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Trump Goes on a Global Killing Spree Then Insults His Victims
“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it.
May 22, 2026
“It’s got no anything,” President Donald Trump said of Somalia in a recent xenophobic rant. “All they do is run around shooting each other.”
As is true of so much with this administration, every accusation is also a confession.
US troops have been shooting Somalis since the early 1990s, after lame duck President George H. W. Bush launched an ostensibly humanitarian intervention there that would be embraced by his successor, Bill Clinton. By June 1993, US and United Nations troops had begun attacking various targets in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, linked to warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid, who had helped overthrow dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.
The next month, in a major escalation, US helicopter gunships attacked a house in that city where a group of Somali clan leaders was meeting. The International Committee of the Red Cross said 54 people were killed and 161 wounded. Aidid claimed that 73 Somalis had died, including women and children, and more than 200 had been wounded. US forces suffered no casualties whatsoever.
Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the US has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa.
And it wasn’t long before—in the early 2000s, under Bush’s son, George W., as part of what became known as the Global War on Terror—American troops began slaughtering Somalis again. In addition to major conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush, the younger, launched early drone wars from Pakistan to Yemen, including in Somalia. His successor, President Barack Obama, upped the Forever War ante, becoming an assassin-in-chief in Somalia and beyond. Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, continued the drone war there, too, when he entered the White House.
However, for all those years of slaughter in Somalia, no American president has ever attacked Somalis with the persistence and at the rate of President Donald J. Trump, especially in his second term in office.
The second Bush administration conducted 11 airstrikes in Somalia, killing as many as 144 people—including possibly 55 civilians, according to the think tank New America. Obama presided over 48 strikes during his eight years in office that killed as many as 553 people. Trump’s first term saw a massive escalation in such drone strikes. Over his first four years, Trump carried out 219 attacks, a 271% increase over the 16 years of the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies. But even that spike has paled in comparison to the relentless rate of attacks during Trump’s second term in office. While Biden exceeded Obama’s total in half the time—51 strikes in four years—Trump is already set to eclipse his own infamous first-term record in less than a year and a half. He has presided over at least 190, if not more, air strikes in Somalia.
Trump’s killing spree in Somalia is just a small part of his wider war on the world. It’s no exaggeration to say that he has the US military “run[ning] around shooting” people on an epic scale. During his two terms in office, Trump has overseen armed interventions and military operations—including air strikes, commando raids, proxy conflicts, so-called 127e programs, and full-scale wars—in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Ecuador, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, the Philippines, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela, Yemen, and an unspecified country in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as attacks on civilians in boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean. His second term has, in fact, been a furious blitz of global war making, only half noticed by the American news media. In March, for example, the United States made war on three continents during just three days, conducting attacks in Africa, Asia, and South America. During that span, the US also struck a civilian boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Less than a year and a half into Trump’s second term, the US has already killed more than 2,000 civilians from Latin America to the Middle East and Africa. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” said Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, a British-based organization that tracks civilian harm globally. She also pointed to attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the eastern Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.
A War on Children
Since the US began conducting air strikes in Somalia back in 2007, as many as 170 civilians have been killed, according to Airwars. The US military has, however, only admitted to six of those deaths and 11 other injuries—and has never publicly apologized to any families of the victims or those who survived its attacks.
In one April 2018 attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term, a US drone strike killed at least three (and possibly five) civilians. A woman and child were among the dead, according to formerly secret US military investigation documents, but the same report concluded that their identities might never be known. A 2023 investigation I undertook for The Intercept, however, exposed the details of that disastrous attack. The woman and child—22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse—survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers, said of the Americans who killed his sister and niece: “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized. No one has been held accountable.”
