Nearly a year after a US strike near Jamaame left shrapnel lodged near her seven-year-old son's hip — shrapnel doctors say cannot be removed without risking paralysis — Maryam Haji Abdi Guled walks her child to school and back every day by hand. Her family is one of several whose accounts of death, maiming, and displacement during a November 2025 US-Somali offensive in southern Jubaland directly contradict AFRICOM's formal finding that its strikes caused no civilian harm. The scale of the US air campaign in Somalia has expanded sharply under Trump. Public AFRICOM records list 84 strikes through September 2026; the New America Foundation, tracking independently, counted 88 over the same period. The November 2025 offensive around Jamaame involved US air strikes on November 14 and 15 alongside Somali ground forces including the US-trained Danab commando unit. Jubaland authorities claimed 56 al-Shabab fighters killed and 20 captured — figures Al Jazeera could not independently verify. AFRICOM completed an assessment of reports that US operations killed 10-12 civilians and destroyed homes and businesses in Jamaame. It concluded the evidence did not meet the military's "more likely than not" threshold. Critically, AFRICOM did not disclose whether investigators spoke to any survivors, relatives, hospital staff, or local witnesses. It did not release the underlying evidence. It declined to say how many strikes were conducted or which munitions were used, citing operational security. From early 2025, AFRICOM largely stopped routinely disclosing the number of fighters killed or injured in individual strike announcements — a quiet contraction of the transparency baseline. The human toll documented by independent monitors and survivor testimony is concrete. A UNHCR-led monitoring network recorded 12 civilian deaths during fighting and air strikes around Jamaame between November 16 and 18, 2025, alongside 22,800 people displaced in what it described as "rapid and widespread" flight. Ali Aden Borrow, a 52-year-old farmer, lost his nine-months-pregnant wife and unborn child to debris from what he described as an air strike. Nuur Ali Nuur's wife was left paralysed from the waist down. Both men now carry medical debts they cannot pay, with no outside assistance. Anna Zahn of Airwars identified a structural problem: the same strikes that cause injuries often destroy the roads, hospitals, and infrastructure needed to treat them. Earlier research by the peace organisation PAX in Jubaland documented chronic injuries, lost livelihoods, displacement, and psychological trauma following alleged US strikes — and found it could not establish the target status of those involved in most cases examined. Bimaal clan chief Ugaas Ahmed Ugaas Said Ali said many injured people remain in Jamaame, unable to reach Mogadishu for treatment, and that residents fear discussing losses because of potential reprisals. The accountability architecture here is circular. AFRICOM investigates itself using classified intelligence and operational reporting, declines to say whether it contacted witnesses, and applies a threshold — "more likely than not" — that it controls. It has previously revised findings on Somali civilian casualties after initially reporting no harm, an institutional pattern that suggests the initial finding is less a determination of fact than a default position that can be overturned only by sustained external pressure. The command acknowledged the assessment could be reopened if new information emerged. What remains is a gap between the lived reality of families in Jamaame and the institutional record in Stuttgart. Three people with direct knowledge of harm declined to speak on the record, citing safety concerns. The survivors who did speak describe a November morning when aircraft appeared, munitions struck homes, and the distinction between combatant and civilian dissolved in the blast radius. Whether accountability follows depends entirely on whether external investigators can generate enough documented evidence to force AFRICOM past its own threshold — a threshold it sets, applies, and adjudicates alone.
