New research shows the U.S. conducted counterterrorism operations in 85 countries from 2018 to 2020.
The data comes from the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute. Researcher Stephanie Savell, co-director of the project, says U.S. troops engaged in combat on the ground in 8 countries during this period including Somalia, Mali and Yemen.
In Kenya, a 2020 raid by the fundamentalist group Al-Shabaab on an airfield in Manda Bay — an important military base for U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Somalia — killed one American service member and two contractors, Savell says.
The same year, a hostage rescue mission in Nigeria left six of the captors dead. The U.S. stepped in quickly out of fear that the captors would sell the American hostage to a local affiliate of al-Qaida or ISIS, she says.