More recently, President Trump has been responsible for the slaughter of scores, if not hundreds, of children in his war of choice in Iran. “US-Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team, told this reporter and other journalists during a recent press briefing. The deaths include more than 150 children killed in a Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in southern Iran. The preliminary findings of a US military investigation into that attack acknowledged that the United States was indeed responsible, contradicting assertions by President Trump that Iran struck the school. Publicly, however, the Pentagon continues to evade responsibility. “This incident is currently under investigation,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth recently told lawmakers, refusing to answer questions about the attack during testimony on Capitol Hill.
Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) US military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple US war zones spiked.
The administration has also been responsible for a steady drumbeat of attacks on civilians in the waters surrounding Latin America. Under Operation Southern Spear, the Trump administration has conducted around 60 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing close to 200 civilians since last September. Trump officials have insisted that the victims are members of one of at least 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties insist that the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians—even suspected criminals—who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.
Trump has also killed and wounded many people in Yemen, including dozens of Ethiopian civilians killed in an attack on an immigrant detention center there last year. “The Trump administration’s Yemen campaign, and this attack in particular, should have set off alarm bells for anyone invested in how the US military operates, and the amount of care or disdain it shows for civilian life,” Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said recently. “One year on, not only has there been no discernible progress towards justice and reparation, but we’re still lacking basic information about what happened in the Yemen attack, why it happened and what steps if any the US military has taken to address it.”
In the spring of 2025, Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed by US airstrikes during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes (codenamed Operation Rough Rider) against that country’s Houthi government. The Yemen Data Project put the death toll at a minimum of 238 civilians, with another 467 civilians injured.
Such deaths are just part of a long butcher’s bill in Yemen stretching back to the very beginning of Trump’s first term. A report by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights examined 12 US attacks in Yemen between January 2017 and January 2019, 10 of them “counterterrorism airstrikes.” The authors found that at least 38 Yemeni civilians—19 men, six women, and 13 children—were killed and seven others injured in the attacks. Among them was a raid by Navy SEALs on a Yemeni village just days after Trump took office for the first time in which women and children died. A year later, the US fired a missile into a sports utility vehicle near the village of Al Uqla. Three of the men inside were killed instantly. Another died days later in a local hospital. The only survivor, Adel Al Manthari, was gravely wounded and forced to turn to a GoFundMe campaign in 2022 to save his life.
“The Attack Was Horrible and Their Response Was Horrible. I Lost a Wife and a Child”
“It’s a horrible place,” Trump said of Somalia during that same racist rant. “Everything is horrible over there.”
Horrible is a word I also recall from my trip to Somalia to meet the family of Luul Dahir Mohamed and Mariam Shilow Muse in 2023.
The US attack that killed the mother and daughter was the product of faulty intelligence as well as rushed, imprecise targeting by a Special Operations strike cell whose members, according to the military investigation conducted later, considered themselves inexperienced. That inquiry led to an admission that civilians were killed and a strong suggestion of confirmation bias (a psychological phenomenon that leads people to cherry-pick information confirming their preexisting beliefs). Despite that, the investigation exonerated the team involved.
To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam—or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia.
“The strike complied with the applicable rules of engagement,” according to that investigation. “[N]othing in the strike procedures caused this inaccurate [redacted] call.” Luul’s husband and Mariam’s father, Shilow Muse Ali, was stunned as he tried to process those words. “The attack was horrible and their response was horrible. I lost a wife and a child,” he told me. “But I cannot understand the explanation in the investigation. How can you admit that you killed two civilians and also say the rules were followed?”
Trump had, in fact, secretly issued loosened rules for counterterrorism “direct action” operations, including for drone strikes in places like Somalia, according to a partially redacted copy of the document. By the end of March 2017, the number of US airstrikes in Somalia had skyrocketed. “The burden of proof as to who could be targeted and for what reason changed dramatically,” retired Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, recalled. During the Obama administration, by contrast, strikes required high-level approval, according to a drone pilot and strike cell analyst, who served in Somalia the year Luul and Mariam were killed. “Giving strike authority down to a ground commander was a massive difference,” he explained. “It had a big effect.” Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump once again relaxed targeting principles and (all too predictably) US military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across multiple US war zones spiked.
