An attack on October 4 by suspected Islamic State-affiliated militants that left four American soldiers dead has unexpectedly pushed the landlocked, sparsely inhabited African nation of Niger into the limelight. While most Americans seem less interested in the attack itself than in the ensuing Twitter broadsides, the situation in Africa’s Sahel region is one that ought to be of national concern given the growing scope of U.S. counterterrorism operations there. This month’s deadly attack underscores the troubling reality that American special operations forces are operating in the Sahel lacking both the resources for the complex threat environment and a coherent regional strategy.
While key details of the attack are still emerging, we know that the 12-man Special Forces team and their Nigerien army counterparts were leaving a meeting with local community leaders in the village of Tongo Tongo near the Malian border when they came under fire from some 50 militants. The ensuing firefight took the lives of four Nigerien and four American soldiers and left eight wounded. It no doubt came as a shock for many to learn that Green Berets were operating in a country which most Americans would have difficulty locating on a map, but America’s counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel date back to the earliest days of the war on terror.
Since 2002, the U.S. has sought through various State Department initiatives to train and equip African militaries to combat al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—a group with roots in the Algerian civil war—and its affiliates so American soldiers wouldn’t have to, but this arm’s-length approach only lasted so long.
Islamist violence picked up in the region in 2012, after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya late the previous year. Tuareg mercenaries formerly on Qaddafi’s payroll returned to Mali with heavy weaponry they had looted, joined their comrades in the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), and formed a pragmatic alliance with the Islamist Ansar ad-Dine group to begin a war of secession (the Tuaregs—being of Berber descent in a country dominated by Mande and Fula peoples—aspired to an ethnostate while the Islamists hoped to form an Islamic emirate). A group of officers in the Malian army, convinced they could handle the rebellion better than the democratically elected president, staged a coup that quickly backfired as the rebels overran the entire north of the country in the ensuing chaos. In turn, this prompted the French military to intervene in its former colony in 2013, an operation that morphed into what is now France’s pan-Sahel counterterrorism mission, Operation Barkhane.
Four years later, the situation remains dire. The MNLA has split with Ansar ad-Dine over profound ideological differences and now fights against the Islamists, but a smorgasbord of jihadist groups have taken advantage of the instability. Earlier this year, four groups, including Ansar ad-Dine, AQIM, and the Mourabitoun Brigades of the notoriously hard-to-kill terrorist Mokhtar Belmokhtar, joined under the banner of Jamma’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) and pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda leader Ayman az-Zawahiri. While JNIM operates primarily along Niger’s western border with Mali, more than 600 miles away in the southeastern Diffa province, the Islamic State affiliate Boko Haram continues its insurgency, moving easily between Niger and neighboring Chad and Nigeria. The emergence last year of the Islamic State in Greater Sahara, the group believed to be responsible for the October 4 attack, under the leadership of veteran jihadist Adnan Abu Walid as-Sahrawi only further complicates the threat environment. In addition to attacking military and civilian targets throughout the Sahel and West Africa—including several high-profile attacks against soft targets in the region—these groups engage in frequent kidnappings and the widespread trafficking of arms, narcotics, and humans.
The plethora of salafi-jihadist groups has prompted a massive multinational counterterrorism effort throughout the region, consisting of not only the 4,000 French troops under Barkhane, but also 15,000 U.N. peacekeepers in Mali and numerous EU advisers—to say nothing of the militaries of the “G5 Sahel” nations (Chad, Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Mauritania) who are set to stage their first joint operation later this month. In addition, of course, are American special operations forces under U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) which have operated in the region with some frequency since 2012. Roughly 800 American soldiers are currently stationed in Niger alone, the majority of them Air Force personnel involved in the construction of a massive drone base in Agadez, as well as about 100 special ops forces under Joint Special Operations Task Force-Trans Sahara, whose stated mission involves training and advising Nigerien forces in addition to conducting what is referred to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR in Pentagon jargon.
The argument for some degree of AFRICOM engagement in the Sahel is not difficult to make. Al Qaida and ISIS affiliates undermine regional stability and pose a grave transnational threat when they enjoy safe havens; the deployment of U.N., E.U., French, and African forces in the region and the enthusiastic support for intervention on behalf of the G5 governments make clear that counterterrorism operations enjoy international legitimacy; the insurgent groups are much smaller and poorly equipped than those the U.S. is fighting elsewhere such as the Taliban or ISIS; and the popular appeal of salafi-jihadist ideology remains minimal due to the strong tradition of Sufism and pre-Islamic animism in local religious practice as well as the anti-Islamist underpinnings of Berberism, the dominant ideology of Tuareg groups. And, of course, American special operations forces are really quite good at what they do.
With that said, the October 4 attack belies the notion that counterterrorism in the Sahel is low-risk in any way. American forces are operating in a remote territory without a major U.S. military presence in the region, make it more difficult to provide ISR, air support, and medevac to forces when they come under fire, as AFRICOM commander General Thomas Waldhauser explained to Congress earlier this year. It was French aircraft and a private contractor that came to the aid of the Special Forces in this instance. Moreover, the ambush calls into question just how well forces in the Sahel are prepared for combat and how well-defined their “advise and assist” mission is as a whole, as Senator John McCain has made clear in recent days. Reports indicate that the ambush may have resulted from a gross underestimation of the enemy’s capabilities and area of operations. Additionally, no one has offered an explanation as to why American soldiers were traveling in unarmored vehicles along the border with Mali, where ubiquitous IEDs and mortar fire have killed more U.N. peacekeepers than anywhere else in the world.
Most disconcerting, however, is the lack of any indication that the Trump administration has developed a regional strategy for counterterrorism in the Sahel. Obama’s light-footprint approach to counterterrorism in Africa (Libya being the very conspicuous exception) was based on the assumption that American soldiers would almost never be in harm’s way. Between the death of a Navy SEAL in Somalia in May and this month’s incident, that assumption no longer holds. If AFRICOM is ramping up its operations across the continent, as Senator Lindsey Graham recently suggested and as the Pentagon’s new authorities in Somalia would indicate, then we should be deeply troubled by the fact that Chad
—our most stalwart and effective counterterrorism partner in the Sahel
—somehow ended up on Trump’s latest attempt at a travel ban. Part of the administration’s seemingly schizophrenic approach to the continent could be explained by the vacancies in the top Africa posts at the State Department and National Security Council.
The issue is not that greater American engagement in the region will necessarily prove disastrous. On the contrary, the current multinational security arrangement is under considerable strain, and if al-Qaeda or Islamic State affiliates manage to carve out larger enclaves in the poorly governed region, the U.S. would be compelled to respond accordingly. But a more robust approach entails heightened risk—to our soldiers, to civilians caught in the crossfire, and, in many cases, to regional stability. AFRICOM is drifting towards a more active role in a conflict with emboldened enemies despite having neither the proper capabilities nor a coherent strategy within which to operate. Given how well the president’s national security team understands the dangers of mission creep, we should hope that the death of four servicemen has prompted an honest assessment in the White House of America’s role in this challenging and critical region.
