Journey has released a third advance track from its forthcoming studio album, Freedom, a heavy, funk-flavored mid-tempo rocker called “Let It Rain.”
The song is available now as a digital download and via streaming services, while a visualizer video for the tune has debuted at Journey’s official YouTube channel.
“Let It Rain” showcases some sizzling guitar work by Neal Schon, who in a post on his socialmediapages describes the song as “a Sassy Funkin Rocker,” adding, “New Chapter from us and definitely proud of it.”
As previously reported, Freedom is a 15-track collection that will be released on July 8. The other songs that have been issued from the album are “The Way We Used to Be” and “You Got the Best of Me,” which debuted in June 2021 and last month, respectively. You can pre-orderFreedom now.
Meanwhile, this Friday, May 20, at 9 p.m. ET, Schon will make an appearance on Talk Shop Live’s Rock N Roll Channel, where he will chat about the album and Journey’s upcoming tour plans. In addition, autographed copies of Freedom will be available to pre-order during the steaming event.
Journey recently wrapped up the initial leg of its Freedom Tour 2022, although the final four shows were postponed because an unspecified member of the group tested positive for COVID-19. Those dates are expected to be rescheduled in the coming months.
The band next scheduled performances are a series of four special symphonic concerts in Las Vegas that will take place at the new, state-of-the-art Resorts World Theatre. The shows are scheduled for July 15, 16, 22 and 23 and tickets are available now.
Schon also promises that Journey is planning a summer leg of its tour.
(DALLAS) — Dallas police arrested a suspect in connection with the May 11 shooting of three women in a hair salon in the city’s Koreatown. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime and could be linked to a series of recent shootings at Asian-run businesses in the city, police said.
The salon owner, an employee and a customer are all Korean, according to ABC affiliate station WFAA in Dallas. The women suffered nonfatal injuries and were transported to a local hospital, according to police.
Police said Tuesday morning that a suspect, who was not named, was in custody and that further information on the arrest will be provided by Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia later in the day.
The FBI is investigating the incident as a hate crime.
“The Dallas FBI Field Office, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District in Texas, and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice have opened a federal hate crime investigation into the incident at Hair World Salon in Dallas,” a spokesperson for the FBI field office in Dallas told ABC News in a statement on Monday. “We are in close communication with Dallas Police and are partnering together to thoroughly investigate this incident. As this is an ongoing investigation, we are not able to comment further at this time.”
Police met with members of the community at a town hall in Koreatown on Monday amid concerns for the public’s safety.
Two of the shooting victims — the owner and an employee — were present at the meeting, according to WFAA. The employee spoke with the help of an interpreter and her was face covered. The women did not reveal their names.
Garcia said at a press conference on Friday that law enforcement “concluded three recent shootings of Asian run businesses may be connected” and the suspect in each incident was driving a similar vehicle.
Police said they learned from a witness report that an unknown Black male parked what appeared to be “a dark color minivan-type vehicle” on Royal Lane and then walked across the parking lot and into the establishment, allegedly opening fire as soon as he entered the salon.
Police also released a security image of a maroon minivan they said the gunmen fled the scene in.
Garcia said the shooting at the salon may be linked to one that happened a day before and one that took place last month.
Police learned from witness reports that on April 2 a driver in a red minivan drove past a strip mall of Asian-run businesses and fired shots at three businesses. No one was injured.
On Tuesday a suspect in a burgundy van or car drove by and shot into Asian-run businesses near 4849 Sunnyvale Street, police said.
“Out of an abundance of caution, we have reached out to our partners to make them aware of the possible connection and ask for their assistance,” Garcia said. “This includes the FBI and member agencies of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. We are also working with North Texas police partners to determine if this criminal action has or is taking place in their jurisdictions.”
Garcia said police will be increasing the presence of high visibility patrol officers in areas in the city where there are large Asian American populations.
“We are turning to every resident of the city of Dallas to keep an eye out and safeguard our city,” Garcia said. “Hate has no place here.”
These incidents in Dallas come amid a spate of attacks targeting Asian Americans across the nation, which spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABC News’ Bill Hutchinson contributed to this report.
Harry Styles only has to wait a few more days until fans can listen to Harry’s House, his third studio album, which drops Friday. To make the occasion all the more special, the singer is taking over a New York venue for a special event.
Harry announced the event, dubbed “ONE NIGHT ONLY IN NEW YORK,” will see him taking over UBS Arena at Belmont Park in Elmont, NY, this Friday. He’ll perform the entirety of Harry’s House for the first time ever.
