The U.S. military
suspends all direct combat missions in Africa, hoping to prevent incidents such as a deadly ambush in Niger.
WASHINGTON — U.S. special operations troops in Africa have been restricted from undertaking missions that might involve direct combat, one of several steps announced Thursday to prevent future casualties after an October ambush in Niger killed four American soldiers.
U.S. forces have not conducted any operations to kill or capture militants since the deadly firefight and are focused almost exclusively on training Nigerien troops and other U.S. allies in the region, and expanding an airfield outside Niger’s capital for drone operations, commanders told reporters at a Pentagon news conference on the results of the military investigation into the Niger attack.
“We are now far more prudent in our missions,” said Marine Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, the commander of U.S. Africa Command, which oversees military operations on the continent. “U.S. forces are not to be involved in direct combat.”
The new restrictions are perhaps the most-far-reaching consequence of the seven-month investigation into the ferocious Oct. 4 ambush of the dozen American soldiers and more than 30 Nigeriens who battled for their lives during a firefight lasting more than an hour against about 100 militants 20 miles south of the Mali border.
The attack caused a public relations furor for the White House last October after President Donald Trump took several days to reach out to the soldiers’ families and then was accused of making insensitive remarks to Staff Sgt. LaDavid Johnson’s widow. A congresswoman from Florida said she overheard his remarks. The White House denied the president’s effort to console the widow was inappropriate.
Johnson was initially unaccounted for and his body wasn’t found until after a two-day search, and then only by villagers. The search for Johnson was delayed, the report noted, after the U.S. received inaccurate reports that he was being held prisoner in a village north of the ambush site.
The Pentagon released an eight-page summary of the investigation Thursday, but withheld the entire 6,300-page report containing witness statements, photographs and other evidence, saying it was still seeking to have the material declassified.
It also made public portions of a 21-minute a video that seeks to reconstruct the more than hour-long attack. The full video was shown to Congress, but the Pentagon had decided against releasing it in its entirety to avoid making public “too much information,” Waldhauser said.
The investigation blamed “individual, organizational, and institutional failures and deficiencies that contributed to the tragic events of 4 October 2017,” according to the summary. But it said that “no single failure or deficiency was the sole reason.”
Maj. Gen. Roger Cloutier Jr., the investigating officer, noted that “American and Nigerien soldiers fought courageously … despite being significantly outnumbered by the enemy,” according to the report.
The investigation criticizes two Army captains — one in charge of the 12-man unit targeted in the ambush and another at the unit’s Niger base — for not disclosing to superiors before they headed out that they were conducting a potentially dangerous kill-orcapture mission against Doundou Cheffou, the leader of an Islamic State affiliate involved in seizing an American aid worker.