President Donald Trump announced Saturday in a social media post that he has ordered “precision Military air strikes,” on members of the ISIS terrorist organization.
He said those targeted include “the Senior ISIS Attack Planner and other terrorists he recruited and led in Somalia,” who were found hiding in caves. According to Trump, they threatened U.S. security and the security of our allies.
ISIS is described by the National Counterterrorism Center as a Salafi-jihadist group, meaning that they are part of the conservative Salafi movement in Islam that believe in religiously-sanctioned warfare, as explained by the Brookings Institute. Per the center, the group has conducted terrorist attacks worldwide that have resulted in thousand killed or injured.
“In 2004, an Iraqi extremist network led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi merged with al-Qa‘ida to form ISIS’s predecessor group, al-Qa‘ida in Iraq (AQI), which Zarqawi led until his death in 2006,” the center explained. “Now-deceased amir Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi took over the group in 2010 and began to expand its operations into eastern Syria in 2011. In 2013, AQI changed its name to ISIS; and in 2014, the group separated from al-Qa‘ida, declared itself a caliphate, and took over vast swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria.”
Just last month, the suspect in a New Year’s Eve attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans was linked with the organization. Shamsud Din Jabbar, 42, accused of speeding a pickup truck down Bourbon Street into a crowd of people and killing 10, was carrying an ISIS flag in his truck, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a Saturday statement that he authorized U.S. Africa Command to conduct coordinated airstrikes today targeting ISIS-Somalia operatives in the Golis mountains.
“Our initial assessment is that multiple operatives were killed in the airstrikes and no civilians were harmed,” said Hegseth. “This action further degrades ISIS’s ability to plot and conduct terrorist attacks threatening U.S. citizens, our partners, and innocent civilians and sends a clear signal that the United States always stands ready to find and eliminate terrorists who threaten the United States and our allies, even as we conduct robust border-protection and many other operations under President Trump's leadership.”
Trump and Hegseth did not provide specific names for the operatives killed in the strikes.
“Our Military has targeted this ISIS Attack Planner for years, but Biden and his cronies wouldn’t act quickly enough to get the job done,” said Trump. “I did! The message to ISIS and all others who would attack Americans is that ‘’WE WILL FIND YOU, AND WE WILL KILL YOU!’”