A seven-year-old boy who was riddled with shrapnel during a deadly US airstrike in Somalia faces losing his ability to walk unless he has a £750 emergency operation.

But Abdiqadir Salah’s family cannot afford the surgery and the US – which refuses to admit that any civilians were killed or injured during its attack six months ago – appears unwilling to pay compensation to those affected by airstrikes in Somalia.

Shards of shrapnel are lodged in two places in Abdiqadir’s back and in his upper thigh after US airstrikes that killed at least 12 civilians, including eight children.

It is the deadliest attack on civilians in Somalia during either Trump administration and one of the worst since the botched 1993 US military operation in Mogadishu known as Black Hawk Down.

A Guardian investigation into the strikes in the town of Jamaame raises myriad questions over US intelligence, how the targets were selected and why children were hit while they were in the open and were likely to have been clearly identifiable to the drone’s strike team.

His mother said Abdiqadir was in the street outside his family home in Jamaame on 15 November 2025 when he was struck by a missile.

“That’s where three of my children got wounded. All three of them were laying on the ground covered in blood,” said Marian Haji Abdi Guled.

“When I tried to tend to them, shells began falling everywhere. Every step you took, or direction you turned, there were shells and missiles raining everywhere.

“There was no warning before the strikes but we could [hear] drones hovering above town before the strikes. It was very loud.”

After the attack, Guled took her three injured children into the surrounding countryside to flee the drones.

Her eldest, Mohamed, 16, had shrapnel lodged in his fingers, while her daughter Sumaya, 14, had three metal fragments lodged in her head, which have since been removed. Abdiqadir’s X-rays, which have been viewed by the Guardian, show shrapnel still lodged near his hip socket from where it entered his lower back.

“They bled throughout the night,” Guled said. “We couldn’t leave the countryside because we feared the drones hovering above would bomb us again.”

The next day Guled travelled 40 miles (60km) to Jilib, the de facto capital of the territory held by the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab, which was the stated target of the US airstrikes on Jamaame in November.

The hospital there, however, could not help. After borrowing money for the two-day journey, Guled travelled with Abdiqadir and his sister to Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.

“My oldest still has shrapnel lodged in his body but I left him back in Jamaame because I couldn’t afford to take him to Mogadishu and took the younger ones.

“During the two nights and two days to reach Mogadishu, we couldn’t even eat anything. All I thought about was saving my children.”

Although her daughter received treatment in the capital, Abdiqadir remains in desperate need of help.

Doctors at Kaafi hospital in central Mogadishu told his mother that the shrapnel inside the child needed to be urgently removed to avoid life-changing consequences for him.

“They [doctors] told me if the shrapnel isn’t removed from his body, it could affect his ability to continue walking,” Guled said.

“But I don’t have $1,000 [£750] needed for the operation to remove the shrapnel from my son’s body. What’s worse than being a mother who can’t do anything for her wounded children?”

Despite being unable to afford the surgery, Guled has stayed in Mogadishu because it is the only place her child can get the required treatment. However, the cost of renting accommodation in the capital – nearly £190 a month – makes it impossible for the family to save enough for the surgery.

The US has not paid compensation to any Somali civilians injured or killed in airstrikes. Under the Trump administration, the Pentagon has also quietly scrapped a programme making it a legal requirement to prevent and respond to civilian deaths.

“I don’t know where the money [for the operation] will come from,” Guled said. “I left the children’s father back at the farm in Jamaame to protect our crops from wild animals. He also doesn’t have money to reach Mogadishu.”

The airstrikes were conducted alongside Somali ground forces in a joint operation led by the US military’s Africa command, suggesting the possibility that some of the casualties may have been inflicted by those troops.

Witness testimonies, however, all describe the Jamaame casualties being caused by bombs dropped from drones, rather than fire from ground troops. US officials would not answer questions over Somali forces’ role in the attack.

Guled has no doubts over the origin of the strikes that injured her children, insisting they had not been inflicted by infantry weapons such as mortars. “It is the Americans who are responsible for our suffering,” she said.

The US Department of War did not respond to a series of detailed questions regarding the airstrikes on Jamaame.