BALIDHIDIN, Somalia — The dead Islamic State fighter was sprawled out on the ridge, bloodstains darkening in the sun, as a line of heavily armed Somali soldiers snaked down the mountainside to a fortified cave — their camouflage uniforms marking a new front line in the fight against the global terrorist group.

The Somali branch has become the Islamic State’s new operational and financial hub, according to U.S. Africa Command (Africom), and local officials estimate there are as many as 1,000 militants under its command. Large numbers of foreign fighters have flowed into Somalia, establishing a formidable force that now threatens Western targets. The group has also become a key source of funding for other Islamic State affiliates around the world, which have killed thousands of people, including U.S. soldiers, according to U.N. investigators.

The struggle to contain this rising threat has fallen to forces in Puntland, a remote, semiautonomous region in one of the world’s poorest, weakest nations. Puntland’s soldiers are now locked in a grinding fight — one with major international implications, but without Western support.

More than a month into their largest offensive against the group, Puntland officials say they have recaptured about 50 Islamic State outposts and small bases and killed more than 150 fighters, nearly all of them foreign. But the toll on their side is growing, too, and there are fears here about how much longer they can sustain the fight.

Washington Post reporters toured the ever-expanding battlefield in Puntland, including recently discovered Islamic State caves; spoke to imprisoned deserters who said they were forced to join the group; interviewed Somali and U.S. officials; and reviewed evidence collected from captured phones and drones. What emerges is the most complete account to date of how the Islamic State was able to regroup here over the past decade after losing its self-declared caliphate in the Middle East.

On Feb. 1, President Donald Trump ordered the first airstrike of his presidency, against senior Islamic State commanders in northern Somalia. A U.S. intelligence official, speaking like others in this story on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the strike targeted a cell responsible for planning external attacks, including against American interests and their allies.

Beyond the strike, the Trump administration has not detailed its plans for Somalia. Africom said it was unable to comment on future policy.

For decades, Washington has sought to prop up the government in Mogadishu, but Somalia remains a fractured state. Political divisions have hampered the fight to claw back swaths of the south from the al-Qaida-aligned militant group al-Shabab and, more recently, allowed the Islamic State to establish a foothold in the north.

The Islamic State in Somalia broke away from al-Shabab in 2015; its secretive, henna-bearded leader, Abdulqadir Mumin, is now the Islamic State’s global caliph, the U.S. military says. Unlike its rivals in al-Shabab, the Islamic State has not focused on conquering territory in Somalia; its aspirations are larger. Burrowed into the Miskad mountains, on the very tip of the Horn of Africa, it has built an international terrorism hub.

In its early days, the Somali branch received money from Iraq and Syria, but soon found its own revenue streams, raking in millions of dollars each year by extorting local businesses. Those who resisted were firebombed.

Before long, al-Karrar, the group’s regional financial office, had established a nerve center, funneling money to militants across multiple regions, in countries ranging from Turkey to South Africa, according to U.S. officials and United Nations investigators. A January 2023 raid by U.S. Special Forces on a cave complex in northern Somalia killed Islamic State financier Bilal al-Sudani. He had sent cash to Islamic State-Khorasan, the Afghan branch responsible for the 2021 Kabul airport bombing that killed 13 U.S. soldiers and at least 170 Afghans.

The Islamic State has also become a more sophisticated fighting force, employing suicide drones, long-distance snipers and bombs.

Last year, its fighters defeated al-Shabab after more than a year of bloody battle, vastly expanding their territory in Puntland.

The new military offensive — planned for months and launched on Jan. 2 — was delayed while Puntland tried to negotiate support from international partners, including the United States. But the political transition in Washington hamstrung talks, according to Puntland security officials, and Trump’s pause on foreign funding has complicated them further.

An Africom official said the Pentagon was monitoring the operation but not providing any support. Puntland says it also gets no help from the Somali state, which is Africom’s main point of contact. Isolated but determined, Puntland drew up plans to go after the militants in their mountain redoubts. But the Islamic State struck first.

Deadly tactics

In the early hours of New Year’s Eve, the Somali branch sent 12 suicide bombers into the town of Dharjaale. They targeted military vehicles and blew up a cluster of nearby homes where top military and political figures were resting.