“They have nothing but crime,” President Trump—himself a convicted felon 34 times over—said of Somalia, as he raged on about that country.
To date, no one has ever been held accountable for the deaths of Luul or Mariam—or any other civilians killed in Trump’s war in Somalia. Nor has anyone been held responsible for those killed in the strike in Yemen that gravely wounded Adel Al Manthari. Or those slain in the raid on a Yemeni village by Navy SEALs. Or the innocents who died in the attack on an immigrant detention center in that country. Or in the strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean Sea. Or for the attack on Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran.
Some of those attacks could well have been categorized as crimes of war. Others are certainly extrajudicial killings—or, simply put, outright murders. Those deaths and so many others can be traced back to Donald Trump and his contempt for the lives of people across this planet.
“It’s filthy dirty, disgusting dirty,” Trump said of Somalia, but in truth, that’s a more apt description for the soul of the country that exports slaughter, year after year, and is led by a man who revels in it. “It’s a horrible place,” he continued about Somalia.
And once again, every accusation of his should be considered a confession, too.
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Sharing 'Grim' Survivor Stories, Amnesty Renews Call for War Crimes Probe of US Strike in Yemen
"I have nothing left that keeps me going," said a survivor who lost a leg. "I want them to provide any type of reparation that will help with our life in any way possible. Something that will revive my hope."
Apr 28, 2026
A week after Democratic senators launched an investigation into US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's assault on federal efforts to mitigate civilian harm, Amnesty International on Tuesday renewed its call for a war crimes probe of the American airstrike on a migrant detention center in Yemen that killed dozens of people last April.
While the United States has been bombing Yemen since 2002 as part of the so-called War on Terror, the Trump administration stepped up attacks last spring, in response to Houthi rebels' resistance to Israel's genocidal war on the Gaza Strip.
"The Trump administration's approach to its airstrikes in Yemen from March to May 2025 should have set off alarm bells in the USA and around the world, clearly signaling an urgent need to strengthen measures to protect civilians," Amnesty International USA director Nadia Daar said in a statement exactly one year after the bombing in Saada.
"Instead, the US administration has systematically weakened safeguards, shrinking offices aimed at reducing civilian harm, while simultaneously displaying a dangerous disregard for the lives of civilians endangered by armed conflicts," she continued. "Against that backdrop, attacks such as the US attack on a school in Minab in Iran, which killed [155] people, including 120 children, were a tragically foreseeable consequence of a failure to implement robust civilian-harm mitigation efforts."
Amnesty concluded last month that the US bombing of the Iranian school "packed full of children" on February 28 was "a serious breach of international humanitarian law" and those responsible "must be held accountable."
Erika Guevara Rosas—Amnesty International's senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns—stressed at the time that "the US authorities could, and should, have known it was a school building. Targeting a protected civilian object, such as a school, is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law."
In a potential preview of what Iranian families impacted by that strike will face, Guevara Rosas noted Tuesday that one year after the attack in Yemen, "US officials have failed to hold anyone accountable or even to clarify the status or outcome of the investigations they had announced a year earlier."
"Families of those killed in the attack on the detention center in Yemen are still being denied basic information about what happened, [and] remain without justice for their loved ones," she explained. "Survivors continue to struggle, lacking the means to secure a decent living or even receive adequate medical treatment."
Amnesty interviewed over a dozen survivors identified by pseudonyms, including Araya, a 22-year-old Ethiopian man, who sustained a serious arm injury and said: "If I don't take a painkiller, I feel hopeless and wish to die. I think about how, at such a young age, I can't even support myself and still rely on help from others. The metal rod inside me is very painful and uncomfortable. It drives you insane."
