Somalia’s Sanaag airstrike controversy deepens as family, elders deny al-Shabab ties

Somalia airstrike controversy exposes the fragile line between counterterrorism and community trust

In the scrubland around El Buh, a coastal settlement in northern Somalia’s Sanaag region, the U.S. military says its jets found a weapons trafficker. Locals say they lost a peacemaker. That gap—between the intelligence picture from the sky and the social reality on the ground—has become the defining tension of remote warfare in Somalia.

On Sept. 13, U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) carried out what it called a “precision airstrike” near El Buh (Ceelbuh), targeting, in its words, an al-Shabab weapons dealer. AFRICOM declined to name the individual. Community elders swiftly did: they identified the man killed as Aqil Omar Abdullahi Ali, a respected clan elder known for brokering peace in a region where elders often carry more authority than officials.

“This was an attack on our traditions and dignity,” elders in Ceelbuh said, condemning the strike. Another elder, Hussein Haji Yusuf—known locally as Indha-deero—told the BBC Somali Service the man was a trusted mediator and not a trafficker or extremist. Al-Shabab, in its own statement, denied the elder had links to the group.

The Somali federal government has remained officially silent. But a Somali official, speaking on condition of anonymity to the BBC, confirmed that Abdullahi Ali was the intended target, describing him as a “senior facilitator” of organized crime who supplied weapons to both al-Shabab and ISIS, while maintaining contacts with Yemen’s Houthi movement. The official said weeks of surveillance preceded the strike and reported no civilian harm.

AFRICOM, for its part, said it reviews all allegations of civilian harm and publishes findings in quarterly reports, but did not confirm whether a review specific to El Buh is underway.

Who is an “elder” in Somali society—and why that matters

To outsiders, “elder” can sound ceremonial. In much of Somalia, it is an office that sits at the heart of governance. Elders mediate everything from land disputes to ceasefires under xeer, the customary law that still structures daily life, especially in contested or rural zones. In places like Sanaag—claimed by both North Western State of Somalia and Puntland State—elders often carry the weight of legitimacy in ways armed groups or distant bureaucracies do not.

The death of an elder, even amid competing accounts of his roles, does not land as a single loss. It reverberates through clans, upends local bargains, and risks consolidating grievances in communities that the Somali state and its international partners most need on their side.

The fog of transparency

Why neither Washington nor Mogadishu has publicly named the target remains a central question. Sometimes, officials argue, naming a suspect exposes methods: the patchwork of human sources, signals intelligence, and surveillance that underpin modern counterterrorism. Other times, silence reflects uncertainty—either about identity or about affiliations that are murkier on the ground than in PowerPoint slides.

Somalia is one of the most drone- and airstrike-intensive theaters outside declared war zones. AFRICOM says it has conducted 55 strikes in Somalia so far this year, including 31 against ISIS fighters in the Puntland State mountains, with the rest targeting al-Shabab. The command has also adopted more formal reporting on civilian harm—quarterly assessments that represent a shift from earlier years of terse denials and piecemeal admissions.

Yet transparency remains patchy and contested. Amnesty International and other rights groups have documented civilian casualties from U.S. strikes in Somalia since at least 2017, at times challenging AFRICOM’s assessments and prompting rare acknowledgments of error. The Pentagon’s 2022 Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan promised a stronger architecture for learning from mistakes. The question, still, is whether that architecture is robust enough in places where social roles—elder, trader, fixer, mediator—can be fluid, overlapping, and, at times, co-opted by armed groups.

Arms routes, the Gulf of Aden, and a murky market

The anonymous Somali official’s allegation—that the target supplied arms to both al-Shabab and ISIS, and maintained contacts with Yemen’s Houthis—speaks to another reality of the region: the same Gulf of Aden that separates Sanaag from Yemen also connects them. It is a well-trodden smuggling corridor. Weapons move with charcoal, livestock, and fuel across sea lanes and coastline tracks that predate the modern state. In the Puntland State mountains, ISIS has carved out pockets of survival and occasionally contested smuggling revenue with al-Shabab, creating a black market where ideological lines blur when profit is at stake.

That ambiguity is precisely what makes the El Buh case hard. Is a man who knows every boat captain and clan checkpoint an elder in service of peace, a broker keeping a fragile calm—or a facilitator greasing the paths of conflict? Sometimes, in Somalia’s peripheries, he is all three at once, and those roles can shift with the weather.

A familiar pattern—and a set of unanswered questions

There is a pattern here that will be familiar to Somalis and to anyone who has followed U.S. air campaigns from the Sahel to the Levant: a strike; a gap in narratives; a local community insisting on innocence; an officialdom—Somali, American, or both—claiming intelligence that cannot be fully shared. Weeks later, a report may land. Often, the community’s grief has already hardened into political memory.

At El Buh, several questions remain:

• If Abdullahi Ali was the intended target, why wasn’t he named? If he wasn’t, who was?
• Is there a civilian harm review underway, and will its findings be made public and translated for local audiences in Sanaag?
• How will Somali authorities engage the clan whose elder was killed, especially if the government stands by the strike’s intelligence?
• What safeguards are in place to account for the role of elders in counterinsurgency zones where titles and functions can be dual-use?

The stakes beyond one strike

Countering al-Shabab and ISIS in Somalia requires more than degrading cells and supply lines. It hinges on durable local partnerships—and on elders who can marshal consent where government writ is thin. Each misidentified target, each unexplained strike, risks eroding the social contract that security forces rely on to collect intelligence, mediate surrenders, and stitch together fragile coalitions.

For readers far from Sanaag, the case feels familiar because it echoes larger trends in modern war: a growing reliance on remote strikes; a higher premium on precise intelligence; and the danger that “precision” becomes a promise rather than a guarantee. The tools have grown sharper. The politics—and the people—remain stubbornly complex.

What to watch next

AFRICOM’s next quarterly report will be one indicator, but not the only one. Watch for whether Mogadishu issues a public statement and whether local authorities move to calm tensions in Ceelbuh. Pay attention to how al-Shabab tries to capitalize on the incident in its propaganda, and whether ISIS in Puntland State responds at all. And look for whether community leaders in Sanaag accept or reject any official accounts that follow. In Somalia, as elsewhere, the success of a strike is measured not just by who is hit—but by what is left behind.

Reporting includes information from the BBC Somali Service.

By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.