Pakistan

A US drone strike killed the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, as he travelled under an alias through Pakistan from Iran. His civilian taxi driver also died.

This was the first drone strike in Pakistan to be conducted by the US military not the CIA. It was the first US strike in Balochistan, an area in the west of the country. It was just the second drone strike in Pakistan to be publicly discussed by the US president. It was the third drone strike this year, the first since February.

Afghanistan

With the opium poppy harvest over, the Afghan Taliban stepped up its operations in the south and north of the country.

The US continued its counter-terrorism strikes against al Qaeda and the Afghan off-shoot of Islamic State. It also continued force protection strikes, defending international and Afghan troops from attack by the Taliban. The most significant of these self-defence attacks hit in Pakistan. The US killed the leader of the Taliban because of the threat he posed to US and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.

The Bureau is collecting data on individual strikes in Afghanistan, summarised above. However not all strikes are reported in open source material. The US Air Force publishes an aggregate summary of strikes in Afghanistan without any casualty information, which we have reproduced below. The figures for May will be released in June.

Yemen

There were no reported US strikes in Yemen last month.

Somalia

A US strike on May 12 killed five al Shabaab fighters, the Pentagon said. The attack targeted al Shabaab fighters who had pinned down a squad of Ugandan peacekeepers.

Kenyan and Somali forces attacked an al Shabaab checkpoint two days previously in the same region of Somalia. US forces were there “in an advise and assist role” but “did not participate in any kinetic operations,” a spokesperson told the Bureau.

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