Jirata, a 30-year-old Ethiopian man, has a metal rod in one of his legs, and lost the other in the attack. He told Amnesty that "I have lost hope and I have nothing left that keeps me going. I came here [to Yemen] to work like everyone else to help my family and change mine and their life for the better... Now people carry me to the toilet."
"The US government caused all this and as a result [of the airstrike], I can no longer work and support myself," he detailed. "I want them to provide any type of reparation that will help with our life in any way possible. Something that will revive my hope."
Another Ethiopian man, 32-year-old Abay, similarly said that "I went to Yemen to change my family's life, but now I made my family's life even harder than it was before," due to his leg and hand injuries.
"I feel broken whenever I see their faces," said Abay, who returned to Ethiopia. "You can see the sadness on their faces. I hoped for a better life, to work and change our lives, but everything turned upside down."
Guevara Rosas said that "the story of these migrants is grim and heartbreaking. Traveling to Yemen in search of better opportunities, they were detained by the Houthis, denied their freedom, then attacked in a US airstrike. Those who survived have been left in limbo, with no justice or reparation in sight, nor an explanation for why this happened to them, an acknowledgment of the wrong done to them, or any support offered to help them carry on with their lives."
She argued that "they must receive full, effective, and prompt reparation, including restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition, through an effective and accessible mechanism."
According to Airwars, US forces have killed 443-642 people in Yemen since 2009. The official government estimate for civilian deaths in that time is just 13. The deadline for the Pentagon's next annual report on civilian casualties is May 1.
Guevara Rosas declared that "in order to stop this deadly spiral, the USA must ensure prompt, transparent, impartial, independent, and effective investigations into attacks that have resulted in civilian casualties, including those in Yemen and Iran."
"The US Congress must also urgently step up its oversight role and demand answers, including a public accounting of these strikes and the adequate and prompt provision of reparation to the civilians that have been harmed, and ensure it is not appropriating funds that may contribute to breaches of international law," she added.
So far, both Republican-controlled chambers of Congress have declined to pass a war powers resolution reining in President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran, invasion of Venezuela, or bombings of boats allegedly transporting drugs on the high seas. Still, Democratic Sens. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), Tim Kaine (Va.), and Adam Schiff (Calif.) intend to force a Tuesday vote on a measure aimed at blocking the president's use of US forces in unauthorized hostilities against Cuba.
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Who’s the Real Criminal at Sea? Trump’s Tanker Grab vs. the Houthis’ Anti-Genocide Blockade
How can Washington claim the right to seize or blow up vessels, disrupt maritime trade, and kill civilian boaters—while bombing Yemen and condemning its de facto Houthi government for intercepting ships in the Red Sea to counter Israel’s genocide in Gaza?
Dec 22, 2025
The United States has now intercepted multiple Venezuelan oil tankers as part of its escalating aggression against Venezuela, while also destroying dozens of small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific under the banner of “drug enforcement,” killing over 100 people whose identities the U.S. has obscured. At the same time, the Trump administration has threatened a naval blockade of Venezuela—a sovereign country with which the United States is not at war.
How can Washington claim the right to seize or blow up vessels, disrupt maritime trade, and kill civilian boaters—while bombing Yemen and condemning its de facto Houthi government for intercepting ships in the Red Sea to counter Israel’s genocide in Gaza?
This contrast exposes a stark double standard in U.S. policy. The U.S. government labelled the Houthis’ actions as “terrorism”, piracy, and a threat to U.S. national security, even as the Houthi government presented plausible legal justifications for its actions based on the laws of war. But Washington has tried to normalize—or even glorify—its own attacks on tankers, pineros (ferries or water-taxis) and fishing boats, which violate the most basic principles of international law.
Beginning in November 2023, Yemen’s Houthi movement launched a naval campaign in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Arabian Sea in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The Houthis publicly announced their criteria, stating they would target only vessels linked to Israel, bound for Israeli ports, owned by Israeli companies, or connected to states materially supporting Israel’s war.
