San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
U.S. forces had trained soldiers who staged coup
NAIROBI, Kenya — U.S. Green Berets were training local forces in the African nation of Guinea last weekend when their charges peeled away for a mission not listed in any military training manual: They mounted a coup.
Gunfire rang out as an elite Guinean special forces unit stormed the presidential palace in the capital, Conakry, early last Sunday, deposing the country’s 83-year-old president, Alpha Conde. Hours later a charismatic young officer, Col. Mamady Doumbouya, announced himself as Guinea’s new leader.
A team of about a dozen Green Berets had been in Guinea since mid-July to train about 100 soldiers in a special forces unit led by Doumbouya, who served for years in the French Foreign Legion, took part in U.S. military exercises and was once a close ally of the president he overthrew.
The United States, like the United Nations and the African Union, has condemned the coup, and the U.S. military has denied having any advance knowledge of it.
For the Pentagon, though, it’s an embarrassment. The U.S. has trained troops in many African nations, largely for counterterrorism programs but also with the aim of supporting civilian-led governments. And although numerous U.S.-trained officers have seized power in their countries — most notably, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt — this is believed to be the first time one has done so in the middle of
The leader of Guinea’s new military junta, Col. Mamady Doumbouya, leaves a meeting Friday in Conokry with a delegation from the 15-nation West African economic bloc, known as ECOWAS.
a U.S. military course.
Last Sunday, once the Green Berets realized a coup was under way, they drove straight to the U.S. Embassy in Conakry, and the training program was suspended, said Kelly Cahalan, a spokesperson for U.S. Africa Command. The coup, she said, is “inconsistent with U.S. military training and education.”
U.S. officials have known Doumbouya since the start of
his rise. A photo posted to the U.S. Embassy Facebook page from October 2018 showed him standing with three U.S. military officials outside the U.S. Embassy.
U.S. officials seeking to downplay the episode initially stressed that the base where the training took place was in Forecariah, a four-hour drive from the presidential palace, close to Guinea’s border with Sierra
Leone.
But on Friday, U.S. officials said they were investigating reports that Doumbouya and his fellow coup-makers had set off in an armed convoy from that same base early Sunday — raising the prospect that they slipped away while their instructors were sleeping.