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.