Seven years ago, a collapsing Malian government reached out to its former colonial benefactor, France, for help. Only a fraction of the area surrounding the capital of Bamako was under government control, and the north was off-limits to the undertrained and overpowered military.
Mali was a prime training ground and operations center for al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
“There’s virtually no governance and no resources provided by the central government throughout the region,” retired U.S. Army Col. Chris Wyatt, who served eight tours in Africa, told the Washington Examiner, describing the dire situation in Africa’s Sahel region.
The ill-preparedness of the Malian forces sent to fight the terrorists in the north led to a coup and government collapse.
“Jihadists got active and moved towards Timbuktu and Mali began to fall apart in the north, and they begged for French intervention,” Wyatt said, describing a scenario that unfolded while he was opening the U.S. office of security assistance in 2012 in Niger, a neighboring Sahel country afflicted by the rapid growth of terrorist groups in recent years.
Just before the French intervention in January 2013, the central government in Bamako sent forces to the north where they were overcome by AQIM.
“About half the forces that went north didn’t have weapons,” Wyatt said. Those with rifles had limited ammunition. “Oh, and by the way, it’s not like they brought along their mess kits and their water buffaloes and their vast resources to fight a campaign against AQIM.”
The Sahel was a breeding ground for radical Islamic groups, including AQIM, which launched attacks and kidnappings in nearby Algeria, and in recent years has begun spreading terrorism into the wealthier countries of West Africa.
Terrorists using satellite communications networks and blending into the local population made the Sahel a safe place to reconstitute.
“The thing about the Sahel is that conflict and illicit activity and slave trading and counterfeiting and gun-running have been going on for thousands of years,” Wyatt said of the narrow band of semi-arid land south of the Sahara Desert that has much poverty, little agriculture, and even less government presence.
But a recent French operation, supported by vital U.S. intelligence, killed the top AQIM leader, Abdelmalek Droukdel, and several of his close associates operating in northern Mali.
“The area has previously been described as a deteriorating security situation,” U.S. Africa Command Air Force Col. Chris Karns told the Washington Examiner by phone from AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany.
“He had considerable connections to al Qaeda itself, and he was a practicing terrorist for over 25 years,” Karns said. “He oversaw AQIM — the entire organizational structure that included the medical committee, political, judicial, military, media, finance, all the way to their spokesman.”
The “emir,” as Droukdel was called, also had deep contacts within the al Qaeda global network.
“They took a long time,” Wyatt told the Washington Examiner about the French forces, which now number 5,100 after a recent increase of 600 soldiers. “They’ve been looking for this guy ever since they went into Mali.”
US support role
The French Operation Barkhane, headquartered in Chad, and the French commitment to security and stability in Africa are reasons why detractors call for the United States to reduce its footprint on the continent and allow the Europeans to take over. But experts and military officials told the Washington Examiner that U.S. Africa Command continues to provide vital support that both contain the terrorist threat and strengthen the capacity of local militaries to stabilize their countries.
“The amount of U.S. involvement so far as personnel and dollars is wildly overstated and misrepresented by a lot of people,” Wyatt said.
AFRICOM’s $453 million annual budget and 6,000 personnel across Africa are now under review by the secretary of defense. Most troops, about 4,000 of them, operate from the only U.S. base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, located just down the road from a Chinese military base.
“The French as much as they want to don’t have the strategic reach that they would like to have, and also don’t have the capacity to do some of the things that they need to do, like intelligence,” Wyatt added.
The result of the French operation was a tactical win and a symbolic victory over al Qaeda.
Although details about the combined air and land operation are not publicly available, Wyatt described early military problems that were later corrected and demonstrate the importance of special operations forces operating in small groups on the continent.
“The problem with the French intervention here is that whenever they go out to intervene to attack a group that supposedly are in an area, you can hear them coming from miles,” he said.
Dust columns rise in the desert. Vibrations can be felt. And helicopters can be heard long before soldiers arrive.
“Typically, they’re very small groups,” Wyatt said of the terrorist groups operating in the Sahel. “They can disband and disperse, and they’re gone, and that’s what made it so challenging for them.”
When the French arrived in early 2013, they quickly mounted an offensive to retake Timbuktu and other northern Mali regional capitals from Islamic groups and terrorists waging war on the government.
While ostensibly retaken, the lack of government reach to the most remote areas and the capacity for terrorist groups to curry favor with locals by providing desperately needed resources, or threatening them when they do not cooperate, allowed AQIM to maintain a safe haven.
Karns described how the U.S. provided intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assistance to the French to locate and track Droukdel over time, but ultimately the French presence in the area was a reason why it led the operation.
“We provide a combination of intelligence, airlift, training, some logistics support, but in this case, our contribution was helping with intelligence,” he said. “There’s a lot of care and attention that is applied to ensuring that the correct target is located or fixed, and intelligence is foundational to everything that’s done.”
Wyatt believes the Droukdel killing is an example of where U.S. and French interests in Africa overlap. Ensuring U.S. national security interests is a reason why U.S. Africa Command was stood up in 2009.
“The bottom line is that, from my experience, the U.S. has been cooperative with the French when it’s in the broader interest,” Wyatt said. “When it’s just in French interest, we haven’t necessarily been all that cooperative.”
The French, European Union, and the U.S. are involved in training a terrorist-fighting force known as the G5 Sahel, which includes soldiers from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. The 5,000 to 6,000 outfit has faced terrorist attacks and funding shortages, leaving it unfit to take on the task of fighting terrorists alone.
“Their capacity is very limited. Their funding is nonexistent,” Wyatt said. “They are not capable, even in the current environment.”
Some 13,000 U.N. troops are also from the U.N. peacekeeping force in Mali, helping to maintain stability and train Malian troops at a deadly cost.
Nearly 200 U.N. peacekeepers have been killed in Mali since 2013, making it the most dangerous peacekeeping mission in the world.
With limited control and AQIM certain to reconstitute its leadership in the Sahel, the international presence in the region, and the logistics and intelligence support provided by the U.S., remains crucial to preventing another government collapse and terrorist safe haven, experts say.
“The death of Droukdel demonstrates how a low-cost investment and partnership paid off to the benefit of Mali, Algeria, the region, and the world,” Karns said. “The enduring solution needs to be an African-led one. However, international assistance is required. The problem set faced certainly has the potential to impact us all.”
Wyatt added, “If these external actors pulled out of the Sahel, the governments there could not contain it.”
The 36-year veteran could not assess whether terrorist groups, if left unchecked, could actually take over the countries of the Sahel, but he argued for a continued U.S. role.
“I don’t think anyone really has a good handle on just how much they have in the way of resources,” he said.
Karns said terrorists take advantage of fragile conditions, and until economic prosperity improves, the international community effort was the best way to contain the terrorist threat emanating from Africa.
“The key is to make sure that these groups are not allowed to reconstitute, regenerate, and recruit,” he said.
“We’re talking about vast stretches of land,” Wyatt said. “Oftentimes, your control is limited to the length of your vision or your rifle.”
