Bosaso (Somalia Today) – A major shift in US military resources towards the war with Iran has inadvertently fuelled an Islamic State resurgence in Somalia, where the group’s global leader is now thought to be based, according to a report by Britain’s The Times newspaper.
Somali intelligence officials told the paper that diverted American air support and shrinking munitions stocks have given the jihadist network room to regroup in the Horn of Africa after a year of severe losses.
For much of the past year, US forces worked closely with Somali troops in a sustained campaign to hunt down Abdulqadir Mumin.
The extremist cleric, who spent years preaching in England before returning to his native Somalia, now commands more than 1,000 fighters recruited from around the world.
From a fortified cave network in the rugged Cal Miskaad mountains of Puntland, the militants have long run what officials describe as a financial and operational nerve centre for Islamic State worldwide.
Throughout 2025, the US carried out dozens of air strikes on mountain strongholds, while American special operations forces launched intermittent ground raids on Islamic State hideouts.
That joint campaign appears to have wiped out about 90 percent of the group’s fighting force, leaving only around 200 fighters alive.
But The Times reported that US military support has fallen sharply this year.
Emboldened militants
Somali intelligence officials say the reduction reflects Washington’s decision to divert key surveillance and strike assets to the conflict with Iran, giving the remaining Islamic State fighters a chance to break out of their mountain isolation.
In recent weeks, the militants have launched a series of raids on nearby villages.
“They are becoming increasingly active again, which is very concerning for us,” Mohamed Abdulle, deputy intelligence director of the Puntland Maritime Police Force, told The Times.
“The reduced number of air strikes is emboldening them to venture out of their caves more and more frequently and carry out the sort of attacks that we have not seen for several months now,” he said.
The group is also drawing strength from returning fighters.
Matt Bryden, a strategic adviser at Sahan Research, said militants who fled last year’s US-led assault by crossing the Gulf of Aden into Yemen are now slipping back into Somalia.
“The group is infiltrating in dispersed, squad-sized groups, which helps to avoid detection and renders it impractical to stage major ground or air operations against them,” Bryden told the newspaper.
Global financial hub
The renewed activity in Puntland underlines a broader shift in global jihadism. Since the collapse of Islamic State’s territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria in 2019, the movement’s centre of gravity has shifted sharply towards Africa.
Islamic State Somalia is now an operationally vital node in that network.
Operating under the Al-Karrar office, the Somali branch serves as the group’s global financial hub. Through smuggling routes and extortion networks in the port city of Bosaso, it channels funds to affiliates around the world.
Officials have linked it to financing Islamic State Khorasan Province, including support for the August 2021 suicide bombing at Kabul airport, which killed 169 Afghans and 13 US service members.
In April, the head of US Africa Command, General Michael Langley, warned Congress that “ISIS controls their global network from Somalia”, while several US officials have concluded that Mumin has effectively become the group’s worldwide leader.
Mumin, who lived in Sweden and Britain in the 2000s and came under investigation by MI5 over extremist links, once burned his British passport in a Mogadishu mosque.
He first served as an ideologue for the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Shabaab insurgency before defecting and pledging allegiance to Islamic State in 2015. A major US air strike targeted him in May 2024, but he survived and gradually consolidated his position.
Divided attention
The slowdown in Somalia reflects a wider strain on American military attention and supply lines.
From Ukraine to Taiwan, US allies have voiced growing concern over the depletion of American weapons stockpiles, driven by what analysts describe as the most intensive opening air campaign in modern history against Iran.
The Times said the US used 5,000 bombs, missiles, and interceptors against Iranian targets in the first four days of the war alone.
President Donald Trump has publicly insisted that the United States has a “virtually unlimited supply” of key weapons, but a recent report by the Foreign Policy Research Institute challenged that claim.
The institute said America was rapidly “running out of the high-end systems that enable low-risk, long-range strikes and the systems and munitions needed for regional defence”.
Counterterrorism experts have long warned that large-scale military campaigns in the Middle East can create security vacuums elsewhere, giving extremist groups space to recover.
The effects are already being felt beyond the Horn of Africa. Last month, about 20,000 Islamic State fighters and their family members escaped from a detention camp in Syria.
Security analysts cited by The Times said the breakout followed the US military’s decision to redirect regional surveillance and defensive assets to counter Iranian and proxy missile attacks.
Despite the shift in focus, the US military says it remains committed to East Africa.
“Our deliberate strikes are successfully degrading a key ISIS financial and operational hub, disrupting their ability to plot attacks against the US homeland,” a spokesman for US Africa Command said in a statement.
“Our resolve has not changed. We set the tempo of our operations to achieve maximum effect. We will continue to work with our partners in Somalia to dismantle this network and reinforce global security.”