If you can’t make it to Elmont in person, no worries — the concert will be streamed exclusively on Apple Music in 167 countries around the world starting at 9 p.m. EST on May 20, the same day his album arrives. There will also be several encore presentations airing on May 22 at 12 p.m. ET and May 26 at 11 a.m. ET.
Harry is very passionate about his new project, which he recently told Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, “This is my favorite album at the moment, and I love it so much.”
He also hinted Harry’s House is “so much more intimate” than his past works and that he’s excited to reintroduce himself with his new project.
Friends of late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins tell Rolling Stone that he expressed concern with the band’s heavy touring schedule in the days leading up to his unexpected death this past March.
According to Pearl Jam‘s Matt Cameron, Hawkins had a “heart-to-heart” conversation with Foo frontman Dave Grohl about the subject.
“[Hawkins] told me that he ‘couldn’t f***ing do it anymore’ — those were his words,” Cameron says. “So I guess they did come to some understanding, but it just seems like the touring schedule got even crazier after that.”
An anonymous friend adds, “The fact that [Hawkins] finally spoke to Dave and really told him that he couldn’t do this and that he wouldn’t do it anymore, that was freeing for him…That did take a year of working up the guts to do.”
Meanwhile, “multiple friends” tell Rolling Stone that Hawkins had “lost consciousness” while on a plane this past December.
“[Hawkins] just said he was exhausted and collapsed, and they had to pump him full of IVs and stuff,” says Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers, adding that incident was “one of the straws that broke the camel’s back” that led him to approach Grohl and the band’s management with his concerns.
However, a rep for Foo Fighters tells Rolling Stone that Hawkins “never ‘informed Dave and [management]'” of wanting to scale back his touring, and also denies that there ever was a “heart-to-heart” or “any sort of meeting on this topic” between Hawkins, Grohl and the band’s management. The rep also tells Rolling Stone that the reports of Hawkins losing consciousness on the plane are “not true.”
Hawkins died March 25 ahead of a scheduled Foo Fighters show Bogotá, Colombia. He was 50. All Foo Fighters’ remaining tour dates have been canceled.
(NEW YORK) — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” into neighboring Ukraine began on Feb. 24, with Russian forces invading from Belarus, to the north, and Russia, to the east. Ukrainian troops have offered “stiff resistance,” according to U.S. officials.
The Russian military has since launched a full-scale ground offensive in eastern Ukraine’s disputed Donbas region, attempting to capture the strategic port city of Mariupol to secure a coastal corridor to the Moscow-annexed Crimean Peninsula.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern.
May 17, 9:20 am
Biden to meet with leaders of Sweden, Finland as they seek to join NATO
President Joe Biden will host Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson of Sweden and President Sauli Niinistö of Finland at the White House on Thursday as the two countries seek to join NATO, the White House announced Tuesday.
The three leaders will “discuss Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO applications and European security,” according to a statement from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
(NEW YORK) — The maker of Skittles, Starburst and Life Savers gummies announced a voluntary recall over the possible “presence of a very thin metal strand embedded in the gummies or loose in the bag.”
“We received reports from consumers alerting us to this matter and are not aware of any illnesses to date,” Mars Wrigley Confectionery US, LLC said in its announcement.
The recall impacted 13 product SKUs ranging from 3.5-ounce to 12-ounce share size bags of gummies.
Click here for the full product list and additional packaging details from the Food and Drug Administration.
“Products were manufactured by a third party and distributed in the United States, Canada and Mexico,” the company said.
Consumers can locate the 10-digit manufacturing code on the back of the package. The first three digits will indicate if it’s included in the recall.
“Mars Wrigley Confectionery US, LLC will work with retailers to remove recalled products from store shelves,” the company said. “If consumers believe they have purchased a recalled item, they should dispose of the product and not consume it. Consumers with questions can contact the company by calling 1-800-651-2564 or by visiting https://www.mars.com/contact-us.”
(NEW YORK) — Within the pages of the alleged Buffalo shooter’s plan to attack a Buffalo, New York supermarket, he described the radical ideals he said he cultivated on the internet.
It included racist and antisemitic rants reminiscent of the sentiments espoused by shooters who committed similar atrocities in El Paso, Texas, and Charleston, South Carolina, in recent years, according to an ABC News review of the document.
Federal security agencies have increasingly sounded the alarm on white supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists as a “significant domestic terrorism threat.”
However, experts on hate in the U.S. said this most recent mass shooting highlights how little the country has done in reckoning with the growing danger of white supremacy in this country.
