A CIA officer was killed in combat in Somalia in recent days, U.S. media said Thursday without releasing details of how the agent died.<\/p>\n
The veteran officer was a member of the CIA's Special Activities Center, a paramilitary branch that carries out some of the US intelligence agency's most dangerous tasks, The New York Times<\/em> said.<\/p>\n The officer died of injuries suffered during an operation last week, according to CNN.<\/p>\n The CIA has not commented publicly on the death.<\/p>\n Washington has some 700 troops deployed in Somalia carrying out training of Somali forces and conducting counter-terrorism raids against the Al-Shabaab militant group, which Washington designated a terrorist movement in 2008.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, Washington put on its terror blacklist the leader of an elite unit of the Al-Qaeda-affiliated group blamed for a January attack in Kenya that killed three Americans.<\/p>\n Al-Shabaab is estimated to have between 5,000 and 9,000 fighters who have vowed to overthrow the Somali government, which is supported by some 20,000 troops from the African Union.<\/p>\n The slain US operative was a veteran of special forces operations, having previously been a member of the elite SEAL Team 6, the Times <\/em>reported.<\/p>\n The outgoing administration of President Donald Trump is considering withdrawing all US forces from Somalia by the time he leaves office in January, the paper added.<\/p>\n At the start of his term, Trump gave the Pentagon a freer hand to expand their operations, with both air strikes and ground raids, in the war-ravaged African country.<\/p>\n But an official report released in February said that "despite continued US air strikes in Somalia and US assistance to African partner forces, Al-Shabaab appears to be a growing threat that aspires to strike the U.S. homeland."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A CIA officer was killed in combat in Somalia in recent days, U.S. media said Thursday without releasing details of how the agent died. The veteran officer was a member of the CIA's Special Activities Center, a paramilitary branch that carries out some of the US intelligence agency's most dangerous tasks, The New York Times […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/toptrendingnews.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}