“Our men in the truck — we only found their bones,” said Mohamed Abdulhakim Salad, who witnessed the attack. None of the attackers were Somali. There were four Tanzanians, two Moroccans and two Saudis alongside an Ethiopian, a Libyan, a Tunisian and a Yemeni, the Islamic State said in a statement. The Post cross-checked their portraits with photos of the dead at the scene. The Tunisian, known as Abu Zubayr al-Tunisi, previously led a unit attacking police in Iraq before returning home to target Tunisian forces, said Mohamed Mubarak, the head of Puntland’s security coordination office, citing intelligence from his counterparts in Tunis.

Officials here say it was the first suicide bombing carried out by foreigners. One wounded attacker, begging for mercy, waited until nine soldiers were around him before blowing himself up, witnesses said.

In January, troops said they killed a woman who shot two soldiers — the first time a female combat fighter from an Islamist group has been seen in Somalia.

“We have not taken many prisoners,” Mubarak said grimly, citing other incidents where the Islamic State planted bombs on dead fighters or used its own wounded to set up ambushes. Overstretched explosives teams rarely have time to defuse and examine suicide vests or bombmaking labs, Mubarak said. The 30-man unit has lost 27 members in the past five years, often in targeted killings.

Puntland soldiers and logistics convoys have targeted dozens of times by drones, a tactic commonly used by militants in Syria and Iraq but new to Somalia.

Footage from captured drones shared with The Post showed that some were equipped with thermal imaging cameras, allowing for nighttime attacks. One model was identified by risk management company Vates Somalia as retailing for upward of $9,000.

The expensive drones can carry and release up to four separate munitions. Cheaper self-detonating versions explode into trucks, water tankers or crowds of troops. Injured soldier Abdiqani Muse Warsame, recovering in the hospital after a recent attack, said drones had repeatedly attacked his unit at night.

“We just have our naked eyes and our guns to shoot them,” he said. Foreign fighters

Puntland’s prisons have more than a dozen men who maintain they were tricked into joining the Islamic State. Some of their claims — like that of a Yemeni man caught during a failed attempt to blow up a police checkpoint in the port city of Bosaso a couple of nights before — didn’t add up.

“I was in a knife fight,” he said sullenly, despite the shrapnel wounds on his face and body and the confiscated evidence spilled across the table: a pistol, small improvised explosives, and a constellation of SIM cards that included a Thuraya satellite phone and Omani and Saudi numbers.

Also in custody are six Moroccans, who say they were recruited in 2023 from the city of Fes. They described an elaborate journey: driving overland through multiple countries, flying to Addis Ababa and sneaking across the Ethiopian border with Somalia. They traveled through the mountains for days, they said, often in the company of other foreigners, including men from Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Sudan and Ethiopia.

Each swore they were promised jobs and were shocked when they were suddenly surrounded by armed men. They said they were taken to a large cave that functioned as a reception area before being split up into smaller groups. The instructors mostly wore masks, they said, but did not appear to be Somali.

“We trained with Kalashnikovs, in a group of around 30 people — Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Somalis and two Palestinians,” said one of the Moroccans. Like other prisoners, he spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

“They used us like enslaved people, digging out caves and bringing water,” said a third prisoner, who said he joined a group of about 80 men upon arriving in the region. “They used to talk about jihad but most of the time we were too tired to listen,” he said.

The Moroccans were recruited online and in person. All had skills. One had an electronics businesses; another sold phones and fixed cars; there was a carpenter, a lawyer and an alfalfa farmer. All said they had sneaked away from the group and surrendered to local authorities, accounts corroborated by Puntland officials.

“We had to unload food from camels and carry it into the mountains,” said one prisoner. “I was afraid because there were four guards with night-vision goggles.” That night, he and a companion made a break for it, he said, running through the desert until they collapsed.

A young Ethiopian prisoner said he was only 15 when he and two other young friends had left the Oromia region, stricken by drought and torn apart by a bloody insurgency. They sneaked into the mountains of northern Somalia two years ago, he said, hoping to find jobs in the Middle East.

But they were intercepted by the Islamic State, he said, and an Oromo-speaking imam tried to persuade them to become fighters.

The young Ethiopian said he was eventually trained and deployed to an outpost to fight al-Shabab, where he secretly stockpiled rations, then deserted.

Three Tanzanian men, brought blindfolded from an intelligence facility and blinking in the fluorescent light, said they’d been tricked into joining the Islamic State in the past 18 months. Each said they could identify the men who recruited them by promising jobs, all connected to the same fish market in Zanzibar.

“On the first day we were told the rules — no talking, no phones, no bright colors so you avoid the drones,” one of the men said.