“We’ve had too many wake-up calls at this point for me to feel confident that we’re going to suddenly change the current path that we are on,” Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told ABC News.
White supremacists don’t just look like white-hooded Ku Klux Klan members from the history books, experts said.
Radicalization can occur anywhere and without a particular group or organization to belong to thanks to the internet and the normalization of hateful rhetoric in media, experts said. It’s given right-wing extremism an environment to thrive and grow.
“We better understand this is a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Marc Morial, president of civil rights organization National Urban League, told ABC News.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a nonprofit policy research organization, found that alleged right-wing attacks and plots have accounted for the majority of all U.S. terrorist incidents since 1994.
“The last two years — 2021 and 2020 — were the highest recorded years of domestic terrorism, plots and attacks, so the trends are pretty concerning,” CSIS Senior Vice President Seth Jones said in an interview with ABC News.
However, Jones said the federal government needs to do a better job collecting and releasing data on domestic terrorist attacks and plots and informing Americans about the severity of right-wing extremism.
There is no public release of such information, he said, which has made it very difficult for Americans to understand the gravity of this problem.
Since 2014, CSIS found that these attacks have been on the rise. Simultaneously, hate crimes have also been on the rise, particularly anti-Black, anti-immigrant and antisemitic attacks, according to FBI data.
“It’s a movement of hatred and violence,” Morial said. “This is not someone just ranting on the internet.”
The normalization of white supremacy and the growing divisive rhetoric of the far-right, Hayden and Morial said, serves to exploit the concerns of vulnerable populations regarding social issues, score political points and win gains for people in power.
“As long as very wealthy people are willing to exploit these feelings of anger in the country, this is going to keep happening,” Hayden said.
“The reality is, they know what they’re doing when they bring up great replacement theory on the air,” Hayden continued. “They know what they’re doing when they dehumanize immigrants. They know what kind of effect it’s going to have on people who are already predisposed to being mistrustful and frightened.”
Experts said there are two routes to combatting white supremacist extremism in America — personally and through policy.
For example, experts say America’s gun violence problem has only made racist violence more deadly. White supremacy has been the motive behind several fatal mass shootings in recent years, past ABC News reporting shows. Experts recommend gun control efforts as a potential solution to deadly extremism.
“This is a deep-seated challenge in the United States, particularly in a culture where individuals have such easy access to guns,” Jones said. “That’s the difference, frankly, between the US and Europe right now, which also has a significant white supremacist challenge in Germany, the U.K., several Nordic countries. What they don’t have, though, is easy access to guns.”
Others stress the importance of getting government funding for improved security in community centers and gathering places, as well as prevention programs and resources that intervene in the radicalization process.
On a personal level, experts recommend calling out racism and white supremacy in your communities as another way to de-normalize and de-platform racist narratives.
Experts also recommend watching out for loved ones who may be encountering extremist ideals online, and avoid leaving them isolated. They say isolation and vulnerability can become a pathway to radicalization.
“Your silence is your acceptance,” Rashawn Ray, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, told ABC News.
“Unfortunately, this is a part of the DNA that created the United States of America and even though there has been progress, these sorts of incidents continue to show that we are not as far as we think we are,” Ray said.
(NEW YORK) — For people in jails and prisons across the country, where reproductive health care is already abysmal, the potential end of Roe v. Wade is a haunting prospect.
“[People are] going to be forced to carry a pregnancy and be forced to give birth — that literally will be part of their sentence, their punishment,” said Carolyn Sufrin, associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “It’s hard to predict the depths of trauma and adverse health effects that we might see with this, but I think we can imagine that it’s going to be profound.”
Women are the fastest growing incarcerated demographic, with more than 200,000 women incarcerated right now. Estimates show that at least 58,000 pregnant people enter the carceral system each year, according to The Sentencing Project and the Prison Policy Initiative.
“Overturning Roe is going to force thousands of incarcerated people to give birth and carry pregnancies in health care systems that have been proven to not be capable of providing adequate prenatal care,” said Corene Kendrick, the deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project.
Thirteen states have so-called trigger laws that could go into effect if federal abortion protections are demolished, according to the Guttmacher Institute. These laws effectively ban all abortions, with some banning abortion after six or eight weeks of pregnancy.
At least seven of these states have some of the nation’s highest rates of female incarceration, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics data: Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming, Kentucky, Arkansas and Mississippi.
