BOSASO, SOMALIA – Airstrikes on the night of Monday 9 November hit Islamic State positions at Dabablayaal and Hal Baalade in Qandala district, east of Dhaadaar and close to the bases the Puntland Darawish hold at Togga Jaceel Sare, according to local security sources who attributed them to American aircraft supporting Puntland’s campaign in the Calmiskaad mountains. Neither Washington nor the Puntland government had confirmed them by Tuesday, and they fell a day after a count of declared strikes showed AFRICOM had announced none against ISIS-Somalia since 6 May while announcing twenty-eight against al-Shabaab, so the ground war in Qandala has been Puntland’s to carry for half a year.
Mine Teams Regroup in Qandala District
Security information gathered over the previous four weeks showed members of the group, especially its operations cells and the teams that lay mines, concentrating at Hal Baalade and Dabablayaal, with further movement near the Wangable well and at Goob and Gardaadin, all of them inside Qandala district. The same fighters had earlier worked the eastern side of Togga Jaceel, a valley where the Islamic State once kept command posts, clinics and defensive positions, and which ranked among its largest strongholds before the Puntland offensive reached it. Security sources say the gathering may be an attempt by the group to reorganise its members for fresh attacks, at a moment when Puntland forces hold routes the fighters once used freely.
Their last direct attack came on 27 September at Dasaan, where the group flew small drones carrying explosives at Puntland positions. On 5 September a mine that local sources say failed in the hands of its handlers went off between Sheebaab and Dhaadaar and killed one of the group’s own members. Puntland’s own operations around Qandala in May had already matched the peak of the 2025 offensive, a sign that the group had rebuilt part of its presence in the district, and in late March it attacked Bosaso for the first time since September 2025.
The strikes also came shortly after the Darawish finished a two-week operation on the western side of Togga Jaceel, from Daboorad to Miraale. Early in 2025 an airstrike in the eastern part of the valley killed an Iraqi-born official who ran the group’s foreign affairs, and in mid-2025 Puntland forces seized large stocks of weapons and medical supplies at Buqo Caleed and Raq-raq during the Calmiskaad operations. Clan fighters from the same ranges took their own guns into Islamic State country in August. Consequently, the fighters now regrouping in Qandala are moving through ground Puntland has already cleared once, and the strikes landed beside the bases built to keep it cleared.
Six Months Without a Declared Strike
AFRICOM’s last announced strike on ISIS-Somalia hit the Golis Mountains on 6 May, about 75 kilometres southeast of Bosaso, and the command said it acted in coordination with the federal government. From January to May the declared campaign averaged nearly thirteen strikes a month, and 56 percent of those strikes hit the Islamic State. From June to October the average fell to just over five a month, and every declared strike between 6 May and 6 November, twenty-eight of them, was aimed at al-Shabaab in the south. An independent tally that includes strikes the command denies recorded 126 American strikes and related operations in Somalia in 2025 and 93 by early November this year.
Puntland officials have described strikes that Washington has never claimed. On 3 September drones flew reconnaissance over Togga Miraale and Togga Baalade before airstrikes hit fighters with a donkey cart at about half past eight in the evening, according to Puntland security officials, and AFRICOM later denied conducting it. On 21 and 22 April a Puntland counterterrorism channel claimed American participation in a cave bombing that killed eight Islamic State members, and the command again said it had carried out no strike at that place and time. “We do not maintain an undisclosed or unannounced strike count,” AFRICOM has said.
Whether the Qandala raids enter the official count will decide which of those two records they join. If AFRICOM announces them in the coming days, as it usually does within a few days of a strike, they end a run of six months in which the group that holds the Calmiskaad caves dropped out of Washington’s declared war entirely. Meanwhile, if AFRICOM stays silent, Qandala becomes the third occasion this year where Puntland’s account of American air support and the command’s own list do not match. Either way the six months were spent by the Darawish, who held Togga Jaceel Sare through the lull with the aircraft largely absent from the declared record.
Air Support Negotiated in Bosaso
On 2 August an AFRICOM delegation met President Said Abdullahi Deni in Bosaso, and the Puntland State House then announced an agreement to expand the American facility there, in a deal signed in Bosaso while Mogadishu waited and, by the officials’ account, largely settled at a closed meeting in Addis Ababa on 27 July. Five Puntland security officials have since said the planned base at Bosaso airport will let American aircraft fly strikes from the city itself, and that a new local counterterrorism force is planned with Washington overseeing its salaries, equipment and training. The same officials say American airstrikes account for at least two-thirds of the Islamic State fighters killed since the war began. Somalia’s defence and information ministries did not answer questions about whether they knew of the agreement.
In October Emirati drones struck Galgala from Bosaso, nine months after Mogadishu revoked Abu Dhabi’s agreements with the federal government. Puntland’s mountain war therefore draws its air support from two foreign partners whose aircraft use the Bosaso runway, while the federal government, whose constitution reserves foreign agreements to Mogadishu, has stayed outside both arrangements and outside the mountains.
The federal army spent the week of the Qandala strikes facing its own soldiers in Beledweyne, where Hawadle men left federal ranks after Ugaas Yusuf Ugaas Hassan told them there was no government left to defend, and President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud’s government was answering a Supreme Court ruling that its mandate had expired in May. Puntland launched Operation Hilaac against the group in the Calmiskaad and Golis ranges in late 2024 with its own forces, and the campaign weakened the group through its first year before slowing at the turn of 2026. The aircraft over Qandala on Monday night flew in support of that war, from a base negotiated in Bosaso, and the only federal signature on it is the coordination line AFRICOM adds to its announcements.
