Why is the US Army training African soldiers for counter-terrorism? – New York Times International Weekly – International

SOGAKOPE, Ghana — Black-clad troops jumped from speedboats and forced their way along a fence toward their target: a building where terrorists had kidnapped a high-level government official.

Shots rang out and the troops returned fire. They soon emerged from the structure with the freed hostage. An ambulance arrived, the man was loaded onto a stretcher and taken away.

The scene by the Volta River in Ghana ended with a bang for the military. But the bullets were for salvation and the hostage was false. The rescuers, 31 soldiers and sailors, lined up to cheers from a US Navy admiral and a group of commandos from more than a dozen nations as the largest annual special operations exercise in Africa ended.

The US-led two-week event, called Flintlock and held in Ghana and the Ivory Coast this year, had focused exclusively on land operations since it began in 2005. But the water mission included this time — some 20 kilometers down the river up the coast — reflects growing security concerns in the Gulf of Guinea, where US and other armed groups have taken advantage of the inability of many West African nations to protect international waters, U.S. and Ghanaian officials said.

“The Gulf of Guinea is like the Old West of illicit activity, particularly drug trafficking,” said General Michael E. Langley, commander of the US Africa Command, at a recent meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee, after that Flintlock had finished.

In Burkina Faso, which borders Ghana to the north, the military seized power from the democratically elected President in January 2022, and the leader of that coup was ousted by other military factions in October. In the previous 18 months, there had been coups in Guinea and Mali, and to the east in Chad and Sudan.

Ghana army officers in the capital Accra blamed the surge in terrorist activity on the 2011 ouster of Muammar al-Gaddafi and the disintegration of the Libyan state, allowing weapons to reach Mali and fall into Islamist hands. . Such groups have flourished in Sahel states like Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.

Some African governments have turned to Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group for help in dealing with terrorists. That has opened up those countries to exploitation by Russia, which has sought mining rights in exchange, Ghanaian and US officials said. But those countries may have turned to Russian support out of desperation, said Col. William Nortey, director of operations for the Ghana Army. “We should think about how to get them back into the democratic process instead of just washing our hands of it,” he said.

Small military special operations units combined with civilian law enforcement agents could be the future of the fight against terrorism in this part of Africa. Previous efforts, Ghanaian Americans and officials said, used battalions of about 500 to 800 soldiers, but such large and static groups of government troops proved vulnerable to terrorists.

Finding enough troops who can go through the arduous training typical of special military units is a common challenge for African nations.

“The drop rate is very high, so we’re still shaping them and hopefully by 2025 we’ll get to some level — we’re still training,” said Col. Richard Mensah, leader of Ghana’s special forces.

Flintlock, which involved 700 soldiers from 10 countries in 2005, saw the participation of 1,300 from 29 nations this year. The groups were matched with NATO mentors in relationships of years. Ghana’s naval forces teamed up with commandos from the Netherlands; the Nigerians were mentored by the British forces; and the Ivorians worked with the Italians.

The exercise deployed troops to five sites — four in Ghana and a wooded area at a camp in the Ivory Coast. In the end, the hostage rescue force—a group of small teams from different African countries—moved somewhat hesitantly at times as they approached their target, and one soldier blindly fired over a fence toward where the hostage was being held. . But with more training, the troops are expected to form elite strike forces.

By: John Ismay