Between trigger laws and other set or expected laws, at least 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion if the Supreme Court weakens or overturns Roe v. Wade, per Guttmacher. This means being forced to give birth behind bars could become a reality for tens of thousands of people each year.
Adequate reproductive care — and especially abortion access — is hard to come by in these facilities as it is. There are currently no federal standards for reproductive care and no required system of oversight when it comes to providing health care in these facilities.
Reports have shown that some people are shackled to bedposts while giving birth, and others have been forced to endure labor in solitary confinement. Some people have experienced miscarriages or other pregnancy complications from their jail cell, Sufrin and Kendrick said.
“Incarceration is an inherently traumatizing and right-violating experience,” Sufrin said. “In the most extreme cases, we see pregnant people who are in active labor and are clearly in pain and contracting or their water’s broken and they’re bleeding — they’re ignored or minimized and then they give birth in their jail cells.”
Alejandra Pablos, a formerly incarcerated woman and reproductive justice organizer, told ABC News she believes she had no bodily autonomy while incarcerated.
While she was detained in Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, she said she remembers strict call times for doctors, poor nutrition and hurdles toward accessing basic care like birth control and OB-GYN visits.
“For me, as long as these things exist — prisons, cages, threats to our our self determination, the right to make decisions over my sexuality, my body — we will never have reproductive justice in the U.S.” Pablos told ABC News.
Pregnant incarcerated people are also at higher risk of miscarriage, premature delivery and low birth weight.
“There’s been numerous examples over the years across the country, of people in jails and prisons who did not receive appropriate prenatal care and suffered miscarriages, stillbirths or other negative outcomes,” Kendrick said.
As for abortions, a 2021 Guttmacher study found that many prisons and jails make incarcerated women pay for the treatment — of the 19 state prisons studied that allowed abortions, two-thirds of them required the incarcerated woman to pay for the treatment.
Of the jails that allowed abortions, 25% of those required the incarcerated woman to pay for the procedure. Of the pregnancies that ended during the study, 1.3% of instances in prisons and 15% in jails were abortions.
Several jails and prisons in states that are hostile toward abortion did not allow abortions at all.
“Prisons and jails are not the place where people who are pregnant should be ever, ” Kendrick said.
She instead recommended diversion programs or early release for pregnant people, considering a vast majority of incarcerated women are charged or convicted of nonviolent offenses.
At least a quarter of women in jails have not been convicted of a crime, the Prison Policy Initiative states.
“They’re there because they are too poor to afford to bail out to be back with their families,” Kendrick said.
If Roe is overturned, experts say these cracks in the foundations of abortion and reproductive care in jails, prisons and other detention centers will only make life more dangerous for women behind bars.
(NEW YORK) — By spring of 2021, Rashelle Chase-Miller knew she’d have to make some hard decisions.
Schools in Portland, Oregon — including her son Leo’s charter — were reopening in-person. But Chase-Miller, herself born and raised in the City of Roses, had reservations. For decades, she’d watched the schools — especially in her historically Black neighborhood — fall into disrepair.
In particular, she worried about ventilation. Vigorous air flow and filtration are crucial for preventing outbreaks of the COVID-19 virus. Yet, an August 2021 inspection by the city’s schools found every assessed facility had at least one room with inadequate ventilation.
Chase-Miller had another reason to be worried: Leo, who is 9 years old, has cerebral palsy and asthma. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that puts him at higher risk of severe COVID. Leo catching the virus would also put her elderly parents, who live close by and are both older than 65, at risk. Not to mention, her 4-year-old daughter Luna, who is too young to be vaccinated.
“For families like mine,” Chase-Miller told ABC News, “ventilation in school is a huge deal.”
Many parents are facing a similar situation.
As society plows forward seeking normalcy, almost all schools are back in-person. Yet the persistence of SARS-CoV-2 means that schools’ ability to stay open depends upon their ability to stop outbreaks.
That’s where school infrastructure — namely, ventilation and filtration systems — come in.
Amid myriad proven COVID-19 prevention measures — masks, vaccines, contact tracing — one of the most powerful tools to prevent transmission is a good ventilation system that frequently recirculates fresh air. Especially now that individual mask and vaccine mandates are all but gone, and individual vigilance is, by and large, waning.
But even before the pandemic, many schools were battling crumbling infrastructure, with a June 2020 report from the Government Accountability Office finding that over 40% of schools — an estimated 36,000 nationally — had deficient ventilation systems.
These systems are playing an increasingly pivotal role: the White House’s most recent National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan included them as a top priority to prevent future shutdowns. Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency issued guidance for the first time on the importance of ventilation in the long-term COVID fight too; the CDC has also described it as one of the core “tools in the mitigation toolbox” against the virus.
