Seven-year-old faces paralysis after US airstrike; US denies civilian casualties

Abdiqadir Salah was seven years old when shrapnel tore through his body on a street in Jamaame, Somalia. It was November 15, 2025. His mother, Marian Haji Abdi Guled, was nearby when the missiles came. She would later describe the moment with the precision of someone who lived through it: three of her children bleeding on the ground, shells falling everywhere, no warning, only the sound of drones hovering overhead before the strikes began.

The attack killed at least twelve civilians that day, eight of them children. It remains the deadliest strike on civilians in Somalia during either Trump administration and ranks among the worst incidents since the 1993 Black Hawk Down operation in Mogadishu. The stated target was al-Shabaab, the Islamist militant group that controls territory in the region. What happened instead was that a mother watched her three children get wounded in the street outside their home.

Abdiqadir's older brother Mohamed, sixteen, had shrapnel lodged in his fingers. His sister Sumaya, fourteen, had three metal fragments embedded in her head—those were eventually removed. But Abdiqadir's injuries proved more serious. X-rays showed shrapnel still lodged near his hip socket, having entered through his lower back. Doctors at Kaafi hospital in Mogadishu, where the family eventually made their way after a harrowing two-day journey without food, delivered a stark assessment: the shrapnel needed to be removed urgently. Without surgery, the boy risked losing his ability to walk.

The operation costs £750. Guled does not have it. After the strike, she fled with her wounded children into the countryside, terrified the drones would return. The next day she borrowed money for a journey to Jilib, sixty kilometers away, hoping a hospital there could help. It could not. Then came the longer journey to Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, the only place equipped to perform the surgery her son needs. She left her eldest son behind in Jamaame because she could not afford to bring all three children. She left her husband there too, on the farm, to protect their crops.

Now she lives in Mogadishu with Abdiqadir and Sumaya, paying nearly £190 a month for accommodation—a sum that makes it mathematically impossible to save for the surgery. "I don't know where the money will come from," she said. "What's worse than being a mother who can't do anything for her wounded children?"

The US military has not paid compensation to any Somali civilians injured or killed in airstrikes. Under the current administration, the Pentagon has quietly dismantled a program that made it a legal requirement to prevent and respond to civilian deaths. When asked detailed questions about the Jamaame strikes, the Department of War did not respond. US officials would not answer questions about the role of Somali ground forces in the operation, though witness testimony consistently describes the casualties as caused by bombs dropped from drones, not ground fire.

Guled has no uncertainty about who is responsible. "It is the Americans who are responsible for our suffering," she said. The shrapnel in her son's body tells the same story. Without surgery, Abdiqadir Salah will likely spend the rest of his life unable to walk properly—a permanent consequence of an airstrike his country's government refuses to acknowledge happened at all.