Niger report prompts U.S. to halt combat missions in Africa
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 confrontation 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.
The investigation found widespread problems across all levels of the military counterterrorism operation last fall — although it focused in particular on the actions of junior officers leading up to the ambush — but said that none of the failures directly caused the overwhelming enemy attack.
“We are now far more prudent in our missions,” said Marine Gen. Thomas Waldhauser, commander of U.S. Africa Command. “U.S. forces are not to be involved in direct combat.”
The new restrictions are perhaps the most farreaching consequence of the seven-month investigation into the Oct. 4 ambush of the dozen American soldiers and more than 30 Nigeriens who battled for their lives during a gunfight against about 100 militants 20 miles south of the Mali border.
The attack caused a public relations furor for the White House in October after President Donald Trump took several days to reach out to the soldiers’ families and then was accused of making insensitive remarks to Sgt. La David Johnson’s widow, which a Democratic congresswoman from Florida said she overheard. The White House denied that the president’s effort to console the widow was inappropriate.
Sgt. Johnson was initially unaccounted for and his body wasn’t found until after a two-day search, and then by Nigerien villagers. The search was delayed, the report noted, after the U.S. received inaccurate reports that Sgt. Johnson was being held prisoner 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 video that seeks to reconstruct the more than hourlong attack. The full video was shown to Congress, but the Pentagon had decided against releasing it publicly in its entirety.
The probe 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 “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,” the report said.
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 headquarters — for not disclosing to superiors before they headed out that they were conducting a potentially dangerous kill-or-capture mission against Doundou Cheffou, the leader of an Islamic State affiliate who is believed to be involved in the kidnapping of a U.S. aid worker.