But even as billions of dollars in federal funding have been allocated to schools, expensive ventilation upgrades have remained low on the priority list for many schools with tight budgets.
For students who attend these schools, it may mean greater exposure to the virus compared to peers who attend schools that have already invested in new ventilation systems. And pediatricians and teachers worry these kids — who are often already living in communities with a higher burden of COVID-19 — may continue to fall behind.
“People have decided the pandemic is over — but that doesn’t mean we can abandon any sense of caution,” Chase-Miller said. “Especially [given] that the things we’re asking for are things we should have had already.”
Ventilation amid the pandemic’s next phase
Ventilation is not merely a form of “hygiene theater,” Chase-Miller said.
As individual-level precautions dissipate — masking made optional, vaccination rates plateauing — systems-level solutions to ensure healthy kids don’t breathe in the particles expelled by hollering, hacking and yawning sick classmates are crucial for prevention.
Functional ventilation systems can reduce potentially infectious viral aerosols by up to 50%, Elliott Gall, associate professor at Portland State University, told ABC News. He added that combining these ventilation systems with portable filters could reduce the number of particles by up to 90%.
Previous research has linked improved ventilation to reduced rates of airborne infections in schools and other enclosed settings (like prisons, office buildings and nursing homes).
As such, ventilation is “often the difference between schools getting open and staying open,” Tracy Enger, director for the EPA’s Indoor Air program, told ABC News.
But even the agency acknowledges that school facilities are lagging. The average American school building is over 50 years old, the agency said. In poorer communities, like the Philadelphia School District, buildings are pushing triple digits in age, Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, told ABC News.
“Many school facilities were not built and have not been renovated to be consistent with today’s building standards,” EPA wrote in a statement to ABC News.
Lacking transparency and accountability
In Portland, that means shoddy ventilation may leave infectious particles looming.
An internal inspection by the district found that every one of the 94 assessed schools had at least one room with inadequate ventilation rates. Communal spaces like libraries and gyms often had the lowest ventilation rates.
Leo’s school — KairosPDX — was excluded from the inspection because while the school’s property is publicly owned, it’s privately operated, Ryan Vandehey, media relations representative for the district, told ABC News.
As a parent, “that means you’re flying blind,” Chase-Miller said.
The district disputes Chase-Miller’s concerns.
“We absolutely believe that our students are breathing clean air that exceeds all existing regulatory standards,” Vandehey told ABC News.
The district purchased filters and portable air purifiers, Vandehey added, alongside other infrastructure investments made during the pandemic.
Most districts lack any transparency at all.
According to the GAO, as of June 2020, 38 of 49 states had not conducted a state-level facilities condition assessment in the past 10 years. Of those that did, public access to the information is often limited — if it’s available at all.
Jordan, in Philadelphia, says he has never seen any such reports. In response, his union started collecting its own data. Yet, when issues with facilities were raised with the district — like black mold in some schools, from tables to cabinets to library books, due in no small part to poor ventilation — they were frequently met with silence, Jordan said.
“More often than not, we get a follow-up call from the person who submitted to complaint to say nobody’s investigated the problem,” he said.
Christina Clark, a communications officer for the district, cited a 2021 webpage on “the facts about ventilation” — which referenced pandemic-era investments of more than $160 million in school buildings among other initiatives like purchases of pricey non-FDA approved air purifiers using hazardous technology that has been banned in California — as an indication of the district’s commitment to the issue. That level of investment is 10% below the district’s annual spending on facilities since 2017, despite the district having received $1.1 billion in pandemic relief funds.
Clark did not provide a comment on Jordan’s specific allegations.
Fearing for the “new normal”
Advocates fear that the lack of accountability will hit vulnerable communities the hardest.
Most schools depend on property taxes for funding facilities improvements, according to the GAO — meaning that poorer districts face greater budgetary constraints as a result.
In Pennsylvania, that means poorer schools have thousands of dollars less per pupil than do richer districts, according to an ongoing lawsuit by six districts against the state’s Department of Education (DOE) — putting them far below the state legislature’s own standards.
It also means the expensive and arduous ventilation upgrades simply don’t happen in places like Philadelphia’s public schools, Jordan said. And without any sense of how bad ventilation currently is, he doesn’t know if — or when — they ever will.
In contrast, rich districts in Pennsylvania, like Lower Merion, raise millions above their targets. In June 2021, the district held a “topping out” ceremony for its new middle school — complete with multiple gymnasia and a theater with retractable seating.
