U.S. seeks big picture in Niger
THE WIDOW OF a fallen soldier killed in Afghanistan released a recording of her phone conversation with President Trump — and said his kind words helped give her family strength.
Natasha De Alencar received the call in April when her husband, Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar, became the first U.S. combat death in Afghanistan in 2017.
She turned on the speakerphone, waiting on hold for 15 minutes with her children nearby, when Trump’s voice came through the line.
“I am so sorry to hear about the whole situation. What a horrible thing, except that he’s an unbelievable hero,” Trump says in the recording of the call, shot by one of the couple’s four children and released to the Washington Post.
He later invites her to the White House. “If you’re around Washington, you come over and see me in the Oval Office,” he said. WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary James Mattis, troubled by a lack of information two weeks after an ambush on a special operations patrol in Niger left four U.S. soldiers dead, is demanding answers as a team of investigators sent to West Africa begins its work.
The team of investigators, led by a one-star general, is working to clear up the confusion of what occurred before, during and after the mission. Sgt. La David Johnson, 25, was initially unaccounted for and his body wasn’t found until after an intense two-day search, and then by Nigerien villagers.
Also killed were Staff Sgt. Bryan Black, 35, of Washington; Staff Sgt. Jeremiah Johnson, 39, of Ohio; and Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright, 29, of Georgia.
For months before the ambush, the U.S. military had requested more drones or other surveillance aircraft in Niger and additional military medical support, but those requests met resistance from the U.S. ambassador to the country, who was reluctant to increase the American presence there, a U.S. official briefed on the attack said.
The Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha, otherwise known as an “A-Team,” increasingly had been operating in remote areas far from command support, the official said. Islamic State
Sgt. De Alencar, 37, a Special Forces soldier, was shot and killed during a firefight involving ISIS militants.
The call came less than 24 hours after De Alencar watched her husband’s body return from Afghanistan to Dover Air Force Base. “It made me feel good, knowing what my husband had done for his country,” that Trump took the time to call, she told the paper. “My husband was awesome. My world sucks without him.”
Trump has come under fire for telling the widow of a slain Army sergeant that he knew “what he signed up for” while giving his condolences in a call that left the family feeling disrespected. De Alencar said that with her, Trump hit just the right note. “At that moment when my world was upside down and me and my kids didn’t know which way we were going, it felt like I was talking to just another regular human,” she told the Post.
“It was a moment of niceness that we needed because we were going through hell.” and Al Qaeda operate there, exploiting divisions within local tribal forces in the region.
U.S. military officials also are looking into the possibility that French forces were attacked in the same area in previous days, but that information may not have been relayed to the A-Team.
The military now considers the ambush of the A-Team to have been a wellplanned and coordinated series of two successive attacks. The A-Team was able to fend off the first ambush but was attacked again while trying to retreat deeper into Niger, the official said. Feds rush for dead GIs’ info WASHINGTON — In the hours after President Donald Trump said on a radio broadcast that he had contacted “virtually everybody” who had lost a family member in military service this year, the White House was hustling to learn from the Pentagon the identities and contact information for those families, according to an internal Defense Department email.
The Tuesday email exchangeshows that senior White House aides were aware the President’s statement was not accurate and asked the Pentagon for information about surviving family members of all service members killed after Trump’s inauguration so that the President could be sure to contact all of them.