The troops' arrival marks the first presence of American military forces in Somalia, other than a small unit of counterterrorism advisers, since March 1994 when the U.S. pulled out of the U.N. intervention operation in the war-torn state, five months after 18 U.S. special forces personnel were killed in a battle with Somali militiamen that inspired the movie Black Hawk Down. The country's new Somali-American president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, last week declared a new offensive against the extremist group, which is based in Somalia but has claimed responsibility for major attacks in East Africa, including the Garissa University attack in neighboring Kenya in April 2015 that killed 148 people. In March 2016, U.S. drones and manned aircraft launched an airstrike that killed up to 150 militants at an al-Shabab training camp north of Mogadishu, which the Pentagon believed was planning to carry out an attack on U.S. and African Union forces in the region.
The United States is to deploy troops to Somalia for the first time since 1994 to help train the Somali Armed Forces in their conflict with al-Shabaab insurgents.