The Pennsylvania DOE could not be reached for comment regarding the budgetary disparities between districts or the lawsuit.
“When we send students to schools that are not well-maintained,” Jordan said, “it’s a subtle way of saying to the children that we really don’t value you as much as students from other communities.”
The “tale of two cities” is similar in Portland, Chase-Miller noted.
Some rooms in the city’s public schools can’t even open their windows while neighboring districts — like Lake Oswego — spend lavishly on everything from unit ventilators to new-age “ionization units” that zap viral particles.
For Chase-Miller, all of this means a higher COVID risk for Leo. And if it’s a higher risk for Leo, it’s also a higher risk for his classmates, their parents and their communities — communities that have already endured the worst of the pandemic.
“I’m preparing myself for the fact that he’ll probably get it at some point,” Chase-Miller said. “But obviously I want the school to be as safe as possible and to take every precaution.”
She added, “Because he deserves that, and so does every other kid.”
(WASHINGTON) — Reversing a decision by predecessor Donald Trump, President Joe Biden has approved a Pentagon request to redeploy several hundred American troops to Somalia for what the National Security Council calls “a persistent U.S. military presence” there as part of counterterrorism efforts.
The move will reestablish an open-ended mission in Somalia assisting the country in its fight against al-Shabab, a local al-Qaida affiliate.
The group once ruled Somalia and has been seeking to regain territorial control over parts of the country. It has carried out overseas terror attacks in Kenya, including in January 2020 when three Americans died in an assault targeting a U.S. base.
The Biden administration believes the move will “enable our partners to conduct a more effective fight against al-Shabab, which is al-Qaida’s largest, wealthiest, and deadliest affiliate and poses a heightened threat to Americans in East Africa,” National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said Monday.
A senior administration official told reporters later Monday that the number of U.S. troops returning to Somalia would be “under 500” and that they would continue with the same mission of training Somalia’s military and assisting local forces on counterterrorism missions. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby stressed on Monday afternoon that “our forces are not now nor will they be directly engaged in combat operations.”
The Pentagon is still evaluating when the return of forces will take place, in consultation with the Somali government.
“This is a repositioning of forces already in theater who have travelled in and out of Somalia on an episodic basis since the previous administration made the precipitous decision to withdraw at the end of 2020,” Watson, the NSC spokeswoman, said.
“The decision to reintroduce a persistent presence was made to maximize the safety and effectiveness of our forces and enable them to provide more efficient support to our partners,” Watson added.
In December 2020, near the end of his presidential term, Trump ordered the withdrawal of the nearly 750 U.S. troops in Somalia as part of a broader strategy to further reduce the troop presence in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Trump had committed to ending what he labeled “forever wars.”
His draw-down decision ended a longterm presence of U.S. special operations troops that had been assisting the Somali military against al-Shabab. Since then, American personnel have been rotating into Somalia on temporary training missions lasting up to a few months.
President Biden’s decision to recommit forces there will allow troops to again stay in an open-ended posture against al-Shabab, according to the administration. The new presence will end the “in and out” rotation implemented after Trump’s decision, the senior Biden official told reporters Monday.
The official contrasted the troop deployment with President Trump’s decision to remove forces, calling the earlier draw-down “irrational because it created unnecessary and elevated risk to forces as they moved in and out of the country on a rotational basis.”
The official added that “it gave us less payoff for incurring that risk because it disrupted their efficacy and consistency of their work with partners.”
The senior official framed the decision as part of the administration’s global counterterrorism effort that also focuses on prioritizing limited resources against “the most dangerous and ascendant threats.”
“In a world in which we must prioritize how we approach global counterterrorism, al-Shabab is a notable priority given the threat it poses,” the official said — both in Somalia and overseas.
The official highlighted federal charges against a Somali man whom authorities claim was taking flight lessons in the Philippines for a 9/11-style attack on an American city. The suspect, Cholo Abdi Abdullah, has pleaded not guilty.
“It was a mistake to withdraw forces in 2020,” Mick Mulroy, an ABC News contributor who served as a deputy assistant secretary of Defense and is also a veteran of operations in Somalia, told ABC News.
“Remote training was not practical enough to stem the expansion of Al Shabaab or collect on threats coming from this terrorist organization,” he said.
“Today’s decision to send special operations forces back into the country to work with our key partners and the newly chosen president, who is very familiar with our operations from his previous time as president, was the right one,” Mulroy said.