A Puntland intelligence officer explained how recruits had been targeted in waves. Poor Oromo migrants hoping to get smuggled to the Middle East were preyed on early to boost manpower, he said, and many had indeed been conscripted against their will.

More targeted recruitment began in 2022 as the Islamic State looked for men with specific skill sets, the intelligence official said, such as Syrians and Tunisians with expertise in drones and bomb making.

A mountain stronghold

In 2020, months after losing its last territory in the Middle East, the Islamic State restructured its African operations, placing affiliates in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado and the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo under al-Karrar, the Somali financial hub.

Both groups, which have received funding from the Somali branch, have massacred thousands of civilians.

A 2021 conviction of an Islamic State financier in Mogadishu traced $400,000 sent from Puntland to Uganda, South Africa and Congo. Funds have also been sent onward from South Africa to Mozambique, the United Arab Emirates, Tanzania, Mozambique and Kenya, according to research by the Bridgeway Foundation, a Texas-based group focused on global conflict.

At the center of an international financial web, the Islamic State in Somalia has entrenched itself in one of the world’s harshest, most inhospitable places. Boulder-strewn scrub often forces trucks into single-file tracks — a gift to makers of roadside bombs, which have killed many soldiers and blasted deep craters in the ruts.

Touring recently captured positions with Puntland forces, Post reporters saw what appeared to be a machine workshop. Tools and car parts were strewn across several small rooms that were dug into the mountainside and reinforced with cement and tires. Semicircles of rocks formed defensive positions along the ridge above, which the soldiers took turns blasting with an antiaircraft gun.

“This road up here leads nowhere except other [Islamic State] bases,” a Somali officer said, pointing to smooth vehicle tracks that meandered away. “They built it themselves.”

In another location, a decomposing body lay outside a cave fortified with sandbags and a cistern carved into it. Low-hanging rocks at the back obscured a small crawl space that led to another room lined with tarpaulins. There were electric wires dangling from the ceiling; the ground was littered with partly burned papers and crushed computer parts.

“Daesh! Daesh!” exclaimed the soldiers in the cave, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State. One pointed to the dead man’s braids — a common Oromo style that is almost unheard-of in Somalia. The dead man had some detonators on him, the soldier said, but no one knew where they had gone.

“It’s a big problem,” Mubarak said with a sigh. “People are taking things as war booty.”

Back at headquarters, officers displayed 15 phones, including a clutch of smartphones, that had been recently seized. One SIM they’d looked at was linked to about $180,000 in payments, said Brig. Gen. Jamal Arab Yusuf Jibril, director general of the Puntland Intelligence Agency. Some phones showed calls to Mongolia and the United States. But evidence was being lost, he said; soldiers sometimes found a smartphone, threw away the SIM and put in their own.

Missing partners

Senior officers in Puntland say they have committed everything they have to the fight against the Islamic State - even the internal security minister is present at the forward operating base in Balidhidin, rapping out orders from behind his sunglasses and gesturing with his cane - but they say they need help from allies.

Though no one wants foreign boots on the ground, drone jammers, bomb detectors and night-vision equipment would go a long way, said Gen. Abdirahman Mohamed Jama, head of the Puntland Maritime Police Forces.

“Yesterday, we had 10 [improvised explosive devices] on our route,” he said.

Citizens are donating food and taking up arms, but officials worry that public opinion could turn if the death toll keeps climbing. Puntland has just one two-person helicopter for medevacs, which it paid for itself, and the fighting is about to get a lot bloodier as soldiers push up a wide valley believed to house the Islamic State’s most fortified positions.

Last week, soldiers came under attack from mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns mounted on either side of the canyon. Officials said nearly 60 militants were killed in the fighting, which also left dozens of local forces dead and wounded. The tiny helicopter buzzed back and forth all day as ambulances jolted painfully over the rocky ground.

On Tuesday, the Islamic State attacked Puntland soldiers deep in the valley with car bombs and suicide attackers on motorbikes. Heavy losses were reported on both sides.

“We have been talking to the Americans about this offensive for months - about air support, medical supplies, intelligence sharing, military supplies - but none of it has happened,” Mubarak said. “We lost a lot more people than we would have if we had moved earlier.”

The UAE supplied some equipment and have carried out a couple of airstrikes. Regional neighbors have donated small amounts of materiel. It’s not nearly enough, according to Puntland President Said Abdullahi Deni, who spoke to Post reporters at the airport before sending off wounded soldiers for treatment abroad.

“We are fighting a global war alone,” he said.