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WASHINGTON — U.S. Special Operations troops killed a senior Islamic State leader in a helicopter raid in a remote area of Somalia on Thursday, U.S. officials said.
An official who spoke on condition of anonymity identified the man as Bilal al-Sudani, an Islamic State leader operating in Somalia.
United States Africa Command said in a news release that the U.S. military had “conducted a successful counterterrorism operation in Somalia.”
Biden administration officials said that no civilians were injured or killed in the raid. They also said that none of the American troops involved were hurt, although one was bitten by a dog they brought with them.
In a statement on Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said Mr. al-Sudani “was responsible for fostering the growing presence of ISIS in Africa and for funding the group’s operations worldwide, including in Afghanistan.”
During a call with reporters Thursday afternoon, a senior administration official described Mr. al-Sudani as “a key operative and facilitator for ISIS’s global network.” The official said that the operative was killed along with 10 other Sudanese Islamic State associates.
The raid took place in a remote mountainous cave complex in northern Somalia.
The official said that the Special Operations troops were prepared to capture Mr. Al-Sudani but that the response from his associates when American troops arrived at their cave complex “resulted in his death.”
The fact that the Pentagon sent commandos to kill or capture Mr. al-Sudani, rather than using a less risky drone operation, indicated his significance.
Somalia is better known as a harbor for Al Shabab, the terrorism group linked to Al Qaeda, than for the Islamic State. But Islamic State attacks have increased across Africa.
The raid in northern Somalia represents the latest in a string of setbacks this year for the Islamic State and its core leadership in Iraq and Syria, the most serious since the end of the jihadists’ so-called caliphate nearly four years ago.
In late November, the Islamic State announced that its overall leader, whose identity has remained shrouded in mystery, had been killed in battle in Syria less than nine months after taking charge of the terrorist organization.
Outside the Middle East, the group has experienced mixed success. Its branch in Afghanistan, which carried out a deadly attack against American troops in Kabul in August 2021, is locked in a stalemate with the Taliban government. But ISIS fighters have struck highly symbolic targets in Afghanistan, including Russian and Chinese interests.
Islamic State fighters, along with Qaeda cells, are gaining strength in West Africa, with the violence now threatening countries like Ghana, Togo and Benin.
At its peak, the Islamic State ruled a self-proclaimed caliphate the size of Britain that spanned the border between Syria and Iraq and boasted tens of thousands of fighters from around the globe. Its extremist vision of eternal combat between its forces and anyone who opposed them inspired deadly attacks in Paris, Brussels, Istanbul, Berlin, Baghdad and other major cities.
But an international coalition led by the United States worked with local forces in Iraq and Syria to fight it, finally pushing it from its last patch of territory in eastern Syria in March 2019.
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Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper
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