IT DID not take long. Within weeks, US President Donald J Trump authorised the firing of missiles at some caves in Somalia, where — he claimed — a military leader of Isis (or the Islamic State) was hiding. No US president in the past quarter-century has started his term without an attack on “terrorists.”

Three days after he became president, on January 23 2009, Barack Obama sent an aircraft to fire a missile at Ziraki village in North Waziristan (Pakistan). It “missed” the Taliban target and instead killed at least nine civilians and injured many others (including 14-year-old Faheem Qureshi). There was never an acknowledgement for this “mistake.” Nor has there been any real account of the civilian destruction in the Momand Valley in Nangarhar province (Afghanistan), where Trump ordered the dropping of a 21,600lb or 9,800kg “mother of all bombs” in 2017 onto a network of caves.

We likely will not hear from Somalia’s civilians in a long time. This has become a habit of US presidents. They start their administration. They fire missiles at ordinary people in a belt that stretches from northern Africa to southern Asia. And then preen about being tough against “terror.”