Niger: a Sahel country bumping along (catch all)

[AdamG]

Got irritated at the lack of orienting graphics and such, whistled up the appropriate 1;500,000 maps.

Nimay @ Lat 13 ° 30' / Long 2 °
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/tpc/t...34566_k-2b.jpg

Teguey just east of Lat 14 ° 30' / Long 0 ° 30'
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/tpc/t...34566_k-2a.jpg

Also

A longer-than-expected meeting with local tribal leaders in Niger may have given militants critical extra minutes to prep the ambush attack that left four American troops dead earlier this month, two U.S. officials told Fox News on Friday.

A dozen U.S. Army soldiers, mostly Green Berets, along with 30 Nigeriens, had traveled 125 miles north from their base at Niger’s capital, Niamey, in unarmored trucks on a routine mission and to meet with local village elders in Tonga Tonga, near the border with Mali.

After the meeting with the village elders ended, the U.S.-led patrol was ambushed by roughly 50 militants.

French aircraft were overhead within 30 minutes, however, they did not fire because they couldn't positively identify who was who on the ground.

A senior defense official told Fox News the U.S. troops were fired on once they were already in their vehicles. The vehicles then scrambled to “get off the X” -- escaping the ambush site using evasive driving maneuvers -- and a gunfight ensued.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/10...cials-say.html

[davidbfpo]

Amidst the deluge of reporting now, very little by people familiar with Niger, this passage is important:

Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Rudy Atallah, the man Trump nearly hired as his National Security Council's’ senior director for Africa, said that Niger is a difficult posting for U.S. service members due to the lack of communication between their camps, the Nigerien military, and the civilians they are purportedly there to help protect. “We don’t have very good intelligence information on what the threat looks like or how it’s growing and [U.S. troops] don’t have the support of local population,” Atallah said. “Our folks don’t spend a lot of time gripping and grinning with the locals, and the locals don’t know what our guys are doing.”

Link:https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...s-attack/54353

You'd think by now AFRICOM deployed enough staff with the right language skills, after all there has been a presence in Niger since the early 2000's, with troop rotations since 2011.

Another report referred to SAR being provided by contractors.

[AdamG]

Plot Twist, or why the first part of the Intel guy's briefing on weather is important.

Niger Floods Leaves Tens of Thousands Homeless
Widespread flooding has killed at least 56 people since the rainy season began in June, and left over 185,000 homeless, according to the interior ministry.
http://allafrica.com/view/group/main.../00055447.html
&
http://allafrica.com/stories/201708310338.html

[davidbfpo]

Some curious information in this NYT report:

American troops who came under fire in Niger...might have waited more than an hour before calling for help....one reason might be that they thought they could fight back against the Islamic State-affiliated militants who attacked them.

Though helicopters did not arrive until an hour after the troops called for help, a drone arrived overhead in minutes, General Dunford said, though he would not say whether it was armed.

Link:https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/23/w...-dunford.html?

[AdamG]

Some curious information

By 'curious', you mean more and more it's sounding like a complete Charlie Foxtrot?

Sources for this ABC report basically says the same thing.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/died-...ry?id=50670787

What was started as a reconnaissance mission to meet with local leaders turned into a kill-or-capture mission aimed at a high-value target, according to both sources.
*
“They should have been up and back in a day. Because they were up there so f------ long on a mission that morphed, they were spotted, surveilled and ultimately hit,” the official said.
*
Their pre-mission threat assessment never considered the possibility of 50 to 60 enemy combatants attacking them, according to the official.
*
On their way back, the team received a call from the base back in Niamey, asking them to turn around and kill or capture a high-value target who is a known al Qaeda and ISIS operative, according to two senior officials.
*
The team arrived at the target location in the early morning hours of Oct. 4, but found nothing. They burned the remnants of the abandoned campsite and headed back south as the sun came up, stopping back through a nearby village called Tongo Tongo around 8:30 AM.
There, the Nigerien force requested they stop to eat, while U.S. soldiers met with a village elder, who was “obviously and deliberately trying to stall them,” according to the official.
“He was definitely stalling as long as he could to keep us there,” the survivor said, saying he had an entourage, showed the unit a child with an illness, and even grabbed a goat he wanted to prepare for them.

[davidbfpo]

By 'curious', you mean more and more it's sounding like a complete Charlie Foxtrot?

From my "armchair" I would not reach such a conclusion.

Sadly the deaths have aroused far greater political and media attention to Niger and AFRICOM's activity.

The Soufan Report's latest comment ends with:

The pace of joint operations in Africa involving U.S. personnel will likely increase in the foreseeable future, as the conditions that help fuel terrorist and insurgent groups continue to worsen.

Link:http://www.soufangroup.com/tsc-intel...bush-in-niger/

There is an older thread on Niger, with mainly historical posts:Niger: a Sahel country bumping along (catch all)

[AdamG]

Additional details for those with WaPo access.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...ffb_story.html

From my "armchair" I would not reach such a conclusion.

Seriously? From what we can both read, it sounds far from a sunny day in paradise.

As previously reported, Coalition forces have been in western Niger for awhile and suffered no causalities while engaging ISIS&friends.

This is the sequence of high points;

1) Simple in-and-out mission gets an additional tasker, which means loitering in a bad neighborhood. The "three hour tour" song from Gilligan's Island should have started playing about then.

2) Reinforcing element doesn't show up for the extended mission, Lord knows why.

3) Local headman obviously stalling the group.

4) Complex double-tap ambush, implication is that they were up against competent opponents. See Threat Assessment, above - contradiction there.

5) Contact report sounds like it took an hour??to get out after first shot. Perhaps the primary comms were eliminated in the first RPG volley, but that's bad. Very bad.

6) French air assets hauled ass to provide cover, but targets not clearly marked. There's SOPs for signaling that a danger close strike would be appreciated.

Not pointing fingers but the overall situation sounds exactly like a Charlie Foxtrot*, with four US and five Nigerian KIA.

* Previous example of a Charlie Foxtrot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kamdesh

[AdamG]

By 'curious', you mean more and more it's sounding like a complete Charlie Foxtrot?

Complete
Charlie
Foxtrot.

...soldiers who survived the ambush and villagers who witnessed it point to a series of intelligence failures and strategic miscalculations that left the American soldiers far from base, in hostile territory longer than planned, with no backup or air support, on a mission they had not expected to perform.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...-soldiers.html

[davidbfpo]

Some here I expect will dismiss this NYT report, so here are two comments via Twitter that might persuade you. Professor Bruce Hoffman:

Superb account of the micro (tragically personal) and macro (open ended strategic) contours of our ongoing war on terrorism...

Professor Daniel Byman:

I can’t recommend enough