General
Pentagon Hands Over Bases in Niger as Extremism Spreads in the Sahel
Relations between the two countries soured after a coup last year. Now the United States is scrambling to find new security partners.
The U.S. military turned over control of its two bases in Niger to local forces on Monday, ending a yearslong counterterrorism mission in the West African country even as violent extremism remains on the rise in the region.
A group of U.S. troops boarded an Air Force cargo plane and flew out of a $110 million air base in central Niger that was built with Pentagon money, among the last of 1,000 personnel that Washington had agreed to pull out by Sept. 15. A small number of troops will remain for a short time to wrap up administrative details, officials said.
Relations between the once-close partners soured after Niger’s military toppled the civilian-led government last year and ordered the U.S. troops to leave. Military juntas in Mali and Burkina Faso have also ordered U.S. and French troops out in recent months, and American officials are now scrambling to find new security partners in coastal West Africa.
Those negotiations could take months or longer, however, as groups that have declared allegiance to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State menace large swaths of the Sahel, the vast, semiarid region south of the Sahara where U.S. counterterrorism efforts have been focused.
“This does make safeguarding U.S. security interests in the Sahel that much harder,” Maj. Gen. Kenneth P. Ekman of the Air Force, the top American officer overseeing the withdrawal, said in a telephone interview from Niamey, Niger’s capital. “The threats from ISIS and Al Qaeda in the region are getting worse every day.”
Indeed, a new United Nations report concluded last month that “complete destabilization of the countries in the region in the medium term remains a possible risk.”
