly arrived African Union Mission in Somalia, AMISOM, whose first Ugandan peacekeepers landed in Mogadishu in March 2007. By 2011, Al-Shabaab controlled an estimated 80 percent of the country, including large parts of Mogadishu and the port city of Kismayo, and had begun exporting violence beyond Somalia’s borders, claiming the July 2010 Kampala bombings that killed 76 World Cup viewers in Uganda. That same year, a UN-declared famine in Bakool and Lower Shabelle, worsened by Al-Shabaab’s restrictions on aid access in areas it controlled, killed an estimated quarter-million people, a humanitarian catastrophe inseparable from the military conflict raging around it. AMISOM and government forces pushed Al-Shabaab out of central Mogadishu that August, and Kenya’s October 2011 invasion, Operation Linda Nchi, opened a second front that culminated in the September 2012 fall of Kismayo, Al-Shabaab’s last major port stronghold.

Losing territory did not end Al-Shabaab’s capacity for violence; it shifted the group’s strategy toward high-casualty attacks and formal international alignment. Al-Shabaab pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda in February 2012, then carried out some of its deadliest single attacks over the following years: the September 2013 Westgate Mall siege in Nairobi, the April 2015 Garissa University massacre that killed 148 people, and the October 2017 twin truck bombings in Mogadishu that killed at least 587 people, the deadliest attack in Somali history. The United States responded with an escalating campaign of airstrikes that has run, with interruptions, since 2007, and Al-Shabaab kept striking American and allied forces directly, including a January 2020 raid on the Manda Bay airfield in Kenya that killed three Americans. President Trump ordered most US troops repositioned out of Somalia that December, though American airstrikes never fully stopped and would later resume at a far larger scale.

Mohamud’s return to the presidency in May 2022 reset the government’s approach. He declared “total war” on Al-Shabaab that August, pairing Somali National Army units and Danab commandos, trained by US special operations forces, with local clan militias called Ma’awisley, and leaning on Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones, whose deployment Somalia confirmed that September. The offensive’s first phase cleared significant ground in central Somalia’s Hirshabelle and Galmudug regions by early 2023; a second phase, launched that August, turned toward Al-Shabaab’s southern strongholds. The United Nations rewarded the momentum by fully lifting Somalia’s 30-year arms embargo in December 2023, while keeping a narrower embargo on Al-Shabaab itself. But 2022 also became Somalia’s deadliest conflict year since at least 2018, and a severe drought pushed the UN to warn that September that famine was “at the door” in Bay region, underscoring how closely the military and humanitarian crises remained entangled even as the government held the battlefield initiative.

That initiative did not hold. AMISOM’s successor, ATMIS, drew down faster than Somali forces could absorb the security responsibilities it was shedding, and Al-Shabaab exploited the resulting gaps. A February 2025 counteroffensive, which Al-Shabaab called Operation Ramadan, rolled back most of the government’s Middle Shabelle gains within three months, including the April recapture of Adan Yabaal, a former Al-Shabaab regional hub. The group also targeted Somalia’s political leadership directly, detonating an IED near President Mohamud’s convoy in March 2025, the first such attack on a sitting president since 2014, and killed 21 people in a May 2025 suicide bombing of an army recruiting line in Mogadishu. AUSSOM, a further AU mission reboot authorized for up to 11,911 personnel, replaced ATMIS on January 1, 2025, but troop-contributing countries were soon arguing that ceiling was already inadequate. Turkish drone strikes carried their own controversy: a March 2024 strike on a Lower Shabelle farm killed 23 civilians, including 14 children, an incident Amnesty International said may amount to a war crime. US airstrikes, meanwhile, surged dramatically once the Trump administration eased Biden-era approval requirements, hitting a record 111 strikes in 2025 and drawing fresh civilian-harm allegations, including a November 2025 operation in Lower Jubba that a Drop Site News investigation said killed 11 civilians, seven of them children.

By mid-2026, independent analysts describe the military conflict as a “managed” or “prolonged” stalemate: neither Al-Shabaab nor the federal government can hold decisive new ground, even as both sides keep fighting. Somalia’s own political crisis has added a further complication. A disputed one-year extension of Mohamud’s mandate triggered days of clashes between government and opposition-aligned forces in Mogadishu in June 2026 that killed 13 people and displaced roughly 12,500 households, diverting attention and security resources from the counter-insurgency fight even as US and Turkish strikes against Al-Shabaab continued through the summer. Some analysts argue that pattern, elite Somali political rivalries consuming resources that might otherwise confront the insurgency, has structurally benefited Al-Shabaab for years, regardless of which side is winning on any given battlefield.