Deadly al-Shabab attack eclipsed by Iranian crisis

Armed with rifles and explosives, about a dozen al-Shabab fighters destroyed an American surveillance plane as it was taking off and ignited an hourslong gunfight this month on a sprawling military base in Kenya that houses U.S. troops. By the time al-Shabab was done, portions of the airfield were burning, and three Americans were dead.

Surprised by the attack, U.S. commandos took about an hour to respond. Many of the local Kenyan forces, assigned to defend the base, hid in the grass, while other U.S. troops and support workers were corralled into tents, with little protection, to wait out the battle. It would require hours to evacuate one of the wounded to a military hospital in Djibouti, about 1,500 miles away.

The brazen assault at Manda Bay, a sleepy seaside base near the Somali border, on Jan. 5, largely was overshadowed by the crisis with Iran after the killing of that country’s most important general two days earlier and is only now drawing closer scrutiny from Congress and Pentagon officials.

But the storming of an airfield used by the U.S. military so alarmed the Pentagon that it immediately sent about 100 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to establish security at the base. Army Green Berets from Germany were shuttled to Djibouti, the Pentagon’s major hub in Africa, in case the entire base was in danger of being taken by al-Shabab, an East African terrorist group affiliated with al-Qaeda.

“The assault represented a serious security lapse, given how much of a target the base was and its location near the border with Somalia,” said Murithi Mutiga, the International Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa project director, based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Many details of the attack remain murky, and the military’s Africa Command has released only scant particulars pending an investigation. But the deaths of the three Americans — one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors — marked the largest number of U.S. military-related fatalities in Africa since four soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger in October 2017. The Kenya attack underscores the U.S. military’s limits on the continent, where a lack of intelligence, along with Manda Bay’s reputation as a quiet and unchallenged locale, allowed a lethal attack.

The deaths also signify a grim expansion of the campaign waged by the United States against al-Shabab — often confined to Somalia, but in this case spilling over into Kenya despite an escalating U.S. air campaign in the region. Kenya is a new addition to the list of countries where Americans have been killed in combat since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, joining Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

This article is based on interviews with a dozen U.S. military officials or other people who have been briefed on the attack.

Early on the morning of Jan. 5, Dustin Harrison, 47, and Bruce Triplett, 64, two experienced pilots and contractors with L3 Technologies, a Pentagon contractor that helps conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions around the world, were taxiing their Beechcraft King Air 350 on Manda Bay’s tarmac. They throttled down their engines, according to one person familiar with the attack. The two men reported that they saw animals darting across the runway.

They were wrong. The animals were in fact al-Shabab fighters who had infiltrated the base’s outer perimeter — a poorly defended fence line — before heading to the base’s airstrip. As the twin-propeller Beechcraft, loaded with sensors and video equipment for surveillance, began to taxi, alShabab fighters fired a rocketpropelled grenade into the plane, killing Harrison and Triplett. With the plane on fire, a third contractor, badly burned in the rear of the aircraft, crawled out to safety.

The al-Shabab fighters were not done. In the ensuing chaos, they made quick work of a significant portion of the U.S. fleet of aircraft — a mix of six surveillance aircraft and medical evacuation helicopters on the ground at the time. The alShabab fighters also destroyed a fuel storage area, rendering the airfield next to useless. The attack most likely cost the Pentagon millions of dollars.

Spc. Henry Mayfield Jr., 23, of the Army was in a nearby truck acting as an air traffic controller when he was killed in the gunfight, according to a person familiar with the incident. His colleague inside the truck, another American, escaped and hid in the grass to avoid the insurgents. He was found hours later.