The United States and its allies immediately denounced these actions as criminal. And there were legitimate grounds for scrutiny. Human rights groups raised concerns about attacks that struck vessels without obvious Israeli connections and about the safety and treatment of civilian crews. Over the course of the campaign, the Houthis targeted more than 100 commercial vessels, damaged dozens, sank several, and seized at least one ship outright—the Galaxy Leader—detaining its multinational crew for more than a year before releasing them in connection with Gaza ceasefire negotiations.
Legal experts have been unequivocal: the United States has no jurisdiction to seize foreign-flagged vessels to enforce its domestic laws or unilateral sanctions outside its territory, particularly in another country’s territorial waters.
But as a matter of law, the Houthis consistently framed their actions as blockade and interdiction during an armed conflict, justified by Israel’s grave breaches of international humanitarian law. That legal framework exists. Under the Geneva Conventions and customary international law, parties to an armed conflict have the right—and in cases of grave breaches, the obligation—to interdict shipping that materially supports a belligerent committing mass civilian harm. In the case of Israel’s genocide, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found, and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) has affirmed, that all states are obliged to cut off all military and economic support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
The United States’ response was not to pressure Israel to halt its genocidal assault—an outcome that would have also immediately ended the Houthi campaign—but to unleash overwhelming force against Yemen. Beginning in December 2023, Washington organized Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational naval deployment backed by extensive U.S. airpower. Over the following year, the United States and Britain carried out hundreds of airstrikes on Yemen, bombing radar sites, missile launchers, ports, the capital, Sanaa, and other infrastructure. Several hundred Houthi fighters were killed, along with scores of civilians. One U.S. strike on the Ras Isa oil terminal killed dozens of African migrants when U.S. bombs hit a detention facility.
But how do the Houthi interdictions compare with the Trump administration’s actions toward Venezuela?
On December 10, Donald Trump boasted to reporters, “We have just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela — a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized actually,” as his administration released video of U.S. Marines rappelling from helicopters onto a civilian oil tanker. This was not a conflict zone. Venezuela is not at war with the United States. There was no UN Security Council authorization, no armed conflict, and no claim of self-defense.
Since then, additional Venezuelan-linked tankers have been intercepted or turned back, and the administration has openly threatened a naval blockade. Meanwhile, U.S. forces have destroyed dozens of small boats in the region under the pretext of counter-narcotics operations, killing over 100 people at sea without arrests, trials, or even public identification of the victims. These were not lawful acts of war or legitimate law enforcement. They were extralegal, summary uses of lethal force.
Under international law, seizing civilian commercial vessels in international waters or imposing a naval blockade outside of a declared armed conflict are “acts of aggression” and can constitute acts of war. The Trump administration claims its actions are justified by U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. But those sanctions are themselves illegal under international law. Only the UN Security Council has the authority to impose and enforce sanctions. Unilateral coercive measures—especially when enforced through military force—violate the UN Charter.
Legal experts have been unequivocal: the United States has no jurisdiction to seize foreign-flagged vessels to enforce its domestic laws or unilateral sanctions outside its territory, particularly in another country’s territorial waters.
The distinction could not be clearer.
The Houthis declared a blockade and attacked ships that violated it, based on a legal rationale rooted in the laws of armed conflict, to try to end mass civilian slaughter in Gaza, and their interceptions stopped when a ceasefire was declared in Gaza.
On the other hand, the United States, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has seized tankers, destroyed boats, killed people at sea, and threatened a blockade against a country it is not at war with—not to try to end a war or save a civiliam population from genocide, but simply in pursuit of extralegal regime change and U.S. control of that country’s most valuable resources.
If the United States wants safety at sea, whether in the Caribbean or the Red Sea, it should stop enforcing illegal sanctions by the illegal use of military force, and stop enabling genocide in Palestine. US murder and violence against other people and countries does not become lawful simply because officials in the White House wish that it was.
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